It begins with a baseball-size lump of gray clay, which she unwraps from a piece of damp cloth so quickly that it takes an extra moment to realize what she’s holding. Then it’s on the wheel, spinning ceaselessly as she dips her hand into a rusty pail and shovels water onto the ball with her palm. More spinning, her hand flattening the mass, then more water, and her thumbs push up the side of the soft slab until it’s tall. The music is swelling now, unfazed by another splash, and her thumbs rotate, pressing down to form a well in the center. The music is still driving, but the wheel has stopped and she’s pulled a wire taut—another sleight of hand—and scrapes it against the flat base, releasing the perfect pot into her hand. She’s standing now, depositing it into the kiln, letting hours pass in a few breaths until the clay is finally cool and she can lift it high like a divine tribute, ignorant of the deep crack only the audience sees. She notices and she sighs. So goes an unforgettable pas de deux (pot de deux?) between real-life artist Marie–Berthe Cazin (Alex Finke) and her creation in the new musical In Clay, making its U.S. premiere at Arlington’s Signature Theatre through Feb. 1 under director Kimberly Senior.

There’s unspeakable devastation in actor Lee Osorio’s eyes when his character, Ryan, confronts the prospect that he may not get the mortgage he needs to build his dream home in Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God. (Mosaic Theater Company’s production plays at the Atlas Performing Arts Center through Dec. 14.) He suggests to his mortgage broker, Keith (Jaysen Wright), that he might call the bank himself. He’s a good guy, after all, and if he can just explain his plans and dreams to them, they’ll approve the loan. Right? “They don’t care about who you are as a person,” Keith says, dismissing Ryan’s naivete. “It’s just numbers to them.”

“It is a little alarming to have lived here so long without realizing who our neighbors are.” That woeful admission seems an understatement by the time it comes in An Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen’s treatise on truth that sees a town turn against a doctor whose microscopic discovery endangers their economic prosperity. This revival of Ibsen’s 1882 play, set in the present day, is now playing at Theatre J through November 23 in a new adaptation by Amy Herzog. But the realization that follows it says everything you need to know about director János Szász’s feeling of urgency and resignation in staging this drama: “And these people consider themselves to be free-thinkers.” 

There isn’t much talk about religion in Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers—playing at Studio Theatre through Nov. 2—but there is faith in spades: that a frozen turkey will still cook through, that one job may soon turn into a better one, that a woman and her husband will someday have enough money to buy tickets to Disneyland, and that a new life built here will be happier than the one left behind. It is Thanksgiving in 1973, after all, and though Watergate rages on, the American dream is (presumably) alive and well.

If you are still under the illusion that online dating in 2025 is anything other than a hellscape of half-hearted swipes, scripted introductions, and painfully awkward first dates, Miriam Battye — the playwright behind Strategic Love Play, playing through November 9 in an area premiere at Arlington’s Signature Theatre — is here to absolve you of that notion once and for all. In a trendy New York restaurant, where reddish plaster walls are offset by desilvering mirrors that evoke the screens in our hand as much as reflect the people in front of them, a Man (Danny Gavigan) and a Woman (Bligh Voth) have just sat down for drinks after matching on an unspecified dating app. We’ll eventually learn her name is Jenny (and his, Adam), but she comes in hot from the jump, prodding her uptight suitor with difficult questions and confessing less-than-generous assumptions that make him clam up quickly. Whether he’ll stick it out for the obligatory second drink is anyone’s guess. Because it’s theater, he does, and for 70 minutes the two wrestle with romantic expectations, take stock of the baggage they carry, and dream of what comes next, should this be the match they’ve been waiting for.

If you see a crowd of Baltimore Orioles fans streaming out of the Waterfront Metro station, rest assured they did not make a navigational error en route to Nationals Parks. They’re probably heading to Arena Stage’s home-run production of Damn Yankees, the cherished albeit dusty musical by composing team Richard Adler and Jerry Ross and book writers George Abbott and Douglass Wallop that has long been a workhorse for high school productions and community theaters. But co-adaptors Will Power and Doug Wright have brushed off the plate with the assistance of director and choreographer Sergio Trujillo for what amounts to spring training—or at least a fall tryout—of a production that runs through Nov. 9 and is openly eyeing a Broadway transfer next year.

Does story or text make a William Shakespeare play? The Bard, who borrowed liberally from history, literature, and mythology to concoct his plots, would’ve probably said the latter, so it makes sense that the playbill for Synetic Theater’s wordless remounting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, running at Olney Theatre Center through Aug. 10, is void of his name. But Ben Cunis and Paata Tsikurishvili’s movement-centered adaptation—set to an ethereal electronic score by Konstantine Lortkipanidze—has all the makings of the Midsummer you already know, and if you’re really jonesing for a line or two, you can probably fill in the blanks yourself.

As the DC area was walloped by a historic heat wave last week, the thought of an outdoor concert seemed, at least to this critic, daunting. There was a time before air conditioning when open-air venues like Wolf Trap’s Filene Center offered audiences and performers an escape from the stifling indoors, but if the pulsating wave of playbills at Broadway in the Park, a stellar one-night co-production from Signature Theatre and Wolf Trap, was any indication, those days are behind us. Still, there’s an unmistakable magic to enjoying music outside, even on the hottest days, and you could pinpoint the moment the magic overcame the audience on Saturday, when a cool breeze wafted through the venue just as Jessie Mueller started George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and a single firefly made itself known to the right of the stage; it was like the audience got comfortable for the first time all week.