A Fine Madness Brings Connection, Healing, and Play to Stages Across DC
"It's not a play," Justin Weaks tells his audience early in A Fine Madness, presented by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. "But we gon' play." That spirit of invitation defines this genre-defying solo work, which Weaks created and performs himself, and which continues at venues across Washington through June 28, 2026.
Weaks, a Woolly Mammoth company member and Helen Hayes Award winner long regarded as one of DC's finest actors, hosts roughly 90 minutes of storytelling, audience games, comedy, poetry, music, and reflection. Directed by Raymond O. Caldwell, the experience grew out of a 2024 workshop production and weaves together two threads: the collective memory of living through the COVID-19 pandemic and Weaks's own experience living with HIV. Along the way, he shares his journey as a gay Black man navigating diagnosis and treatment, reminding audiences that undetectable means untransmissible, and slipping in and out of the characters who populate his life, from his aunt to a healthcare worker.
The show's central conceit reaches all the way into deep space. Using a vintage overhead projector, Weaks tells the story of the Voyager spacecraft and the famous golden record launched toward the stars in the 1970s as an archive of human culture. Nearly fifty years later, he sets out to assemble a new archive, this one built from the audience itself. Throughout the evening, attendees write down memories, shout out answers, solve puzzles in teams, fill in Mad Libs-style blanks, and even pour and share sweet tea with one another. Their recorded responses are played back and mixed live, becoming part of the show's evolving record of life in DC in the 2020s.
The staging surrounds audiences with an intentionally intimate, homey environment: antique lamps, a turntable, a model of the solar system, a metronome, and a retro microphone, all supported by Matthew M. Nielson's atmospheric sound design and a "mission control" crew that announces segments and keeps time. There is no fourth wall here. Performer and audience share the same space, and by evening's end, strangers find themselves in sincere conversation with one another, which is precisely the point. As Weaks observes, pandemics don't really end; they echo. But mad times, he insists, call for gathering together.