Email Author Jim Lillie

1998 Stories by Jim Lillie

• Marley's Ghost

  published December 31, 1998

  In the media hoopla surrounding the Denver Center Theatre Company's 1998 Tony Award for outstanding regional theater, most theatergoers didn't... More >>

• Green Eggs and Hams

  published December 24, 1998

  Theodor Seuss Geisel won a pair of Academy awards for writing Design for Death, a 1947 film documentary about Japanese warlords, and Gerald... More >>

• Dancing on Her Grave

  published December 24, 1998

  Human beings have reveled in the mocking of solemnity as early as the twelfth century, when subversive subdeacons rang church bells improperly as... More >>

• Paid in Full

  published December 17, 1998

  Acutely aware that society routinely champions mendacity in matters of art, beauty and truth, the Lower East Side slackers in the musical Rent... More >>

• To All a Good Night

  published December 17, 1998

  Its yearly appearance might be anticipated, dreaded or even lampooned, but Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol remains the quintessential holiday... More >>

• Rock of New Ages

  published December 10, 1998

  Are the crystal-arranging rituals of gong-happy new-agers really any different from the solemn-voiced genuflecting that undergirds the world's... More >>

• Dead Man Laughing

  published December 10, 1998

  On the surface, Beth Henley's The Wake of Jamey Foster looks like a typical American dysfunctional-family play. In fact, before Act One is twenty... More >>

• All Tapped Out

  published December 3, 1998

  Near the end of Riverdance--The Show, there's a brief yet moving scene that beautifully clarifies and unifies all thirteen of the Irish dance... More >>

• Clueless in America

  published December 3, 1998

  Setting his huckster's sights on no less a prize than the United States presidency, a slick-talking loudmouth unabashedly declares, "Truth is in... More >>

• What We're Made Of

  published November 26, 1998

  What, exactly, constitutes our national character? Are we largely the sum of our popularly determined and time-tested beliefs? Or is our... More >>

• Demons at Work

  published November 19, 1998

  Soon after Tennessee Williams finished writing his last great play, The Night of the Iguana, in 1961, America's preeminent dramatic poet plunged... More >>

• Jogging for Life

  published November 19, 1998

  For a touchy-feely play written at the beginning of America's politically correct modern age, Michael Brady's To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday is... More >>

• Truth to Power

  published November 12, 1998

  Against the sounds of clicking typewriter keys, a disembodied voice tells us that Voices From the Soul is dedicated to "the brother on the... More >>

• Who's to Blame?

  published November 12, 1998

  Given that the potty-mouthed characters in playwright Chay Yew's Porcelain have little trouble posing a myriad of pointed questions --"Have you... More >>

• Those People

  published November 5, 1998

  Few American playwrights have demonstrated the ability to effectively transform their vivid childhood memories into something other than a highly... More >>

• Bad Magic

  published November 5, 1998

  British playwright George Bernard Shaw once remarked that fabled escape artist Harry Houdini was, along with the personages of Jesus Christ and... More >>

• Genius at Play

  published October 29, 1998

  Their blazing eyes fixed upon the majesty of the firmament, three creative geniuses stand shoulder-to-shoulder in Paris in 1904, speculating about... More >>

• Avant Discard

  published October 29, 1998

  As you watch Whiteline Productions' presentation of An Evening of Three One-Act Plays by Luigi Pirandello, it becomes increasingly clear just why... More >>

• A Long Strange Trip

  published October 22, 1998

  Teeming with macabre, whimsical episodes and peopled with bizarre, charming characters--all 23 of whom, save one, are played by a first-rate... More >>

• Casa Bernarda

  published October 22, 1998

  Sixty years before American audiences were entranced by the 1992 Mexican film Like Water for Chocolate, a mystical fable about a young woman's... More >>

• Security Chicks

  published October 15, 1998

  If you grew up participating in duck-and-cover air-raid drills and memorizing the exact location of your neighborhood's official fallout shelter,... More >>

• Night of the Living Dead

  published October 15, 1998

  Hardened by years of debilitating despair, a young woman shuffles into a Midwestern living room, saunters over to the dining-room table and... More >>

• Under the Covers

  published October 8, 1998

  For better or worse, the wobbly wheel of sexual politics as entertainment appears to be shimmying out of control. Prurient as it may be,... More >>

• Sex, Sex, Sex

  published October 1, 1998

  Based on a familiar legend packed with graphic sexual references and written almost entirely in verse, David Ives's play Don Juan in Chicago is a... More >>

• Everyone Knows It's Windy

  published October 1, 1998

  Ever-admiring of her husband's pioneering spirit but increasingly contemptuous of his overriding ambition, a young wife reacts to one of her... More >>