Courtesy of Susan Lyles
Audio By Carbonatix
For years, Denver-based actor, director, standup comedian and playwright Edith Weiss had a drawer full of short plays that won competitions in New York, California and Chicago — but never went anywhere.
“I put them together, you know, one after the other,” Weiss says. “Then I shopped them around, and nobody wanted them.”
The problem wasn’t the writing. It was the shape. A string of unrelated shorts is a tough sell, so what Weiss needed was a thread. That thread arrived when Susan Lyles, founder and producing artistic director of And Toto too Theatre Company, invited Weiss over for a conversation in August last year.
Lyles has known Weiss’s work for nearly fifteen years through the company’s Play Crawl events and had previously staged a reading of Weiss’s Molière adaptation, The Tightwad. Budget limits kept that larger-cast piece from production, but Lyles saw potential in her pile of shorts.
“She sent me a script with all of her shorts that she’s done, two of those that she’s done for the Play Crawl in the past, but it was just an evening of shorts,” Lyles says. “So, I went back to her, and I talked with her, and I told her, ‘Let’s find a way to connect all of these pieces,’ so that’s what she’s been working on.”
What emerged is Fierce Satire and Mediocre Sex, a world premiere running February 13–28 at Buntport Theater. The result is a long one-act in which Weiss herself plays a therapist who used to be a stand-up comic.
“Edith has created this neat little piece where she is a therapist, and it’s a group therapy session, with the audience being the group, and she’s guiding us through different aspects of humanity, things that happen in our lives and they’re not always what we expect,” Lyles says. “It’s just kind of trying to say that as different as everyone seems to think we are right now, we’re not, so that’s kind of her whole idea on this.”
Courtesy of Susan Lyles
Each short lives in its own theatrical universe. One is a game show called Shakespeare in Jeopardy, featuring Ophelia, Tamora and Mistress Quickly competing under bright lights. Another is a quiet bench scene between two people talking about what it means to be human or not wanting to be. There’s a suicide hotline sequence that, improbably, draws laughs while discussing the value of the elderly.
“Now, that might not sound funny, but I think we’ve gotten a chuckle or two out of the subject of suicide,” Weiss says. “It also deals with religion, women never being quite equal with men and political correctness, which, as a comic, I despise. Even though I’m on the left on the political spectrum, as a stand-up, that just shuts you down. That’s just akin to censorship, so we have a big thing about that.”
Weiss’s character, the therapist, holds it all together and speaks in Weiss’s own voice. “I did stand-up for twenty years; that’s how I made my living,” she says. “Being by myself, talking in my own voice, felt familiar. What was unfamiliar was not just zipping out with one-liners, but really going deeper than that, and exploring that has been good.”
Thematically, the piece circles what Lyles describes as trust issues and what Weiss describes more bluntly as “the foibles of being human.”
Under Lyles’s direction, the design helps each short feel distinct while maintaining flow. Lighting designer Miriam Suzanne isolates sections of the stage into small worlds, arranged in what Lyles calls “an inverted V.” Most scenic elements are preset, allowing the show to glide from one segment to the next without clunky transitions.
“Otherwise, you’ve just got a bunch of sketch comedy,” Lyles says. “My whole point is playing the honesty all the way through.”
The production also reflects And Toto too’s long-standing mission “to produce and develop new work by women,” Lyles says. “And all of our development work is using Colorado-based playwrights. I love working personally with the playwright, which you don’t get if you’re working with published work all the time.”
Courtesy of Susan Lyles
That ethos is part of why the show lands at Buntport. Without a permanent home, And Toto too can choose projects without the pressure of filling a season with familiar titles.
“We don’t have a brick and mortar because that’s part of our model,” Lyles says. “I’m not beholden to the almighty dollar. I don’t have to go back and pull chestnuts out to keep the company going. I get to do new work and invest in new people.”
Weiss appreciates that intimacy. “Small appeals to me,” she says. “A lot of bigger theaters have gotten kind of corporate. This is more personal. There’s more at stake here.”
For Weiss, this production also marks a milestone. Despite decades of writing and performing, she has never had a full-length work produced in Denver or Colorado. “This is a first for me,” she says. “I believe this has been literally thirty years in the making. And I’m only forty, so how did that happen?”
She laughs at her own math, but the weight of the moment is real. She worries about whether the show will succeed financially for the company that took a chance on her, but Lyles waves that off.
“We’ve done this for 21 years, and we’re still going, so you can let some of that pressure off of you,” Lyles says. “We muddle through, and I love doing this.”
Lyles believes audiences will respond, not only because the material is sharp and funny, but also because Weiss is beloved in the community. “People are falling all over themselves to get in and see her work,” she says. “And I’m excited for them to be able to see it.”
In a theatrical landscape where familiar titles often feel like the safest bet, Fierce Satire and Mediocre Sex asks audiences to buy a ticket to something they don’t know and to sit in a room together while a fictional therapist guides them through the absurd, uncomfortable and deeply human parts of being alive.
“My purpose is to make the audience feel a camaraderie with all other human beings,” she says. “With everyone in the room, and with everybody. That’s a big ask, maybe, but that’s my goal.”
Fierce Satire and Mediocre Sex runs Friday, February 13, through Saturday, February 28, at Buntport Theater, 717 Lipan Street. Tickets are $27.38-$32.64. Learn more at andtototoo.org.