One-Star Trek

Actor, dancer, playwright and t'ai chi ch'uan master Maria Cheng of Theatre Esprit Asia performed her one-woman show Spirits and Sworded Treks all over the world before landing in Denver and helping to found TEA, the region's only strictly Asian-American company. The tour de force opened TEA's inaugural season last...

By Susan Froyd

October 16, 2014

Audio By Carbonatix

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Actor, dancer, playwright and t'ai chi ch'uan master Maria Cheng of Theatre Esprit Asia performed her one-woman show Spirits and Sworded Treks all over the world before landing in Denver and helping to found TEA, the region's only strictly Asian-American company. The tour de force opened TEA's inaugural season last year and came back to wow audiences at the Colorado Theatre Festival in August, where it bagged nine nominations and six awards. One of those audience members, Ed Baierlein of Germinal Stage, was so impressed that he offered to restage the show for a three-week run at his own theater.

“We at TEA are looking at this as a gift from the universe,” Cheng says. “I had acted in Germinal's Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Ed was sweet enough to come to see me at the theater festival. He's a crotchety old codger with a heart of gold -- very opinionated, with specific tastes -- and if you know him, you know that very little pleases him.” But Spirits pleased him a lot.

“In one sentence, it's about a middle-aged Chinese-American woman examining the ups and downs of pursuing a spiritual past, comprising monologues, storytelling, martial arts and weaponplay, and really bad singing but beautiful dancing,” Cheng explains. “And live slicing, dicing and stir-frying!”

Spirits and Sworded Treks opens at 7:30 p.m. tonight and runs through October 19 at the Germinal, 7287 Lowell Boulevard in Westminster; get information and tickets, $20, at theatre-esprit-asia.org.
Fridays-Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Sat., Oct. 18, 2 p.m. Starts: Oct. 3. Continues through Oct. 19, 2014

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Susan Froyd started writing for Westword as the "Thrills" editor in 1992 and never quite left the fold. These days she still freelances for the paper in addition to walking her dogs, enjoying cheap ethnic food and reading voraciously. Sometimes she writes poetry.

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