August Wilson came to prominence when the first of his cycle of plays about black life, each set in a different twentieth-century decade, graced the Great White Way in 1984. A year earlier, though, another of Wilson’s works had begun playing at theaters in New Haven, Chicago and San Francisco…

Family members and their friends rip each other’s hearts out, pour alcohol on the resulting wounds and then go at it all over again in A Delicate Balance, playwright Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning look at relationships among the well-to-do. Like most of Albee’s family dramas, the 1966 play, being given…

Bertolt Brecht was the last century’s most influential theater director and theorist. Since World War II, his beliefs about political theater have served as the cornerstone of practice for fringe groups and mega-companies alike (most prominently, the early days of Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company were marked by many Brecht-inspired productions)…

Inna Beginning is a two-and-a-half-hour play that would pack a stronger punch if it were two hours shorter. Germs of ideas whiz about like supercharged particles in Gary Leon Hill’s play, which was conceived in collaboration with composer Lee Stametz and Denver Center Theatre Company actor Jamie Horton, who also…

The number of world premieres produced by the Denver Center Theatre Company over the past few years makes it increasingly hard to think of the city’s flagship theater company as a repertory group dedicated to presenting periodic revivals of classic plays. Earlier this season, more doubt was cast on the…

Career academic Vivian Bearing is an expert on the works of seventeenth-century poet and preacher John Donne. A fiery intellectual, she knows the depth of Donne’s passion, the beauty of his wordplay, and, thanks to an exacting mentor, the hidden messages that are embedded in the punctuation of his Holy…

Richard II is as given to high-flown poetry, and King Lear weathers as many cosmic crises, but the role of Hamlet is still considered the supreme account of an actor’s mettle. From Burbage to Bernhardt to Barrymore to Burton to Branagh, performers have always laid everything on the line to…

Imaginatively designed, directed and acted, the Denver Children’s Theatre production of Tomato Plant Girl is, as shows for young people go, a breath of fresh air. Wesley Middleton’s work, currently playing at the Mizel Arts Center, teaches the difference between conformity and friendship by focusing on how relationships develop instead…

Eighteen months ago, no one could have predicted that the Denver Center/Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Tantalus would spawn any lingering offspring. Because the Trojan War marathon was often referred to as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, it made sense that locals wouldn’t clamor for more mythology until they’d crossed over to…

The Aurora Fox Arts Center’s The Memory of Water has some passable portrayals, but the play’s complex family relationships don’t progress beyond the embryonic stage. Plagued by glacial pacing, wretched British accents and frequent directorial miscues, English playwright Shelagh Stephenson’s touching work devolves into a mishmash of tinny one-liners and…

The Arvada Center’s production of The Dinosaur Play is filled with a wide array of sights and sounds, but the most impressive spectacle occurs shortly after the lights dim, when a stodgy professor wanders on stage and delivers a lecture about paleontology. The audience, made up almost entirely of elementary…

Filled with more raunch than a Friars Club roast, the first part of Bag Ladies Ball is initially hard to swallow. The interactive dinner-theater show, being staged in a second-floor meeting room at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in central Denver, is playwright and director Melvyn Benetti’s response to…

What becomes of an entire class of people when its members are summarily rounded up like common criminals, even though they’ve never committed any crimes? Are they to maintain their dignity when told that such imprisonment is for their own protection? Should they hold fast to democracy’s ideals when they’ve…

A program note gives plenty of notice that A Question of Mercy examines difficult issues, and the first scene certainly sets a somber, thoughtful tone. However, playwright David Rabe’s look at AIDS and assisted suicide doesn’t hit home until the character of Anthony appears on stage for the first time…

The best thing about Black Box Theater Ensemble’s trio of one-acts, The Whole Shebang, is that the Boulder-based company has a good time without taking itself too seriously. That’s no mean feat in a drone-prone town that holds meetings about pet-guardianship and garbage-ownership rights. The three plays, presented at the…

The Denver Center Theatre Company’s Much Ado About Nothing boasts some beautifully staged scenes and well-crafted performances, especially actress Robin Moseley’s bravura turn in the role of Beatrice. But while the visually pleasing production engages now and then, it adds up to considerably less than the sum of its parts…

When Another Antigone premiered off-Broadway in 1988, higher education’s radar screen was aglow with a growing number of issues that threatened to crash an already overloaded system. With funding scarce in the post-Reagan years, deans couldn’t motivate tenured professors to change their ways and, at the same time, couldn’t afford…

Rehashing a centuries-old debate, an erstwhile film critic (and aspiring moviemaker) declares that the theater has no relevance for his generation. Naturally, that remark doesn’t sit too well with his girlfriend’s mother — an accomplished stage actress who reminds the young man that creating art is a greater calling than…

An abundance of stock characters and melodramatic situations might prompt a lesser director to turn Flyin¹ West into a hiss-filled potboiler; but in director Jeffrey Nickelson’s capable hands, Pearl Cleage’s 1992 play becomes an expansive ode to courage, self-determination and the price of freedom. The two-hour-plus drama is being given…

It’s not surprising that no one disrobes in Closer, British playwright Patrick Marber’s full-frontal look at sexual mores and modern relationships. The play’s four London dwellers seem so comfortable obsessing about sex — and its sometime companion, love — that taking their clothes off hardly seems necessary. The two-hour drama,…

The performers’ spotty British accents make whole sections of dialogue unintelligible, and the pacing often lags where it should accelerate, but the Aurora Fox Theatre Company’s production of Communicating Doors proves to be an entertaining comic thriller anyway. On the strength of some strong performances, beautifully realized design elements and…

Director Hugo Jon Sayles’s choice to present Ain¹t Misbehavin¹ as a New York City “rent party” lends the collection of Depression-era tunes a laid-back informality that makes the audience feel at home starting with the first note. The Broadway musical revue, now showing at the Nomad Theatre in Boulder (following…