Playwright Michael Yates Crowley mingles sensitivity, myth and outright cartoonishness in his exploration of rape — a topic that’s been receiving a lot of attention lately — in The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B. Matthias, now receiving its regional premiere from Local Theater Company.
Birds of North America was written by Anna Moench, who won the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company’s eleventh annual playwriting competition. She clearly knows her birds, and she brings a birdwatcher’s obsession to life in this world premiere that also tackles love and loss.
Edgar Allan Poe Is Dead and So Is My Cat, the latest Buntport production, is an assertion of the liberating power of unadulterated silliness.
Smart People, Lydia R. Diamond’s play about race that’s now at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, is directed by Nataki Garrett, associate artistic director for the DCPA Theatre Company. Garrett was hired by then-artistic director Kent Thompson, who left in March, two months after she started there; Garrett…
The Foreigner, currently showing in the Arvada Center’s Black Box Theater, is a farce. Written in 1984, it has new power in Trump’s America, and shows how language can both divide and unite, while sometimes silence has even more power. And like all good farces, it’s very, very funny.
You might not want to attend the bash described by Joseph Moncure March in his 1928 poem “The Wild Party,” but you should rush to get one of the rapidly disappearing tickets to the Denver Center’s staging of The Wild Party.
We’ve all hosted an unexpected guest, someone who, as Coleridge said of old age, lingers after he “hath outstayed his welcome while/And tells the jest without the smile.” But in Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, now at Edge Theater Company, two unanticipated guests create chaos.
First produced in 1970, Company feels somewhat of its time, but this Aurora Fox production is still a joyous, evening-long blast of music and talent.
Since the election of Donald Trump—and in some cases long before that—several Denver theater directors have been increasingly concerned with political issues and are expressing those concerns in their casting and choice of material.
The Denver Center’s production of Macbeth gets points for originality and guts, but director Robert O’Hara needs to trust more in the words, the subtleties underlying them, and Shakespeare’s pulsating silences.
Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company is showing the regional premiere of Lauren Gunderson’s The Revolutionists, and it’s a superb production.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a play adapted by Christopher Hampton from an eighteenth century French novel, is an ambitious undertaking for Miners Alley.
Expect a lively, original production of Macbeth – and a haunting one – in the newly renovated Space Theatre at the Denver Center.
Appropriate is an absorbing, ghost-haunted play, and a smart start to Curious Theatre Company’s new season.
Amanda Berg Wilson has two major projects coming up: You on the Moors Now, which she directs for the Catamounts — the Boulder company she founded — opens on September 8; the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ next immersive project, The Wild Party, runs October 11 through 31 at Stanley Marketplace.
Jamil Jude, an up-and-coming young director whose relationship with Curious Theatre Company artistic director Chip Walton goes back over six years, is currently in Denver rehearsing the cast for Appropriate, which opens September 2. Jude is very enthusiastic about Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play.
I’ve seen a lot of let’s-tear-each-other-to-pieces plays, but I’ve never seen one this skin-strippingly nasty or verbally exhilarating as Dinner, now at Edge Theater.
Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit is full of twists. For starters, the actor doesn’t see the script until he gets on the stage. For another, a different actor plays the lead — and offers the voice of the playwright — every night.
The summer theater season is winding down, but there are still a few worthwhile productions in town. Keep reading for capsule reviews of two current shows that both close this weekend.
In It’s Only a Paper Moon Hanging Over Immigration History, which is being workshopped at the Dairy Arts Center, Motus Theater’s Kirsten Wilson wants to explore what constitutes race and whiteness, interact with audiences and encourage questioning and exploration.
Some theater companies preach, some educate, some exist simply to provide entertainment, whether big, brassy musicals or dated comedies with gentle jokes that go down easy. But the Edge Theater in Lakewood has a vibe all its own, so it’s shocking to hear it’s taking a break.
As an impressionistic exploration of evil, a take on the sheer horror of JonBenét’s murder, House of Gold is absorbing and effective. But when the play flattens this once-living-and-breathing child into a symbol, it feels like a violation.
