At the intermission of Equivocation, this summer’s traditional non-Shakespeare-but-related-to-Shakespeare offering from the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, I found myself exultant, almost floating along the aisle to the lobby. I’m so grateful to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival for bringing us this play, I said to a friend. It’s brilliant. And so it…

This holiday weekend, why not go to camp? Greetings from Camp Katabasis, the brilliantly funny new show from Buntport Theater Company, has a special Memorial Day performance. But there are other shows to remember around town, keep reading for mini-reviews of three favorites. Greetings from Camp Katabasis. In Greetings from Camp…

Catherine, a widow living in a wealthy suburb of Austin, Texas, during the presidency of George W. Bush, hires Arturo from a group of unemployed men gathered at a street corner to clean up her overgrown garden. She is lonely, neurotic, angry, shunned by neighbors who gossip about the reasons…

Egeon of Syracuse turns up in Ephesus searching for his lost son, Antipholus, and his son’s servant, Dromio — or, in this production of The Comedy of Errors, directed by Geoffrey Kent for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, his daughter, Antiphola, and her servant, Dromia. Setting foot in Ephesus is death…

When Timothy Orr, then the assistant director of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, was called on to take over the whole thing following the departure of CSF artistic director Philip Sneed in early 2013, he found himself immersed in what he now calls — in a profound understatement — “a very…

Sweet & Lucky, an offering from the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ Off-Center in collaboration with Third Rail Projects, is not a play, but an experience. The idea of theater as something that should change consciousness rather than being passively viewed isn’t new; it was big in the hallucinatory,…

In Greetings from Camp Katabasis, two campers are out in nature, annoying the hell out of each other, bickering, philosophizing, attempting to bond and mourning the death of a friend called Chuck. Katabasis, according to counselor Amie (Friend?) — whose hysterically funny monologues frame the action and is probably just…

I’m always skeptical when told that a play is going to shock and startle me, particularly when the play’s about race. Almost daily I watch spokespeople for Black Lives Matter on talk shows and hear commentators speculate about who will get the black vote that Barack Obama commanded. I read…

David Mamet, the caustic playwright who’s an unapologetic right-winger these days, has always liked to offend, and he does so with brilliant scripts filled with intelligent, jazzy and sometimes incisive dialogue. His November, now showing at the Avenue Theater, premiered in 2008, as George W. Bush’s second term was coming…

“Death takes a holiday” is one of those wise, cynical, darkly funny old-European concepts that should yield rich fictional results, both comic and philosophical. The idea, which got its start in a 1924 play by Italian Alberto Casella, is that Death decides to take a break from collecting souls to…

Theater in the area has really come to life lately, introducing new plays and writers, posing interesting ideas and offering glimpses into worlds I’ve never really known. Harvey Fierstein’s Casa Valentina, receiving its regional premiere at Edge Theater, brings us into an enclosed and semi-secret world: a 1962 Catskills retreat…

Edmond Rostand’s 1897 Cyrano de Bergerac is a big, romantic beast of a play, written in poetic couplets, featuring a love as doomed and all-encompassing as any in literature — that of Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Isolde — though it doesn’t end in a lovers’ suicide. The story includes duels…

“What keeps a man alive?/ He lives on others./He likes to taste them first then eat them whole if he can/Forgets that they’re supposed to be his brothers/That he himself was ever called a man.” — The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill “The history of the world, my sweet/Is…

The 2016 theater season is in full swing, with some remarkable productions on local stages. Although Fade closes this weekend, you still have time to see the excellent Ideation and 10 Myths About the Application of Beauty Products. Keep reading for capsule reviews. Fade.  This ninety-minute-long, two-person play is based on…

Every now and then, an artist — or, in the case of Buntport Theater Company, an artists’ mind meld — seems to pass through a metaphorical doorway. For more than a decade now, Buntport has been one of the bright lights on the local theater scene. With their company-created original…

If you’re a fan of the sitcom The Middle, you’ll remember the wonderful episode in which the family’s eccentric youngest son, Brick, starts a font blog. “If you can talk about fonts, you can talk to anyone,” he comments to his father. Brick acquires one reader, blogs for a few…

When a play starts with a school principal announcing that a tiger has escaped from a local zoo and is loose in the neighborhood, and proposing a handful of fairly mild responses (a buddy system, no recess) while also stating that he himself carries a rifle, you quickly conjure up…

Marsha Norman’s Getting Out, first produced in 1979, portrays the grim dilemma of a woman just released from prison. Arlene has been driven to her bare-bones Louisville, Kentucky, apartment by a prison guard, Benny, who actually retired from his job for the chance to be with her — though his…

Elliot, a Marine, is back from Iraq with a Purple Heart and a serious leg injury — though it heals well enough to allow him the choice of either returning to combat or getting a job at a Subway shop. While sorting through all of this, Elliot gets the full…