As you walk into the theater for There Is a Happiness That Morning Is, you are handed what looks like a school notebook, the kind with a stiff black-and-white-speckled cover. You take your seat before a long blackboard. A bearded fellow watches as you settle in, chiding the latecomers. He…
The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a brilliant work, its flaws so intertwined with its crazed strengths that you can hardly separate one from the other. McDonagh grew up in London, the son of Irish parents, and invented an Ireland — and an…
Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a brilliant work, its flaws so intertwined with its crazed strengths that you can hardly separate one from the other. McDonagh grew up in London, the son of Irish parents, and shot to fame in the 1990s. He invented an Ireland —…
Ed Baierlein founded Germinal Stage in 1973 in a Market Street space, and later moved to a tiny theater on West 44th Avenue, just off Federal Boulevard. Here, for 26 years, he staged an eclectic mix of American and European plays: some experimental, others realistic, some profound and others just…
The Lyons begins with a fairly familiar premise: a deathbed vigil featuring the protracted dying of a Jewish patriarch, Ben, and the shallow chatter of Rita, his wife. This cancer-ridden father isn’t wise or long-suffering, however. He’s a mean-spirited monster of blind ego with perhaps one single redeeming feature: He…
Last produced four years ago, Jugged Rabbit Stew is one of Buntport’s best shows, a startling and peculiar mix of comedy, sadness, magic, craziness and erudition that only this troupe could produce. And this revival brings back Evan Weissman, a longtime member who left — sort of — a while…
Sometimes the most interesting theater experiences in Denver are bare-bones productions: a handful of actors and an interesting script can spark the imagination in ways elaborate tech often can’t. Today, Rachel Fowler, Bill Hahn and Gabra Zackman — three of the area’s finest performers — will open Tomorrow in the…
The tech crew at the Denver Center Theatre Company includes some of the best people in the country, and their budget is clearly generous, but their work can only carry a production so far. The set for Hamlet is a subtle wonder of stone and steel, offering frequent glimpses of…
Ulysses is dying alone in a decrepit trailer in Paonia. When we first see him, there’s an oxygen tube taped to his chest and he’s frying sausages, naked except for an apron — which he’s put on not out of modesty, but to protect his private parts from splattering grease…
Black Odyssey. Based on Homer’s epic, Black Odyssey tells the story of a soldier, Ulysses Lincoln, coming back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Like his namesake, he is forced to wander for many years before he can return home, encountering supernatural beings and many strange adventures along the…
Rebecca Remaly, who founded Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company with her husband, Stephen Weitz, hadn’t directed a play since the birth of their son, Jamison, over eighteen months ago. But when she read Sharr White’s Annapurna, she knew she had to get back in the game. White, whose The Other Place…
Black Odyssey. Based on Homer’s epic, Black Odyssey tells the story of a soldier, Ulysses Lincoln, coming back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Like his namesake, he is forced to wander for many years before he can return home, encountering supernatural beings and many strange adventures along the…
Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap opened at London’s New Ambassadors Theatre in 1952, moved to the St. Martin’s Theatre in 1974 and has continued its majestic trundle through theater history to become the longest-running show in the entire world. It’s like a lot of other English institutions — tea cozies, the…
A while back, the New Yorker’s magisterial Hilton Als mentioned playwright Marcus Gardley’s immense talent and called him “a potentially great writer who has yet to write a great play.” Gardley’s latest work, Black Odyssey, which was featured in the Denver Center Theatre Company’s New Play Summit last year and…
The Legend of Georgia McBride. Matthew Lopez’s The Legend of Georgia McBride makes for a bright, fast, entertaining evening, but there isn’t a lot of there there. Casey, an easygoing dreamer, has a wife he adores, Jo, and scrapes out the barest of livings as an Elvis impersonator at a…
Playwright Marcus Gardley has won prestigious awards and been compared with such giants as August Wilson and Tennessee Williams for the poeticism of his language. But he’s also been criticized for writing plays that lack structure and for creating characters more symbolic than real. The Denver Center Theatre Company commissioned…
In 1992, Armistead Maupin, author of the much-loved Tales of the City series, refused to visit Colorado on a book tour; the state had just passed a bill repealing anti-discrimination laws against gay people and been derided nationwide as the “hate state.” But now we’ve redeemed ourselves, and Maupin will…
Matthew Lopez’s The Legend of Georgia McBride, now receiving its world premiere at the Denver Center Theatre, began as a staged reading at last year’s New Play Summit. Lopez has two plays running in Denver right now, and both feature original and intriguing central concepts. In The Whipping Man, currently…
The entrance to Edge Theatre is in a small, gray Lakewood strip mall, but once you open the door and step inside, you encounter a warm, colorful space that includes three rooms serving as galleries for local artists, a bar and — of course — the auditorium, cunningly curtained and…
Chay Yew is a hot director who was in the news a year or two ago when he took over Chicago’s acclaimed Victory Gardens Theatre and made several controversial changes. The strife at the time, according to the New York Times, “recalls family melodramas like August Osage County or even…
There are many narratives that celebrate the coming together of once intractable enemies — Arab and Israeli, peasant and landowner, torturer and tortured — with scenes showing growing comprehension, forgiveness, even respect and affection. But in 1865, immediately following the defeat of Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Appomattox,…
The setting for Gidion’s Knot is familiar and innocuous — a brightly colored children’s classroom with low tables and plastic chairs, student papers neatly tacked up on one board, another board covered with drawings inspired by mythology. But a psychological whirlwind will soon be let loose in this setting, in…
