In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play. Playwright Sarah Ruhl uses the orgasm as the prism through which she views the entire Victorian world — and, by extension, our own. From the orgasm, entirely misunderstood and invisible in those repressive times, emanate ripples that change not only the relationships…
The six members of the Buntport Theater Company like taking up strange facts, historical anomalies and odd and eccentric bits of information and working them into their communally created plays. After one Buntporter spotted Tommy Lee Jones standing in line for tickets to La Bohème at the Santa Fe Opera,…
In her book The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth Lloyd, philosopher of science, provides an exhaustive investigation into the female orgasm. After exploring many theories about the orgasm’s origins and purposes, she concludes that it is a vestigial trait like men’s nipples, a…
The last time I saw Molière’s The Misanthrope, it was gorgeously staged at the Denver Center, with an elegant set adorned with flying cupids; a huge, round, rose-trimmed bed that dominated the stage through the entire second act; and costumes that entirely expressed their wearers’ over-the-top personalities, so that the…
Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) is about orgasms — but it’s neither titillating nor smutty. Ruhl has been called one of our most brilliantly imaginative playwrights, and locals have seen her luminous work before at the Denver Center, Curious Theatre Company and the Boulder Ensemble…
The 11 Minutes Theatre Company has revived Fuenteovejuna, a seventeenth-century play by Lope de Vega based on a historical incident that took place in 1476. Fuenteovejuna is a small village that has come under the control of a violent and amoral commander. The play begins by celebrating the joyous innocence…
There are two major threads in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. There’s the primary plot, in which Viola is shipwrecked in Illyria, decides to dress as a man and signs on as a servant to a local nobleman, Orsino, with whom she rapidly falls in love. But Orsino sends Viola off to…
Over the past year, Curious Theatre Company has given us a first-rate production of Pulitzer winner and Tony nominee Clybourne Park; 9 Circles, the regional premiere of a deeply humane investigation into the psyche of an American soldier on trial for war crimes; and now Red, which received ecstatic reviews…
Red opened last weekend at Curious Theatre Company. We’ll publish a full review in the next Westword — but Juliet Wittman was so impressed with the production, she provided this sneak preview: John Logan’s Red is a two-hander about painter Mark Rothko. The year is 1958, and he has been…
The bar where Amateur Night at the Big Heart takes place is what sociologists call a “third place” — the first being home, for most people, and the second the workplace. A third place can be a pub, diner, coffee shop, library, post office or anywhere that people congregate and…
Date. Some years ago, writer-actor Luciann Lajoie found herself alone and at loose ends, so she decided to try Internet dating. In Date, seated in what looks like a pretty bare apartment, empty chip bags on the table beside her laptop along with a fortifying bottle of wine, she takes…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with…
Some years ago, writer-actor Luciann Lajoie found herself alone and at loose ends, so she decided to try Internet dating. In Date, seated in what looks like a pretty bare apartment, wearing blue jeans with a hole in the knee, empty chip bags on the table beside her laptop along…
The Drowsy Chaperone. The role of the Man in the Chair is the spine for The Drowsy Chaperone, and the primary reason that this lighthearted, inconsequential and very silly show is so much fun to watch: Without him, it would just float off into the ether. But with him, we’re…
Lin’s husband is scheduled for execution, but the electric chair in the big house is so rickety he can only be put to death if everyone in the Armadillo Acres Trailer Park where she lives conserves energy. So she’s urging them to keep the lights burning. Betty’s husband is already…
Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. — Letter from Oscar Wilde to Lord…
The Drowsy Chaperone. The role of the Man in the Chair is the spine for The Drowsy Chaperone, and the primary reason that this lighthearted, inconsequential and very silly show is so much fun to watch: Without him, it would just float off into the ether. But with him, we’re…
Amateur Night at the Big Heart, a comedy/drama by Denver playwright and director Terry Dodd, first saw the light of day as a staged reading at the Denver Center Theatre Company 25 years ago.The following year, the play received its world premiere at the Arvada Center, directed by David Ogden…
Did you miss Chess at the Arvada Center? Now you have a second chance to see the production, which has moved to the Lone Tree Arts Center’s Main Stage Theater, where it opens tonight. In the meantime, here’s a reprise of Juliet Wittman’s review: The semi-operatic Chess doesn’t have a…
Great Wall Story, by Lloyd Suh, opens at the Denver Center this week, having begun life with a staged reading at last year’s New Play Summit. It is based on one of those tall tales that just happen to be true. In 1899, a small group of Denver journalists who…
When I saw the reading of Lloyd Suh’s Great Wall Story at last year’s New Play Summit, I thought it smart and entertaining, a lighthearted take on some pretty serious topics, but with one specific problem: Suh’s depiction of an adolescent boy, who behaved in ways I couldn’t imagine any…
Novelist and playwright Michael Frayn is equally adept at comedy — his Noises Off may be the funniest and most intricately structured farce of the twentieth century — and high-minded, contemplative drama. In Copenhagen, for example, he has the ghosts of physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg reminiscing about a…
