Radio Golf is the last of August Wilson’s ten plays about the black experience in the twentieth century, most of them seen through the prism of Pittsburgh’s Hill District; he died the year he completed it. With this production, the Denver Center Theatre Company will have done the entire series,…
Eurydice. Playwright Sarah Ruhl has created her own magical, eccentric, gutsy and entirely original interpretation of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, one in which the Lord of the Underworld is a comic-fearful shape-changer, ruling over a place populated by people of stone; Eurydice’s father, already dead, longs for her from the Underworld…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
She was in herself, like a woman near term, and did not think of the man, going on ahead, or the path, climbing upwards towards life. She was in herself. And her being-dead filled her with abundance. As a fruit with sweetness and darkness, so she was full with her…
Susan, a mailwoman played by Erin Rollman, finds little meaning in her profession — but a lot of significance in the splat of birdshit on her windshield. Lovingly framing it with her fingers, she declares the thing “a bird poop angel” and bursts into a rapturous, American Idol-style song of…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
Paragon Theatre’s production of Love Song represents the best kind of marriage between a script and a theater company: The play provides fascinating, quirky roles that make actors look good, and where it has flaws, the production counters them. This is the story of Beane, a sad, lonely, crazy man…
As You Like It. It doesn’t get more minimal than this: As You Like It performed by six people on a stage where the set consists of little besides a large rock, swaths of fabric and a wooden swing; echoing footsteps announce an actor’s entry minutes before he actually appears;…
For most modern theater-goers, Martin McDonagh has become the voice of Irish drama, and I’ve tended to consider the grotesquery and violence of his plays — The Lieutenant of Inishmore, A Skull in Connemara, Pillowman — as a departure from a misty, lyrical tradition. For example, I’d always thought of…
As You Like It. It doesn’t get more minimal than this: As You Like It performed by six people on a stage where the set consists of little besides a large rock, swaths of fabric and a wooden swing; echoing footsteps announce an actor’s entry minutes before he actually appears;…
Eric Schmiedl’s Plainsong, an adaptation of Kent Haruf’s award-winning novel, was one of the high points of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s 2008 season. Now Schmiedl is back as one of five playwrights participating in the Colorado New Play Summit, which features a staged reading of his new play, Eventide,…
Dusty and the Big Bad World. We all know about the Christian right’s attacks on textbooks, teachers, Halloween, the arts, public television and the words “happy holidays.” And we know what happened when these people finally got their very own president. Dusty and the Big Bad World is based on…
Shakespeare’s Richard III is the quintessential story of power-lust, of a man willing to murder his relatives, betray his supporters and shed any amount of blood to acquire the crown of England. While Macbeth took us inside the villain’s psyche and made us understand both his craziness and his grief,…
It doesn’t get more minimal than this: As You Like It performed by six people on a stage where the set consists of little besides a large rock, swaths of fabric and a wooden swing; echoing footsteps announce an actor’s entry minutes before he or she actually appears; and everyone…
Dusty and the Big Bad World. We all know about the Christian right’s attacks on textbooks, teachers, Halloween, the arts, public television and the words “happy holidays.” And we know what happened when these people finally got their very own president. Dusty and the Big Bad World is based on…
Inana is set in a shabby London hotel room, where the director of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, having done all he could to secure the treasures in his care, has fled with the bride he acquired through an arrangement with her father, a young woman he barely knows. The…
Doubt. Set in 1964, when the second Vatican Council was convening, John Patrick Shanley’s play follows a priest who may have molested a twelve-year-old boy — who just happens to be the sole black kid in the predominantly Irish and Italian school where the priest teaches — and the nun…
Doubt. Set in 1964, when the second Vatican Council was convening, John Patrick Shanley’s play follows a priest who may have molested a twelve-year-old boy — who just happens to be the sole black kid in the predominantly Irish and Italian school where the priest teaches — and the nun…
Gemma Wilcox has developed a considerable following with her series of related, fantastical and original one-woman shows. These have played around the United States and Canada, as well as at the Boulder Fringe Festival, winning several awards along the way. So the theater was full for the opening of her…
Although playwright David Lindsay-Abaire is known for his absurdist humor, impossible characters and unexpected quirks, his Rabbit Hole is a serious and entirely conventional drama dealing with grief — perhaps the worst grief possible, the death of a child. Bereaved mother Becca is a rigid perfectionist, given to baking sophisticated…
The night after I saw Shining City, I had a dream. It started with some reassuringly everyday stuff about working in a kitchen with a small, spry, hyper-conventional and hyper-competent aproned woman — we seemed to be covering a toaster with lavish decorations and a thick coat of frosting. But…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
