My Old Lady begins like a clash-of-cultures comedy of manners, as Mathias Gold, a penniless, middle-aged American, enters the stylish Paris apartment he’s inherited from his father and discovers the apartment’s one drawback: Under a typically French agreement called a viager, the place comes with its previous owner, who is…

As I was going up the stairI met a man who wasn’t there.He wasn’t there again today.I wish, I wish he’d go away. Thom Pain (based on nothing) is a strange, hour-and-some-long monologue. It contains passages about both a sad little boy and a failed love affair, and some viewers…

How I Learned to Drive. “Look at me,” Uncle Peck pleads to his young niece, the narrator-protagonist of How I Learned to Drive. “Listen to me.” And that’s just what she does. Deeply and over a period of years, she ponders her relationship with the uncle who first molested her…

In 1936, the year it was written, You Can’t Take It With You would have been described as zany or madcap. It’s about the doings of a dotty, vaguely artistically inclined family. Penelope Sycamore writes plays because someone once left a typewriter on the doorstep. Her husband, Paul, makes fireworks…

Any play by John Patrick Shanley is worthwhile, but Defiance is a far slighter script than other works of his that I’ve seen. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged by the Denver Center Theatre Company in…

Anna in the Tropics. The setting is a small, Cuban-run cigar factory in Ybor City, Florida, at the turn of the last century. In those days, such factories employed lectors to read aloud to the workers. The lector in Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics has chosen Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. As he reads,…

From everything I’ve heard about her, Wendy Wasserstein — who succumbed to cancer last year at the age of 55 — seems to have been one of the nicest people imaginable: funny, warm and kind. Still, her plays have always tended to leave me cold. So perhaps it’s a step…

Rachel Corrie has been a lightning rod for controversy since her death in Gaza at the age of 23, when she was run over by an Israeli soldier while attempting to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home. But Rachel Corrie was more than just a symbol; she was a…

There’s a very specific strain of English humor — a sort of hyper-literate silliness — that stems from a love of nonsense as a genre. Think Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, and now think Spamalot, a musical loosely based on the legendary 1975 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail,…

Anna in the Tropics. The setting is a small, Cuban-run cigar factory in Ybor City, Florida, at the turn of the last century. In those days, such factories employed lectors to read aloud to the workers. The lector in Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics has chosen Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. As he reads,…

I have to admit, I spent almost the entire evening at the Aurora Fox either glancing at my watch or wondering why Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics had won a Pulitzer. It’s not that the concept isn’t terrific: The play is set at the turn of the last century…

I still have unhappy memories of Menopause the Musical and the slightly less ghastly Hats! at the New Denver Civic Theatre — shows intended to be cheap to produce and expensive to attend, shows that found instant audiences by playing on the sentimentalities and self-delusions of middle-aged women. So I…

How I Learned to Drive. “Look at me,” Uncle Peck pleads to his young niece, the narrator-protagonist of How I Learned to Drive. “Listen to me.” And that’s just what she does. Deeply and over a period of years, she ponders her relationship with the uncle who first molested her…

All in the Timing. David Ives’s six one-acts are all about language, communication and understanding, and also chance and fate. The dialogue is light and funny and fizzy, and it gets your frontal lobes buzzing as you attempt to catch and process all the flying puns, allusions, jokes, rhythms and…

From the moment you walk into the theater and see the topsy-turvy set, the central metaphor of Vote for Uncle Marty is obvious. And although the suggestion that we live in an upside-down world isn’t particularly original, the play certainly is, since it arises from the collaborative work of Buntport’s…

Look at me,” Uncle Peck pleads to his young niece, the narrator-protagonist of How I Learned to Drive. “Listen to me.” And that’s just what she does. Deeply and over a period of years, she ponders her relationship with the uncle who first molested her when she was eleven, a…

All in the Timing. David Ives’s six one-acts are all about language, communication and understanding, and also chance and fate. The dialogue is light and funny and fizzy, and it gets your frontal lobes buzzing as you attempt to catch and process all the flying puns, allusions, jokes, rhythms and…

John and Jen are not lovers, as the title of John & Jen might lead you to believe, but children of a violently abusive father in the ’60s. Jen, the older sibling, does everything she can to protect her little brother. But when she leaves for college, becoming a free-spirited,…

All in the Timing. David Ives’s six one-acts are all about language, communication and understanding, and also chance and fate. The dialogue is light and funny and fizzy, and it gets your frontal lobes buzzing as you attempt to catch and process all the flying puns, allusions, jokes, rhythms and…

In Craig Lucas’s Prelude to a Kiss, Peter and Rita meet cute and proceed to have one of those idiosyncratic, charming conversations that invariably herald on-stage love — except that this conversation has points of real shadow and light. Soon after discovering that she has a passion for social justice,…

At the opening-night performance of The Little Mermaid, I saw a little girl perched on a booster seat, ecstatically dancing her upper body to the big numbers; in the row behind me, a pair of sisters waved their small sparkly shoes. At intermission, wide-eyed boys wandered the corridors in adorable…

Sista’s and Storytellers. This is not a play, and it’s not exactly a cabaret act, either. It’s sort of a cross between a slumber party and a church service, as a group of women who sang together as children in a choir called the Heavenly Voices come together for a…