Before the action begins, you contemplate set designer David Lafont’s rendering of a grimy one-room flat, filled with papers, boxes and mismatched bric-a-brac. There’s a rolled-up carpet, an unusable gas stove, a toilet seat hanging below the ceiling and a porcelain toilet back leaning against a wall. A tennis racket…

I enjoyed Crowns most when I closed my eyes and just listened. The music — gospel songs and spirituals, church music with just a touch of rap — includes such well-known pieces as “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” as well as several…

A dreary scene confronts us on the small, square stage: a counter with knives and a cleaver, a dirty bucket, blood splashed against the back wall, on the floor. It’s 1990, the first Intifada is in process, and a pair of Palestinian brothers, Chaled and Na’im, are arguing in a…

The first scene of Fiction pulls off a telling bit of trickery. Two people argue and banter over espressos in a Paris cafe. Playful, self-conscious and hyperliterate, they seem a long-married couple. But as they rise to leave the cafe, the woman extends her hand in farewell, and we realize…

To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best…

A collection of monologues about the Iraq War based on the experiences of men who fought there, Sand Storm is raw and upsetting, but it also tells an old, old story. Hundreds of accounts like these followed the war in Vietnam, and they echo the observations in Chris Hedges’s seminal…

I’m sitting at a small table at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre with my friend Robin Haig. A one-time dancer with the Royal Ballet, Robin has just retired from the University of Colorado Dance Department and is talking about Margot Fonteyn and the Bumptious Colonial, a one-woman show she plans to take…

Dear God, but I am sick of Death of a Salesman, which I’ve now had to see three times in the past year. Despite the play’s ahead-of-its-time dramatic devices and portentous poeticizing, it continues to strike me as an endlessly protracted whine. And a verbose and dated whine, at that…

The death penalty is an obscenity in itself, and the ways in which it’s applied are equally vile: the endless waiting on death row, where prisoners can sometimes see fellow inmates led to slaughter or hear the readying of the death equipment; the capriciousness of the appeals process; the countdown…

There was a moment in Chess that undid me completely. It occurred when the heroine, Florence, met the man she believed to be her father — the father she had last seen in 1956 when, as a terrified little girl, she’d been torn from his arms by the Hungarian revolution…

The most interesting character in After Ashley disappears after the first scene. This is Ashley herself, whom we meet while she’s watching one of those smarmy television shrinks with her teenage son, Justin. The shrink, Dr. Bob, is giving advice to a sexually incompatible couple, and this leads Ashley to…

The United States could recover from an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in just two to four years…. Nuclear war is not nearly as devastating as we have been led to believe. If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it. Dig a hole…

Quartermaine¹s Terms simply refuses to come to life. In fact, from the current Germinal Stage production, I can’t quite figure out what the play’s supposed to be about. It seems like one of those gentle, wistful British comedies in which all the meaning lies beneath and around the actual lines,…

I’ve been dancing around this conclusion, trying to find a way to put it more tactfully, but I can’t: Waitin¹ 2 End Hell is a nasty, misogynist play. You can dress it up all you want with theories about the problems of the black family and the unfair and emasculating…

Private Eyes is a very smart play. For a while I tormented myself trying to decipher the plot, but I couldn’t do it. Some critics have compared the story to a set of nested Russian figures, but I think it’s more like a drawing by M.C. Escher. An event makes…

The first act of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is about as perfect a piece of theater as I can imagine. On a stunningly evocative, elegantly gray-and-white set, with cool, beautiful lines and an abstract but vaguely human-looking sculpture lurking in the background, Matilde cleans house for a pair of…

“Poor Wandering One” is among the loveliest of Gilbert and Sullivan’s many lovely melodies, but you haven’t really lived until you’ve heard Johnette Toye singing it — as she does in Phantom of the Music Hall. Toye preens and staggers and makes her mouth into a dark, wide-open square from…

At the end of the nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt was the grande dame of French theater and Eleonora Duse her Italian counterpart. The two actresses had contrasting strengths. Bernhardt’s acting was glamorous and stylized; she posed prettily and had a self-consciously beautiful voice. Duse’s approach was more realistic; she believed…

Although Man of La Mancha first opened in New York in 1965, I’d somehow managed to go all these years without seeing it. I had heard the songs, of course — who hasn’t? — but I thought of the musical as soggy and dated and had no intention of attending…

Watching television with Isabelle, my crinkly-haired, adventurous, lemon-curd-loving Belgian anthropologist friend, was always a hoot. I’d explain to her the inexorable rules of U.S. television drama: No, House hasn’t arrived at the correct diagnosis because it’s 8:30 p.m., and that only happens at seven minutes to 9. She delighted in…

There’s nothing more romantic than being young and in love in New York City, walking together along the worn, sooty streets touched by that filtered city sunlight, oblivious to the sound of traffic and the rush and impatience of the anonymous crowd. The Last Five Years has been widely described…

There has been a great deal of excitement around The War Anthology, which began when Curious Theatre Company artistic director Chip Walton and assistant director Bonnie Metzgar commissioned several writers to create stage pieces based on war photographs. Anticipation grew when the theater announced the participation of Pulitzer winners Paula…