It takes time for major historic events to find expression in art (a serious body of literature about the Vietnam War didn’t emerge until almost a decade after the peace treaty was signed), and it seems to me that playwrights are just beginning to feel their way into the topic…
When I first saw publicity for The Testosterone Monologues at the PS Grille (now PS 1515), I imagined some guy playing with his penis — literally or metaphorically — in a nasty, smoky joint. Surprise number one: PS 1515 is a nice place, well-appointed, shiny wood fittings, roses on the…
From King Henry V to Louisiana’s Huey Long, history is filled with figures who balanced personal corruption against great achievement — and whose achievements, in fact, arose from their corruption. For playwright Joan Holden, Robert Speer, mayor of Denver during the first decade of the twentieth century, was just such…
I’m a huge fan of the Heritage Square Music Hall. Going there to review feels like a break from school and from all those plays — whether deep and thoughtful or annoyingly pretentious — to which I have to give serious critical consideration. Heritage provides solace for mind and spirit,…
It’s hard to assign a genre to John Guare’s Landscape of the Body, currently being produced by Paper Cat Theatre. It’s absurdist and unrealistic; it mingles horror and slapstick. “I’d like a laugh track around my life,” says Betty Yearn, being interrogated as a suspect in the murder of her…
Nancy Cranbourne has a devoted following in Boulder, and if you check out Vulva Riot, her new solo show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, you’ll see why. Although naming theater pieces after genitalia seems to be a trend these days, I must admit, I wish Cranbourne hadn’t called…
The best thing about Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree is the central character who tells most of the story, a six-year-old child named Elizabeth. She’s sometimes cute, but she’s also smart, bratty and eccentric enough to keep the highly emotional play from becoming overwhelmingly sentimental. It’s through Elizabeth’s often uncomprehending…
Julian Sheppard’s Buicks falls squarely in the middle-aged-male life-crisis genre. Bill, who owns a car dealership and has a wife, Kathy, and two children, is a glad-handing, posturing creep, mildly racist and, most of all, utterly oblivious to the thoughts and feelings of those around him. He doesn’t see his…
Ed Baierlein has mounted a clean, skilled, well-acted production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love at Germinal Stage and, paradoxically, the production’s strengths highlight the play’s weaknesses. The action takes place in a cheap motel room at the edge of the Mojave Desert, where May and Eddie are performing yet…
I first heard Paul Robeson’s voice during the folk revival of the early 1960s, the days when Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were ascendant. Someone had put together a disc of folk songs from earlier in the century that included Robeson singing “Get on Board, Little Children.” It was an…
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun originally opened on Broadway in 1959 — before the civil-rights movement found its full momentum and at a time when, as Hansberry said, “The intimacy of knowledge which the Negro may culturally have of white Americans does not exist in the reverse.” The…
I was thrilled when I first heard that the Denver Center Theatre Company intended to present Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex with the powerful Bill Christ in the title role. It seemed a perfect marriage of text and actor. In fact, the company has deployed many of its strongest performers for this…
If you want to put on a first-rate production, you need to start with a strong script. And given how many of these there are to choose from, I’ve no idea why so many half-baked plays — ancient, creaking comedies, pretentious contemporary effusions, dated musicals — get staged around here…
Last year, director Israel Hicks commissioned Charles F. (OyamO) Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan, to write a play based on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Hicks wanted it set in a contemporary milieu, with Torvald transformed into the Nigerian ambassador to the United Nations. OmayO obliged. The…
During the intermission of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, I overheard some people talking in the lobby. They were trying to fit the play’s characters into the familiar Tennessee Williams oeuvre. Dorothea was like the self-deluded, fragile, alcoholic Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, they agreed. But who in…
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen is a play of ideas; I see them as white balls zigzagging through a bright white sky in a constant and dizzying display. The protagonists are Niels Bohr and his onetime student Werner Heisenberg — leaders among the group of scientists who transformed the world’s concept of…
Going to the theater alone is depressing, so part of my job as a reviewer involves coaxing, bribing and seducing friends and family members into accompanying me. Over the years, I’ve come to rely on these companions — wise and perspicacious people all — even when their opinions clash with…
Who is Silvia? What is she, That all our swains commend her? Holy, fair and wise is she; The heaven such grace did lend her, That she might admired be. Is she kind as she is fair? For beauty lives with kindness. Love doth to her eyes repair, To help…
The Hunger Artists have made something of a tradition of staging a reading of James Joyce’s The Dead in the historic Byers-Evans House at the beginning of each new year, and it’s a good tradition. The story, subtle and beautifully multi-layered, filled with references to snow, memory and, as the…
The Country Dinner Playhouse confuses me. Just when I’ve got the place written off as old-fashioned and out of it, its operators come up with a really good show. Not just pretty good for dinner theater or “Well, at least the leads are talented, even if the supporting cast isn’t,”…
Stop Kiss is about a slowly developing love affair between two women who don’t, at first, know they’re gay. Sara, an idealistic young teacher, has arrived in New York to take a job at an impoverished school in the Bronx. She comes to Callie’s apartment because the latter has offered…
At the end of last month, Brian Freeland, whose LIDA Project has been a vital presence on the Denver theater scene for the past ten years, sent out a press release announcing that the group is leaving town. They had intended, he said, “to reinvent theatre as a vehicle for…
