When Violet Weston’s husband walks off into the summer night, her three adult daughters and their families decide to return home to Oklahoma to comfort their wounded, vindictive mother. This is the premise of August: Osage County, a dark comedy that has won both the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony…
“I’m not so interested in giving answers as I am in posing questions,” says writer/actor Evan Brenner about his one-man play The Buddha — In His Own Words. “The Sutras were originally an oral tradition, and I’m interested in the process of making these scriptures oral again.” In this ninety-minute…
Twenty-three years ago, the Denver Black Arts Festival was created to give black artists an opportunity to showcase their work. “Back in 1986,” explains festival spokeswoman Sheryl Renee, “there was no place for African and African-American artists to show their wares, no outlet for visual artists from mainland Africa and…
Office Space made smashing a copy machine seem absurdly badass and made “TPS reports” and “flair” household words. Starting off as a relatively unnoticed box-office fizzle, the movie came into its own when it gained legs as a quotable video cult classic. It’s the story of a sedate cubicle monkey,…
In a culture lacking traditional steps toward adulthood, it’s up to each person to define his own coming of age. Of course, some coming-of-age experiences are naturally more interesting than others — and then there’s Chazz Palminteri’s A Bronx Tale, which is off the charts. “It’s the story of a…
The Squabble is a seemingly simple tale of two small-town friends driven apart when one calls the other a goose. “It’s a comedy,” says Buntport player Brian Colonna. “It’s very absurd, but the absurdity is like real life, where people have a falling out and then spend the rest of…
It’s official. You can finally tell your parents they were wrong when they said that comic books were a waste of time and money. Why? Because all those afternoons spent in musty comic-book stores and reading X-Men in the basement will pay off tonight when Geeks Who Drink present The…
Art Trading Cards (ATC) are miniature works of art on 2.5-inch-by-3.5-inch pieces of card paper and traded like baseball cards. The minis are created using a variety of mediums – drawing, painting, dotting, collage, photography, calligraphy – carried out in everything from pencil and crayon to inks and watercolor. Each…
In the last decade, the green movement has gone from the commune to the halls of Congress, from activist groups to ad agencies. Everywhere you look, there are green building and green businesses and green lifestyles. And while it’s easy enough to buy energy-saving light bulbs or ride your bike…
Seventeen workplace sexual-harassment videos edited down to three “greatest hits” minutes, a public-access clip of a crazy old man explaining his odd method of saving the world, and a montage of training videos from Wendy’s, Chick-fil-A and a Chicago grocery store. That’s just a taste of what you’ll find at…
Once upon a time, there was a musical about an English man and his wife living in colonial Africa with his mother-in-law, their small boy and an African servant. But this is where it gets weird: A man plays the wife, a girl plays the small boy, and a white…
The nightly news is unremittingly gloomy, and it just seems to get worse every day, which is why we need something to cheer us up — something fun and artsy, like the 18th annual Aspen Shortsfest. The five-day film festival starts today and features a variety of shorts, from Academy…
Grab your skis, silly costumes and thinking caps, because the New Belgium Loveland Scavenger Hunt presents the perfect opportunity to have fun for a great cause. “When you can get people dressed up in costume and acting silly and letting go of anything that usually holds them back, it turns…
Founded in 1948 by Howard Higman at the University of Colorado, the Conference on World Affairs is an opportunity for professionals working in the arts, media, technology, environment, politics, spirituality, human rights and countless other fields to get together and discuss just about anything under the sun. Over the past…
Poetry is hard — hard to read, hard to write. That’s why I admire the way poets like William Carlos Williams make it look easy by, for example, investing plums with complexity and transcendence. One of Williams’s modern-day literary descendents, Mark Doty, will read and discuss his own deceptively simple…
In what became my favorite memory of a family vacation, my uncle coaxed the owner of a Cape Cod pub to allow me and my equally underage cousins admission to an Irish jig. Despite the bar’s atmosphere, the event was remarkably family-oriented. If you’re looking for similar family-style fun that…
Found-object artists bring into focus the white noise of the world, giving commonplace items a shot at more than utility. Although Dave Phelps is not the first artist to find meaning in the mass-produced, his collage technique combines the shapes and colors of the everyday into something beautiful and universal…
Everyone loves to eat, right? From salt-and-vinegar potato chips to milk chocolate, steaks to shrimp, crab legs to McNuggets — I’ll eat (and love) almost anything. Just thinking about the newest round of Taste Test at the Lab at Belmar (and the last ever at the Lakewood location)made me hungry…
The American Place Theatre’s one-man touring presentation of The Kite Runner lands at the Lakewood Cultural Center, 470 South Allison Parkway, tonight. Although it has been pared down significantly from the original text, the entire performance is drawn directly from the book. “The uniqueness of having this story told through…
OBJECT Project is a traveling art exhibition featuring fifteen contemporary realists who all focused on the same five objects: a clear glass of water, a moth, a ball of string, a bone, and a mirror. The point was to see how each artist would interpret the five items, and the…
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. It’s a quote that comes to mind when considering that nature, while chaotic, is also what makes life possible on this small rock. “Natural disasters are manifestations of the earth’s…
The Ill Affair and the illiterate Website Launch Party are back-to-back events exploring the boundaries of love and hate while raising money for RedLine art studio and illiterate magazine. “We’re looking at these words commonly viewed as oppositional terms and seeing how they interact,” says illiterate editor Adam Gildar. “How…
