Plays that illuminate the predicaments of entire cultural groups are inevitably propelled by richly detailed characters whose everyday struggles epitomize larger concerns. August Wilson’s soul-stirring dramas about twentieth-century black life, for example, strike universal chords because their theme of racial oppression never displaces the playwright’s broader message about the common…
From the moment she strides through the red-curtained setting that represents Diana Vreeland’s Manhattan residence, Deborah Persoff exudes the ebullience that one typically senses only from established performers appearing in test-marketed star vehicles. Suffused with a regal pride that verges on but never becomes haughtiness, Persoff cuts a commanding figure…
Smaller in scope and more conversational in tone than last season’s effort by the Denver Center Theatre Company, the Avenue Theatre’s production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile proves nearly as amusing and, at times, more affecting. More than anything else, though, John Ashton’s environmental approach enlivens and…
The committee that awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1962 cited John Steinbeck for his “sympathetic humor and sociological perception” — qualities that his detractors had long disparaged as little more than sappy sentimentalism and simplistic moralizing. Regardless which assessment is more valid, each suggests Steinbeck’s ability to articulate…
Vowing to “revivify the vital fluids stored in the neural coconuts,” a failed jazz singer and his eccentric, ivory-tickling sidekick attempt to explain how the “elastic wholeness of the biomatrix” — or, in layman’s parlance, life — has slowly deteriorated since an event known as the Big Snafu occurred. With…
For anyone who likes sitcom-style playlets in which characters with low self-esteem point blaming fingers at their childhood, the media, the men in their life and/or the healing professions, Women Aloud: Artistic Estrofest ’99 might prove illuminating or even therapeutic. But those who easily tire of gripe sessions set in…
It’s not hard to believe that the Devil has done earthly time as an erstwhile boxing promoter or even a professional critic, but did he really head up a Viennese Masonic lodge for fifty years? And has the same horned creature who’s rumored to frequent the power corridors of the…
The meticulous staging smartly echoes Oscar Wilde’s intellectual choreography, the costumes are resplendent, the setting is tastefully appointed and the actors are eager to relish each epigram and witticism. But even though director Len Kiziuk has paid dutiful attention to the vital elements that prop up The Importance of Being…
A hundred years before terms like “mommy track” and “telecommuting” crept into the common parlance, German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker wrestled with an agonizing dilemma: Would she settle for being a stay-at-home mom who filled her few idle hours by sketching portraits, or would she fulfill her prodigious talent by…
Laden with postmodern gloom and narcissism, The Fastest Clock in the Universe is an offbeat play about “human cannibals” struggling to define themselves in a world bereft of meaning, sense or care. Despite the characters’ attempts to dial back the forces of time, they’re eventually compelled to reckon with the…
As the three characters in Art discuss the worth of a painting one of them has purchased for an extravagant sum, they argue, rail and bluster until they finally establish the play’s basic premise: When it comes to questions of art or relationships, there’s no accounting for taste. But while…
The prospect of an evening of ghost stories is intriguing, especially this time of year, but there’s no point in dragging it out for two-and-three-quarter hours when only five to ten minutes’ worth of the material is even of passing interest. Director Scott Gibson and company’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, Once Upon…
His radical American cousins have reduced the grandeur of character to the smithereens of personality. His angry English countrymen have rejected arch debate in favor of circuitous harangue. And his disaffected Irish forebears have alternately romanticized, upbraided and forsaken their motherland. But rather than siphon such tried-and-true iconoclasm, twenty-something playwright…
In an age when a former professional wrestler (and current elected official) declares organized religion a crutch for the weak-minded (who need strength in numbers), a talking-head presidential candidate spews inflammatory remarks about religious groups and a so-called reverend pickets the funeral of a murdered gay man, it seems a…
A Depression-era board game invented to provide financially strapped folks with the chance to embark on vicarious — and harmless — voyages through the choppy waters of high finance serves as the central metaphor in Nagle Jackson’s A Hotel on Marvin Gardens. As a group of self-absorbed upwardly mobile types…
When it comes to dealing with the biblical question of who is his brother’s keeper, politicians blame the other party, theologians kowtow to the well-heeled while reminding them to help the less fortunate, and self-help enthusiasts consider the question confounding and untenable. Enter actor Laurence Fishburne, whose three-character Riff Raff…
If talent, poise and charisma were the only qualities needed to triumph in theaters of war or pleasure, then the sparkling quintet in Swingtime Canteen could claim absolute victory after crooning and hoofing their way though an Act One medley of brassy Andrews Sisters tunes. But even though the heroic…
Snugged away in a remote fishing shack in northern Minnesota, a burly loudmouth named Junior laments to his fellow ice-anglers that citified “income poops” have made a mess of the frozen lake that he and his Woolrich-clad pals consider their sacred refuge. In addition to spawning schools of cappuccino-sipping, tofu-nibbling…
In his best plays, Tennessee Williams uses vivid imagery and poetic dialogue to evoke feeling — instead of explaining it to death, which is the preferred method used by many of today’s psychodramatists. In fact, as illustrated by Germinal Stage Denver’s Noh theater-style production of Suddenly Last Summer, Williams’s powers…
Like the union of the two main characters in The Marriage of Bette and Boo, the Bug Theatre Company’s production is a hauntingly sad, absurdly comic look at domestic strife that lasts a little too long for its own good. Pacing and structural problems notwithstanding, director Donna Morrison’s version sometimes…
Throw a couple of polarized misfits on stage and let them rail about society’s refusal to accept them, and most theatergoers will likely say with a shrug, “That’s a shame. Welcome to the world.” If a playwright couches those same issues in the all-embracing language of family discord, though, audience…
Fifty-two years and a couple hundred pounds ago, Marlon Brando electrified Broadway audiences with his snarling, animalistic portrayal of the bellowing lout in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. In fact, Brando’s riveting turn as Stanley Kowalski spawned generations of imitators who wrongly believed that mumbling, scratching and raw emoting…
