If the befuddled characters in Three Men in Search of a Pair of Shoes seem unusually eager to share their endless observations about life, that’s mostly because playwright and director Eric C. Lawrence has yet to compress his freewheeling comedy into a more succinct discussion about the male psyche. The…
Generally regarded as two of the greatest performers of their day, French stage diva Sarah Bernhardt and English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell played opposite each other in a 1904 London production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelleas and Melisande. Although they weren’t ideally cast as the pair of young lovers — Mrs…
A few years before Martin Luther King Jr. thundered his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a quartet of black college students stood up for equality by sitting down at a “whites only” lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. That singular act of courage,…
Like the rotting entrails of the butchered animal one of them has dumped in the backyard, a Queens family’s darkest secrets ooze with stultifying frankness as a holiday barbecue unfolds. Knit together by tears as well as blood, the Robinsons and the O’Conners have dutifully gathered for their annual Labor…
Near the end of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, an immigrant worker strides through the streets of Brooklyn in search of the drunken longshoreman who has wronged him. Waving away another’s placating pronouncements, the fiery man lifts his voice heavenward and cries, “He degraded my brother, my blood!…
If contemporary Texas politicians were as endearingly funny as the small-town folk who bustle to and fro during Red, White and Tuna, then having a whole bevy of Texans in the White House someday might not seem so unsettling. It’s easy enough, for instance, to snicker at the small-minded observations…
No matter how dedicated they are to presenting plays that provoke as well as entertain, most independent theater artists face the same middle-of-the-road, bureaucratic issues that plague large, established companies. That’s especially true when a troupe earns acclaim and immediately sets its sights on becoming “the next Steppenwolf” — referring…
Decades before self-help books, therapy sessions and touchy-feely television shows complicated our understanding of relationships, playwrights like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Edward Albee were crafting absurdist dramas that illuminate the problems of human communication. These days, an absurdist outlook on life isn’t limited to artistic endeavors. In fact, that…
Sleeping Beauty — The Panto begins as five performers clad in medieval costumes flounce through a portal in the Nomad Theatre’s faux-castle setting and sing, “It’s a good day/How could anything go wrong?” Those words prove as prophetic as the merry goodbyes uttered by passengers boarding the Titanic. Indeed, a…
Ever since Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and his band of Claymated misfits fled the North Pole’s hidebound environs, Santa’s helpers have had a hard time keeping their nonconformist attitudes in check. It’s not unusual, for example, for shopping-mall elves to adorn their ears with tree ornaments, coin suggestive greetings or…
Veteran critic Mel Gussow’s fine biography of Edward Albee reveals that most people who knew the artist as a young man had an inkling of his potential but not a clue about his destiny. Nearly all agreed that Albee, whose streak of hedonism could sometimes turn self-destructive, would pursue some…
Part of the promise of an evening of Rodgers and Hammerstein favorites is that the audience will be able to enjoy the company of charismatic artists. No matter how cleverly the selections have been juxtaposed for continuity’s sake, theatergoers rely on the actors to provide a sense of import and…
Is total sincerity the key to maintaining healthy relationships, or should people bend the truth now and again to spare each other’s feelings? That’s the underlying dilemma facing seven disparate academic types in Germinal Stage Denver’s production of The Philanthropist, Christopher Hampton’s charming and erudite “bourgeois comedy.” Among other exploits,…
Lonely Planet, through December 11 at the Denver Civic Theatre, 721 Santa Fe Drive, 303-595-3800
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…
