For Better. Karen has just become engaged to Max. She’s met him face-to-face only once, but they’ve conducted a three-month relationship via cell-phone conversations, texting and instant messaging. Everyone in Karen’s small circle —- sister Francine, brother-in-law Michael, old friend Stuart (who’s secretly in love with her) and Francine’s best…
Karen has just gotten engaged to Max. She’s met him face-to-face only once, but they’ve conducted a three-month relationship via cell-phone conversations, text and Instant Messaging. Everyone in Karen’s small circle — sister Francine, brother-in-law Michael, old friend Stuart (who’s secretly in love with her) and Francine’s best friend, Lizzie…
Macbeth. Setting Macbeth in the old West should work. From what we know, eleventh-century Scotland was a violent and lawless place, a place where the dirty, drunken louts and desperate whores of our own frontier days would fit right in. Unfortunately, director Geoffrey Kent’s vision is far too literal and…
This production of Macbeth, the first directorial effort by actor and fight choreographer Geoffrey Kent, promised to bring new life to Shakespeare’s tragedy by setting it in America’s frontier West — not the West of national myth, enshrined in John Wayne movies, but the grimmer and more violent terrain of…
Guy, now in his early forties, has a habit of loving and leaving his women. He holds out promises of long-term commitment but tends to vanish when things get serious or difficult. Shortly before his planned marriage to an almost-23-year-old nurse, he decides to look up four of his past…
Defiance. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged at the Denver Center in spring), Defiance examines the state of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1971, when the Vietnam War had lost all vestige of legitimacy for most…
The setting is a hovel in England’s Cambridgeshire fens, a flimsy wood structure that offers only the barest protection from the elements, both natural and human. The protagonists are a pair of gardeners who have lost their jobs at Cambridge University’s Christ Church College — Wattmore because of accusations concerning…
The curtain call saddened me. As the performers gathered on stage looking jacked up and happy, audience members were already pushing along the aisles and heading for the doors. I could understand their impatience: It had been a long and unsatisfactory evening. At the same time, I think it’s rude…
Defiance. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged at the Denver Center in spring), Defiance examines the state of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1971, when the Vietnam War had lost all vestige of legitimacy for most…
As I was going up the stairI met a man who wasn’t there.He wasn’t there again today.I wish, I wish he’d go away. Thom Pain (based on nothing) is a strange, hour-and-some-long monologue. It contains passages about both a sad little boy and a failed love affair, and some viewers…
My Old Lady begins like a clash-of-cultures comedy of manners, as Mathias Gold, a penniless, middle-aged American, enters the stylish Paris apartment he’s inherited from his father and discovers the apartment’s one drawback: Under a typically French agreement called a viager, the place comes with its previous owner, who is…
Defiance. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged at the Denver Center in spring), Defiance examines the state of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1971, when the Vietnam War had lost all vestige of legitimacy for most…
Any play by John Patrick Shanley is worthwhile, but Defiance is a far slighter script than other works of his that I’ve seen. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged by the Denver Center Theatre Company in…
In 1936, the year it was written, You Can’t Take It With You would have been described as zany or madcap. It’s about the doings of a dotty, vaguely artistically inclined family. Penelope Sycamore writes plays because someone once left a typewriter on the doorstep. Her husband, Paul, makes fireworks…
How I Learned to Drive. “Look at me,” Uncle Peck pleads to his young niece, the narrator-protagonist of How I Learned to Drive. “Listen to me.” And that’s just what she does. Deeply and over a period of years, she ponders her relationship with the uncle who first molested her…
Rachel Corrie has been a lightning rod for controversy since her death in Gaza at the age of 23, when she was run over by an Israeli soldier while attempting to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home. But Rachel Corrie was more than just a symbol; she was a…
From everything I’ve heard about her, Wendy Wasserstein — who succumbed to cancer last year at the age of 55 — seems to have been one of the nicest people imaginable: funny, warm and kind. Still, her plays have always tended to leave me cold. So perhaps it’s a step…
Anna in the Tropics. The setting is a small, Cuban-run cigar factory in Ybor City, Florida, at the turn of the last century. In those days, such factories employed lectors to read aloud to the workers. The lector in Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics has chosen Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. As he reads,…
Anna in the Tropics. The setting is a small, Cuban-run cigar factory in Ybor City, Florida, at the turn of the last century. In those days, such factories employed lectors to read aloud to the workers. The lector in Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics has chosen Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. As he reads,…
There’s a very specific strain of English humor — a sort of hyper-literate silliness — that stems from a love of nonsense as a genre. Think Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, and now think Spamalot, a musical loosely based on the legendary 1975 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail,…
How I Learned to Drive. “Look at me,” Uncle Peck pleads to his young niece, the narrator-protagonist of How I Learned to Drive. “Listen to me.” And that’s just what she does. Deeply and over a period of years, she ponders her relationship with the uncle who first molested her…
I still have unhappy memories of Menopause the Musical and the slightly less ghastly Hats! at the New Denver Civic Theatre — shows intended to be cheap to produce and expensive to attend, shows that found instant audiences by playing on the sentimentalities and self-delusions of middle-aged women. So I…
