A.R. Gurney is famous for writing middlebrow off-Broadway plays in which well-to-do WASPs comically mourn the passing of their cherished way of life. Past Gurney bromides examined such hallowed American myths as the old-boy network (The Old Boy, presented a few years back by the Director’s Theatre in Boulder), the…
In the media hoopla surrounding the Denver Center Theatre Company’s 1998 Tony Award for outstanding regional theater, most theatergoers didn’t notice that the award was given for a body of work that wasn’t even produced last season. More to the point, the coveted prize (which is awarded annually by the…
Theodor Seuss Geisel won a pair of Academy awards for writing Design for Death, a 1947 film documentary about Japanese warlords, and Gerald McBoing Boing, a 1950 animated cartoon. But he was better known as Dr. Seuss, the prolific author who launched a new trend in children’s literature with such…
Human beings have reveled in the mocking of solemnity as early as the twelfth century, when subversive subdeacons rang church bells improperly as part of the annual Feast of Fools and food-fighting choir boys mischievously sang out of tune during the Feast of the Boy Bishop. It comes as no…
Acutely aware that society routinely champions mendacity in matters of art, beauty and truth, the Lower East Side slackers in the musical Rent harbor no illusions about their place in the world. They’ll never be invited to place their names in the social register, for instance, or plaster their autographed…
Its yearly appearance might be anticipated, dreaded or even lampooned, but Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol remains the quintessential holiday story about the transformative powers of love, forgiveness and redemption. Director Laird Williamson has an unabashed (and, among local practitioners, unparalleled) devotion to pageantry, mystery and grandeur; when these qualities…
Are the crystal-arranging rituals of gong-happy new-agers really any different from the solemn-voiced genuflecting that undergirds the world’s established blood religions? Does our willingness to profess unwavering belief–whether in the rock of ages or the age-old healing properties of rocks–somehow guarantee us a higher place in the grand scheme of…
On the surface, Beth Henley’s The Wake of Jamey Foster looks like a typical American dysfunctional-family play. In fact, before Act One is twenty minutes old, we’ve become acquainted with an undiscovered ectomorphic genius who makes a living cashing in beverage bottles; an insufferable financial type grown newly contemptuous of…
Near the end of Riverdance–The Show, there’s a brief yet moving scene that beautifully clarifies and unifies all thirteen of the Irish dance extravaganza’s far-flung episodes. To the bow-shredding accompaniment of a lone violinist, the fervent company of singers and dancers–who transport us to such outposts of the unofficial Irish…
Setting his huckster’s sights on no less a prize than the United States presidency, a slick-talking loudmouth unabashedly declares, “Truth is in the eye of the beholder or the mouth of the seller.” Before his TV-reporter girlfriend can convince him otherwise, the smooth operator embarks on an ambitious though clearly…
What, exactly, constitutes our national character? Are we largely the sum of our popularly determined and time-tested beliefs? Or is our collective psyche a more mercurial interfusion of passionate and ephemeral desires? Before you get all centrist-minded and declare in your best chardonnay-sipping, Brie-nibbling way, “Why, a healthy mixture of…
Soon after Tennessee Williams finished writing his last great play, The Night of the Iguana, in 1961, America’s preeminent dramatic poet plunged into a severe decline marked by acute drug and alcohol dependency, extended periods of mental illness for which he was hospitalized, and macabre public appearances where he seemed…
For a touchy-feely play written at the beginning of America’s politically correct modern age, Michael Brady’s To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday is surprisingly humorous, delightfully risque and impishly entertaining. The romantic drama about a strong-willed widower’s long-running bout with mourning sickness is being presented by the Morrison Theatre in…
Against the sounds of clicking typewriter keys, a disembodied voice tells us that Voices From the Soul is dedicated to “the brother on the corner who never had a chance.” As the stage lights slowly illuminate several cardboard silhouettes that represent a few of the play’s characters, playwright Hugo Jon…
Given that the potty-mouthed characters in playwright Chay Yew’s Porcelain have little trouble posing a myriad of pointed questions –“Have you ever participated in toilet sex?” is fairly typical of the blunt-force dialogue–you’d think Yew’s one-act play would be overflowing with tough-talking scenes of in-your-face drama. But as the playwright’s…
Few American playwrights have demonstrated the ability to effectively transform their vivid childhood memories into something other than a highly personal cautionary tale. Mere mention of the words “socially relevant family play” is usually enough to conjure bizarre images of a metaphorical free-for-all between the Bronx-accented denizens of yesteryear’s kitchen…
British playwright George Bernard Shaw once remarked that fabled escape artist Harry Houdini was, along with the personages of Jesus Christ and Sherlock Holmes, one of the three most famous people in the world. Although today’s culture of instant celebrity has considerably altered Houdini’s standing among the greatest entertainers of…
Their blazing eyes fixed upon the majesty of the firmament, three creative geniuses stand shoulder-to-shoulder in Paris in 1904, speculating about their collective capacity to influence twentieth-century life. Momentarily bringing to mind Cyrano de Bergerac’s lyrical odes to rugged individualism, a fiery Pablo Picasso murmurs, “The modern world waits to…
As you watch Whiteline Productions’ presentation of An Evening of Three One-Act Plays by Luigi Pirandello, it becomes increasingly clear just why the Pirandello Repertory Theater (and its cash-cow second-stage cabaret, the Laugh-a-Minute Luigi Comedy Club) has yet to take hold in Denver. Of course, lack of popular demand has…
Teeming with macabre, whimsical episodes and peopled with bizarre, charming characters–all 23 of whom, save one, are played by a first-rate quartet of actors–Giles Havergal’s acclaimed adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt is now being presented at the Space Theatre by the Denver Center Theatre Company. But…
Sixty years before American audiences were entranced by the 1992 Mexican film Like Water for Chocolate, a mystical fable about a young woman’s repressed dreams, Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca wrote a trilogy of tragedies about the hopes and fears of his country’s peasant classes. Shortly before he died, in…
If you grew up participating in duck-and-cover air-raid drills and memorizing the exact location of your neighborhood’s official fallout shelter, then you probably didn’t regard the end of the Cold War as just another over-hyped media event. As the first images of a collapsing Berlin Wall flickered on your television…
