The one-act play is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Shakespeare evidently never wrote a one-act play to encapsulate his feelings and thoughts, even though his world may have seemed smaller to him than our modern, global network of communications does to us. Relying mostly on his knowledge of human nature, the…
What did it all mean? That was the lingering question many audience members pondered one recent Saturday afternoon after Cirque du Soleil loosened its formidable grip on their collective imaginations. Holding the sell-out crowd spellbound with a captivating performance of its current touring show, Quidam, the Montreal-based troupe received two…
Classical theater, like classical music, is often regarded as something that must be tolerated, if rarely enjoyed. Many theater-goers routinely endure an entire evening of, say, Shakespearean drama or Wagnerian opera, dutifully applauding a performance more out of respect for its standing as a classic than for its ability to…
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, an old woman has left the impersonal confines of a city hospital for the warmth of her remote cabin so that she might die quietly. Grace Stiles (Judy Phelan-Hill), a lifelong mountain dweller, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the ninety-year-old recluse…
The first act of Sam Shepard’s play Buried Child might have you wondering if the playwright wrote his drama shortly after watching the cult classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. At many points in Shepard’s story, it seems as though an ectomorphic, sledgehammer-wielding psychopath might leap out of the shadows, screaming,…
If you’re like most people, chances are there’s a situation from your past, oft-told at small gatherings, that has always seemed worthy to you of dramatization. “After all,” you say to yourself after having regaled a cozy audience of acquaintances with your oddly funny, slightly embellished tale, “people keep telling…
“I want to yell things in newspapers,” one character says in Leslie Ayvazian’s play Nine Armenians. The granddaughter of a prominent minister who fled his native Armenia for freedom in America, she intends to tell anyone who will listen that her people’s suffering–which remains palpable today–has been ignored by humankind…
By the time the curtain falls on David Mamet’s Oleanna, you’re likely to have changed your mind several times about whose side is more “right” in the two-character drama. You’re also bound to gain new insight into a misunderstood, sometimes-maligned playwright. To begin with, the play examines political correctness, sexual…
Shouldering the tools of his trade, a gaunt figure walks on to the stage, opens his artist’s easel and begins to paint. He dons a hat emblazoned with burning candles that set his canvas aglow, while a backdrop reflects dual self-portraits of the man’s face. In this first moment of…
Plays about the theater have enjoyed a healthy success for at least 2,500 years, ever since Greek dramas were followed on the day’s bill of fare by comedies that made fun of the serious action preceding them. Somehow, audiences never tire of listening to the lamentations of people paid to…
A few years from now, an enterprising promoter is going to reap a considerable fortune repackaging the hits of, say, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Lyle Lovett. But the show won’t be sold to American audiences by sending it out on the usual concert circuit. Nor will it seize its target…
Something has happened to the experimental theater. Time was when an alternative-theater piece was certain to be as iconoclastic as it was entertaining–when performance pieces opposed in form and content to mainstream theater practices and conventions would draw an audience for both their novelty and their political and social commentaries,…
The hottest thing in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, now at the Acoma Center, are the performances. The crack cast assembled by Curious Productions is so at home on stage that it’s a privilege to watch it work. Under the savvy direction of Kathryn Maes, the four actors create a private,…
Think about it: Musicals are absurd. The minimal plots coast along on thin ice and then, suddenly, for no good reason, somebody erupts into song. The music is usually as thin as the plot line, and the characterizations are really about striking appropriate poses. Unless you’re talking about the achievements…
Playwright Tom Donaghy’s Minutes From the Blue Route offers a surprisingly tender, conciliatory look at a mildly dysfunctional family. And with its production of the piece, the Boulder Repertory Company has once again distinguished itself as a troupe capable of doing emotionally sophisticated work with quietly challenging material. The tensions…
Playwright David Mamet’s remarkable Speed-the-Plow is as true to the contemporary American cityscape as an Edward Hopper painting. Mamet’s tough-mouthed dialogue–always a series of interruptions and eruptions–falls with an intoxicating rhythm on the ear. His is the prose-poetry of the street, with its low-life hustlers, as well as the equally…
A new theater company has just arrived in Denver with a hot agenda and a cool style: Shadow Theatre Company is intent on bringing more plays by African-American playwrights to the boards. And if its first production, Innocent Thoughts, by William Downs, is any indication, we’re in for some exhilarating…
When Carlisle Floyd wrote the exquisite opera Susannah in the mid-1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy was out hunting up commies under every rock and movie studio. It was a bleak, hysterical period–but it was nothing new. Witch-hunts crop up over and over again throughout history, changing form to suit every era…
Poor John Adams. Obnoxious and disliked, the lawyer from Massachusetts who prodded Thomas Jefferson to compose the Declaration of Independence just couldn’t get along with the other founding fathers. But irritating as he may have been, he was an American hero just the same. So Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone…
Exuberant musicals are the Country Dinner Playhouse’s stock-in-trade, though sometimes that exuberance can seem forced. The most recent show at the Playhouse, 42nd Street, was a terrific, bouncy re-creation of a 1930s extravaganza and the best thing the CDP had done in a long while. But its newest production, Fiddler…
The frailties of human nature were meat and drink to Moliere. His comedies live on because they so cleverly skewered hypocrisy, pretentiousness and ego-driven stupidity, and his sense of the absurd is just as relevant now as it ever was. This year the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is offering The Would-Be…
Capital punishment is on everybody’s mind these days, what with Timothy McVeigh’s conviction and JonBenet’s murderer still on the loose. So the regional premiere of Colorado playwright David Hall’s The Quality of Mercy is timely enough. And CityStage Ensemble’s biting production has much to offer–several fine performances, inventive direction by…
