Now and then, fantasy and reality humorously collide in Pork Pie, a self-styled “mythic jazz fable” set in a period described only as The South: “When men wore hats, women had the power, and legends were alive.” Beginning with a kindly narrator’s tongue-in-cheek remarks, Michael Genet’s world-premiere play, currently running…
Each of Anton Chekhov’s four dramatic masterpieces walks a tragicomic tightrope. Actors and director are sometimes thrown off balance by emphasizing a play’s comedy at the expense of its tragedy (and vice versa), while others perch somewhere in the humdrum middle. In either case, theatergoers can be left wondering whether…
With three plum roles, a tension-packed story line and streaks of black humor, Orphans has been a perennial favorite since it premiered at Los Angeles’s Matrix Theatre in 1983. Given that it was originally produced by a group called Actors for Themselves, it’s no surprise that Lyle Kessler’s comic thriller…
Fancy abounds, issues take flight and genders do more than bend in Cinderella: The Real True Story, a modern retelling being presented in Boulder by the all-female Goddess Theatre Company. Written by Cheryl Moch, the two-act play recounts the famous fairy tale with a “same-sex twist.” Instead of falling in…
Trying to make sense of everything that happens in the LIDA Project’s Alice is like trying to decipher every line of routing code that appears at the bottom of an e-mail. A few characters and phrases sound and look familiar, but deciphering the whole assemblage seems an impossible task for…
In the first scene of An Experiment With an Air Pump, a scholar asserts that scientists are beatified by their search for truth. A few scenes later, another character asks whether good scientists are, by definition, good human beings as well. As British dramatist Shelagh Stephenson’s play continues, two different…
August Wilson came to prominence when the first of his cycle of plays about black life, each set in a different twentieth-century decade, graced the Great White Way in 1984. A year earlier, though, another of Wilson’s works had begun playing at theaters in New Haven, Chicago and San Francisco…
Theater companies that produce plays about the evils of censorship are sometimes guilty of committing the very sins they seek to decry — a dilemma that’s brought home in a pair of one-acts billed as The Decency Acts. The joint effort of Promethean Theatre and the Bug Theatre Company is…
Bertolt Brecht was the last century’s most influential theater director and theorist. Since World War II, his beliefs about political theater have served as the cornerstone of practice for fringe groups and mega-companies alike (most prominently, the early days of Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company were marked by many Brecht-inspired productions)…
Family members and their friends rip each other’s hearts out, pour alcohol on the resulting wounds and then go at it all over again in A Delicate Balance, playwright Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning look at relationships among the well-to-do. Like most of Albee’s family dramas, the 1966 play, being given…
The number of world premieres produced by the Denver Center Theatre Company over the past few years makes it increasingly hard to think of the city’s flagship theater company as a repertory group dedicated to presenting periodic revivals of classic plays. Earlier this season, more doubt was cast on the…
Inna Beginning is a two-and-a-half-hour play that would pack a stronger punch if it were two hours shorter. Germs of ideas whiz about like supercharged particles in Gary Leon Hill’s play, which was conceived in collaboration with composer Lee Stametz and Denver Center Theatre Company actor Jamie Horton, who also…
Richard II is as given to high-flown poetry, and King Lear weathers as many cosmic crises, but the role of Hamlet is still considered the supreme account of an actor’s mettle. From Burbage to Bernhardt to Barrymore to Burton to Branagh, performers have always laid everything on the line to…
Career academic Vivian Bearing is an expert on the works of seventeenth-century poet and preacher John Donne. A fiery intellectual, she knows the depth of Donne’s passion, the beauty of his wordplay, and, thanks to an exacting mentor, the hidden messages that are embedded in the punctuation of his Holy…
Eighteen months ago, no one could have predicted that the Denver Center/Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Tantalus would spawn any lingering offspring. Because the Trojan War marathon was often referred to as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, it made sense that locals wouldn’t clamor for more mythology until they’d crossed over to…
Imaginatively designed, directed and acted, the Denver Children’s Theatre production of Tomato Plant Girl is, as shows for young people go, a breath of fresh air. Wesley Middleton’s work, currently playing at the Mizel Arts Center, teaches the difference between conformity and friendship by focusing on how relationships develop instead…
The Aurora Fox Arts Center’s The Memory of Water has some passable portrayals, but the play’s complex family relationships don’t progress beyond the embryonic stage. Plagued by glacial pacing, wretched British accents and frequent directorial miscues, English playwright Shelagh Stephenson’s touching work devolves into a mishmash of tinny one-liners and…
The Arvada Center’s production of The Dinosaur Play is filled with a wide array of sights and sounds, but the most impressive spectacle occurs shortly after the lights dim, when a stodgy professor wanders on stage and delivers a lecture about paleontology. The audience, made up almost entirely of elementary…
What becomes of an entire class of people when its members are summarily rounded up like common criminals, even though they’ve never committed any crimes? Are they to maintain their dignity when told that such imprisonment is for their own protection? Should they hold fast to democracy’s ideals when they’ve…
Filled with more raunch than a Friars Club roast, the first part of Bag Ladies Ball is initially hard to swallow. The interactive dinner-theater show, being staged in a second-floor meeting room at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in central Denver, is playwright and director Melvyn Benetti’s response to…
The best thing about Black Box Theater Ensemble’s trio of one-acts, The Whole Shebang, is that the Boulder-based company has a good time without taking itself too seriously. That’s no mean feat in a drone-prone town that holds meetings about pet-guardianship and garbage-ownership rights. The three plays, presented at the…
A program note gives plenty of notice that A Question of Mercy examines difficult issues, and the first scene certainly sets a somber, thoughtful tone. However, playwright David Rabe’s look at AIDS and assisted suicide doesn’t hit home until the character of Anthony appears on stage for the first time…
