Halfway through her best-selling Nickel and Dimed, a book examining the minimum-wage way of life, author Barbara Ehrenreich stops for a disquisition on cleaning other people’s toilets. “The first time I encountered a shit-stained toilet as a maid, I was shocked by the sense of unwanted intimacy,” she writes. “A…
Contrived Ending. This play is local author Josh Hartwell’s homage to the movies and, in particular, to the old-fashioned art house. All the action takes place on a beautifully detailed and realistic facsimile of a cinema lobby, and the play actually sounds and feels like a lot of movies — Reality…
Although the play’s been around over thirty years, I’d never seen D.L. Coburn’s The Gin Game, and at the beginning, I expected it to be a heartwarmer. Two old people connect on the seldom-used porch of their retirement home, a dusty, cluttered place of battered chairs and cast-off household objects…
As you walk into the familiar Buntport space, the scent of popcorn envelops you. Contrived Ending, which is premiering here, is local playwright Josh Hartwell’s homage to the movies and, in particular, to the old-fashioned art house. All the action takes place on a beautifully detailed and realistic facsimile of…
The Last Five Years. This intimate two-person musical involves the breakup of a marriage. When Jamie and Cathy met in New York, he was an aspiring writer and she an actress. Success came for him fast, while she continued to inhabit the dreary, ego-pummeling world of auditions and summer stock —…
Is there anyone who doesn’t remember the two central figures in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men — quick-witted, enterprising George and his friend Lennie, who possesses a child’s mind in the body of a hulking, preternaturally strong man, and who tends to kill small, smooth-furred things like mice and…
It’s amazing what legs a lighthearted spoof can have. Little Shop of Horrors got its start in 1960 as a seventy-minute black-and-white movie, featuring Jack Nicholson in a small role and shot by director Roger Corman in two days — either on a bet, or because he still had three…
A Body of Water. In Lee Blessing’s play, two middle-aged people wake up one morning in a beautiful house near a lake — or perhaps the shimmering they glimpse through the windows comes from more than one lake or inlet; they’re never quite sure. They have no idea who or where…
The central figure in Lydia is a brain-injured young girl who rises periodically to speak to the audience, then subsides again on her pallet in the middle of the family living room, grunting and moaning. Trapped in her stiffening body, Ceci burns with sexual desire and a longing to continue…
I first saw the intimate, two-person musical The Last Five Years when Modern Muse presented it almost two years ago, and now it’s being offered by Denver Center Attractions. The two productions provide an almost-textbook example of the difference that staging, casting and a director’s overall conception can make. Because…
A Body of Water. In Lee Blessing’s play, two middle-aged people wake up one morning in a beautiful house near a lake — or perhaps the shimmering they glimpse through the windows comes from more than one lake or inlet; they’re never quite sure. They have no idea who or where…
Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong won critical acclaim for its quiet beauty, and Eric Schmiedl’s stage adaptation — miraculously — comes close to doing the original justice. This isn’t one of those theater pieces that wows you on the spot; instead, Plainsong stays with you, settling slowly into your consciousness until…
Without memory, we lose our identity. We can’t know who we are unless we’re aware of what we usually think about and read, who our friends are, what we like to eat, the flowers we prefer. And the workings of memory are mysterious. In his new book, Musicophilia, the ever-inspiring…
I’d like to see Closer again, not because the first viewing was overwhelmingly enjoyable or illuminating — although it was definitely interesting — but because the structure wasn’t immediately apparent, and you sense that it’s important to the meaning. When I got home and went on Google, I found an…
There are moments from Paula Vogel’s And Baby Makes Seven that stick with me: Anna, a pregnant woman, seated on a kitchen chair and smiling while her gay male roommate, Peter, cups one of her breasts, and Ruth, her lesbian lover, holds the other; Ruth fighting her alter ego, a…
Theresa Rebeck’s black comedy Our House is smart and timely, and makes a serious point in a highly comic way. But much of the dialogue in the first half — little jabs about Prada, wine-tasting (“pear, some floral, maybe some crushed stone”) and the general idiocy of television news (“apple…
9 Parts of Desire. Heather Raffo is the daughter of an American woman and an Iraqi father, so she’s uniquely qualified to bring the two cultures face to face in this one-woman play about the lives of Iraqi women. She herself is represented by one character, an American who feels…
For most Americans, the first Gulf War was a video-game war. We knew it only as television images of blurry streaks across greenish skies, talking heads, excited voices giving a play-by-play on tactics and military decisions; we found it impossible to understand what was happening on the ground, who was…
Life was rough for the average white male in 1950s America. Although few women had jobs and fewer still had any semblance of power in the political or business world, women actually ran the entire country. At home, they psychologically emasculated their husbands and sons. Outside the house, they helped…
The 1940’s Radio Christmas Carol. For a while, as radio manager Clifton Feddington pitches us questions, hustles his performers and generally works to keep things on track, you can’t help wondering just why you’re watching this show. Clearly, it’s supposed to be a slice of life, as awkward, desultory and…
Marley was dead.” Those are the first words of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, although he still pops up again a couple of times: Scrooge sees his old partner’s face in the door knocker, looking like “a bad lobster in a dark cellar,” and Marley’s ghost later appears festooned in…
La Cage Aux Folles. This is a big, splashy musical with lots of big, splashy song numbers. But unlike many such musicals, La Cage Aux Folles also has heart, humor and a good story to tell. In a time of intense mean-spiritedness and prejudice, it carries a message of tolerance…
