My reaction to a Harold Pinter play often follows a predictable pattern. For the first few minutes, the dialogue strikes me as ordinary, the contradictions and obscurities willful and self-conscious. I find myself questioning whether the playwright is really as brilliant as decades of reviews say he is. Yet by…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
Rattlebrain Theater Company consists of a group of highly talented and appealing actors with loads of stage presence. Director Dave Shirley, who also writes much of the material, keeps things buzzing along and utilizes music and video clips to great effect. In It’s Hickenlooper’s World, the troupe’s target is Denver…
Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba is a difficult play to carry off. The plot concerns a group of five daughters confined within the walls of their house for an eight-year mourning period by the iron will of their bitter, violent, widowed mother. Marriage is the only possible…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
As Rose opens, an ailing woman in her eighties sits shiva on a public bench. We don’t know whose death she is mourning, though she tells us early on that her own daughter was killed by the Nazis at age nine. The character, Rose, then takes us on a tour…
Triple Espresso is like the first few minutes of a dinner-theater production. You know, the part where the emcee comes out and congratulates the people in the audience who are celebrating birthdays or anniversaries, jokes with a pretty girl, gets impudent with an older couple and asks how many people…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
Michael Frayn has to be one of the cleverest writers alive. He’s responsible for the brain-teasing profundity of Copenhagen, a play that examines the race for the atom bomb during World War II in the context of a visit by Werner Heisenberg, then working for the Germans, to his mentor,…
Now that Buntport Theater has come of age and is attracting reliably positive reviews and large, enthusiastic audiences, the six company members have revived one of their earlier works, an evening of one-acts titled 2 in 1. The first piece, “This is My Significant Bother,” is a dramatization of nine…
Book of Days. Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days is a bitter exegesis of life in small-town America; the cast serves as narrator and chorus. At its heart is a murder. The play tells us that life in this country has been corrupted on every level and in almost every way…
I’ve been a fan of Lanford Wilson’s work ever since I saw one of his early one-acts at the legendary Caffe Cino in New York in the mid-1960s. It might have been This Is the Rill Speaking, and I think it played in tandem with Sam Shepard’s Icarus’s Mother. I…
I’m absolutely mystified by the weakness of this script. Playwright Rebecca Gilman has won awards and been praised in all the right places. Although it had problems, I rather liked her Spinning Into Butter, which was produced at the Denver Center a couple of years ago. But Boy Gets Girl…
Bat Boy: The Musical. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the Weekly World News — a two-foot-high boy, found in a cave in West Virginia, who endorsed Al Gore for president and later almost died after being sprayed by a pesticide truck. In the…
Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love is an eighteenth-century play, but it contains elements reminiscent of Shakespeare’s work, which was written more than a century earlier: the spunky heroine who dresses as a man in order to pursue her beloved; the haven of learning and philosophy whose inhabitants discover, like the…
Steven Dietz’s Inventing van Gogh unleashes a torrent of ideas about art, possibly enough for a dozen plays. The words are so evocative and so many, the set and lighting so lusciously colored and the acting so selfless that the experience of watching the play becomes all-encompassing. I felt engulfed…
Bat Boy: The Musical. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the Weekly World News — a two-foot-high boy, found in a cave in West Virginia, who endorsed Al Gore for president and later almost died after being sprayed by a pesticide truck. In the…
Ellen McLaughlin’s Tongue of a Bird isn’t poetry, though it wants to be: It lacks conciseness, the sense of language reduced to its essence. Instead, it floods the stage with lyrical phrases and poetic images, as if the author were saying, “How’s this one? Didn’t move you? Didn’t quite work?…
As Communicating Doors opens, a leather-clad prostitute called Poopay enters a hotel room for an assignation and discovers that her customer, Reece, is a dying old man who doesn’t require her usual services. Instead, he wants her to witness his confession. In the course of his business dealings and the…
Bat Boy: The Musical. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the Weekly World News — a two-foot-high boy, found in a cave in West Virginia, who endorsed Al Gore for president and later almost died after being sprayed by a pesticide truck. In the…
In many ways Noel Coward’s life’s work was being a blithe spirit — and an intensely elegant one at that. An actor, writer and composer of songs, he was as much known for his suave persona as for his hilarious plays. He wrote Blithe Spirit in 1941, while German bombs…
Although it’s a comedy, The Merchant of Venice is far darker than such sunny Shakespearean offerings as Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s also a difficult piece for modern audiences because of the central figure of Shylock. Shylock is the money-lending Jew to whom Antonio, the…
