Big Love. In a plot lifted from Aeschylus, fifty sisters have been promised by their father to fifty cousins; on their wedding day, they flee from Greece to Italy in search of sanctuary. They land at the home of hyper-civilized Piero, who wants to help but doesn’t want trouble —…
In the bowels of the hautest of New York’s haute cuisine restaurants, would-be actor Sam mans the phones. All may be elegance, soft-spoken service, expensive food and flattering lighting above, but here in the basement there’s grubbiness and clutter, drab green walls and constantly ringing phones. Also a jarring, flashing,…
In Well, playwright Lisa Kron has created a character, Lisa Kron, who’s writing a play —an exploration, insists the on-stage doppelgänger — dealing with Lisa Kron’s relationship with her mother. It has to do with illness and healing, she informs the audience (no pesky fourth wall here), and the fact…
Calamity. Written by Stephen Wangh and Suzanne Baxtresser, Calamity brings Calamity Jane back to life, re-creating one of the Wild West shows in which she starred at the turn of the last century. But here Calamity also confronts the present — along with current ideas about just who she was…
Apparently playwright Charles Mee has been garnering a fair amount of attention over the past few years, but it somehow escaped me. So I have no particular expectations when Big Love begins with a group of young women clustered in the wings at both sides of the playing area, all…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. There’s enough good material here for a tight, funny, one-hour-long show, but this one stretches on and on. Presented by Denver Center Attractions through December 20,…
The mythology of the West as depicted in dimestore novels and Hollywood fantasy has been pretty thoroughly discredited by now; since the 1980s, a rash of revisionist works have described lives of deprivation, hunger and dirt — not to mention greed and exploitation — on what historians no longer want…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Presented by Denver Center Attractions through November 1, Garner Galleria Theatre in the Denver Performing Arts Complex, 303-893-4100, www.denvercenter.org. Reviewed September 18, 2008. Microworld(s), Part 1…
A middle-aged man is alone on stage, reciting a paragraph of prose. The stage behind him has an unused, dusty appearance — chairs, a few other bits of furniture. We realize we’re in a deserted theater. The man mumbles and hesitates, and then there’s an interruption from the audience. A…
A Raisin in the Sun. This fifty-year-old play remains astonishingly relevant. The Younger family — grandmother Lena, son Walter Lee and twenty-year-old daughter Beneatha, as well as Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth, and young son Travis — live in a roach-infested Chicago apartment with a down-the-hall bathroom. Travis sleeps on the…
Thaddeus Phillips is a magician of the stage. He likes putting disparate things together — objects, images, ideas — in service of a new and transformative vision. He is also an internationalist to the core. His characters are often bewildered travelers, and maps, boundaries and foreign languages play a large…
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. First produced in 1984, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the play that propelled August Wilson to fame, and it has everything that makes the playwright great: eruptions of humor, rage, pettiness and affection, all given resonance by a broadly humanistic sense of history and context. The…
A Raisin in the Sun was written over fifty years ago, but it remains vivid and relevant today. Though the final act is weakened by a sequence of preachy, 1950s-style dramatic speeches, in which each character in turn bares his or her soul, in every other respect these people are…
Die! Mommie Die! It’s been forever since we’ve had really good, outrageous, dirty-minded, over-the-top camp in Denver, so Die! Mommie Die! is a particular delight. Charles Busch’s play is a spoof of such 1960s Gothic horror movies as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. There’s no important…
I knew that René Marie was a tremendous jazz artist — but I had no idea that she was also an amazing writer and an astonishingly powerful actress. Not until I saw Slut Energy Theory. Marie’s one-woman play has been promoted as a work about incest and abuse; performances are…
When he wrote The Voysey Inheritance over a hundred years ago, Harley Granville-Barker intended to show the rot beneath the politely conventional exterior of Edwardian society. The plot concerns a solicitor who uses his clients’ funds to enrich himself and his family while managing to keep up with interest payments…
For the children who compete in them, spelling bees are a very big deal. They represent an arena where poor kids, rural kids and the kids of immigrants can find identity and pride. Indian-Americans, like the winner of this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, Kavya Shivashankar, seem to do particularly…
Die! Mommie Die! It’s been forever since we’ve had really good, outrageous, dirty-minded, over-the-top camp in Denver, so Die! Mommie Die! is a particular delight. Charles Busch’s play is a spoof of such 1960s Gothic horror movies as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. There’s no important…
Yankee Tavern introduces us to Adam, a young man working in what used to be his father’s bar. He’s arguing with his fiancée, Janet, because the names he provided for her save-the-date notices were fictitious, and she’s furious. Adam’s father committed suicide here — or rather, we think it was…
Dial ‘M’ for Murder. Frederick Knott’s Dial ‘M’ for Murder is one of those stylish, intricately plotted murder plays, though not a whodunit. We know early on that the villain is onetime tennis pro Tony, who wants his wife, Margot, murdered; we watch as he hires the man to do…
Every now and then, the Buntport troupe decides to remind audiences that they’re not just clever, funny, creative and entertaining; they’re also artists. And that’s just what they do with Indiana, Indiana, a production based on a novel by Laird Hunt of the University of Denver. The story isn’t complicated…
Jeffrey Nickelson, who passed away last week, made a huge contribution to the theater scene in Denver, both as an actor and a director. He created Shadow Theatre on a $500 donation, and — against all organizational and financial odds — kept the company alive and artistically kicking for a…
