Of all Tennessee Williams’s sometimes brilliant but always anguished works, Suddenly Last Summer is the most difficult to produce. The structure of the play is so awkward and the horrors so thick that melodrama sneaks in unbidden at every turn. The first of two one-act plays included in a program…
It’s natural enough–a full-blown, new-age interpretation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But while the Denver Center Theatre Company’s rendering explores the fantastic quality of dreams, building a fabulous world full of rich, bright magic, it sometimes palls–like having to listen to a fundamentalist sermon when you hold different ideas…
Caustic and brilliant, August Wilson nails down the realities of racism in his plays. They are as revealing, humane and in-your-face as they are graceful, funny and entertaining. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, at the Denver Center Theatre Company, is a masterful piece of theater, competently mounted and performed with moments…
When the theater “holds a mirror up to nature,” it’s not always a pretty sight. The nature reflected there is frail, cruel, stupid and cold as often as it is brave, kind, bright and sympathetic. But the reflection can order and analyze human experience, making it easier for us to…
In the theater it is possible to weigh arguments–to present two sides of a debate and let the audience come to its own conclusions. In the movies, and almost always on TV, what you usually get is propaganda. Occasionally, a great film will come along that is open-ended enough to…
Viola loves Orsino who loves Olivia who loves Viola (thinking her Cesario). The eternal triangle. Love does not come easy in Shakespeare’s plays: There’s always some piper or other to be paid, some complicated journey laid on the innocent by fate. But in the comedies, of course, fate’s jests always…
