I enjoyed Crowns most when I closed my eyes and just listened. The music — gospel songs and spirituals, church music with just a touch of rap — includes such well-known pieces as “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” as well as several…
Fiction. Michael and Linda, both novelists, are long and happily married. But Linda has just been diagnosed with a brain tumor and told she has three weeks to live. She knows the kind of story almost everyone with a terminal diagnosis hears again and again — the exciting new treatment…
The first scene of Fiction pulls off a telling bit of trickery. Two people argue and banter over espressos in a Paris cafe. Playful, self-conscious and hyperliterate, they seem a long-married couple. But as they rise to leave the cafe, the woman extends her hand in farewell, and we realize…
A dreary scene confronts us on the small, square stage: a counter with knives and a cleaver, a dirty bucket, blood splashed against the back wall, on the floor. It’s 1990, the first Intifada is in process, and a pair of Palestinian brothers, Chaled and Na’im, are arguing in a…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
A collection of monologues about the Iraq War based on the experiences of men who fought there, Sand Storm is raw and upsetting, but it also tells an old, old story. Hundreds of accounts like these followed the war in Vietnam, and they echo the observations in Chris Hedges’s seminal…
To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
Dear God, but I am sick of Death of a Salesman, which I’ve now had to see three times in the past year. Despite the play’s ahead-of-its-time dramatic devices and portentous poeticizing, it continues to strike me as an endlessly protracted whine. And a verbose and dated whine, at that…
I’m sitting at a small table at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre with my friend Robin Haig. A one-time dancer with the Royal Ballet, Robin has just retired from the University of Colorado Dance Department and is talking about Margot Fonteyn and the Bumptious Colonial, a one-woman show she plans to take…
Chess. The Cold War serves as a frame for Chess, the musical account of a match between a Russian champion, Anatoly, and his petulant American counterpart, Freddie. The action takes place in 1989, in the weeks before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Florence is Freddie’s second, coaching…
There was a moment in Chess that undid me completely. It occurred when the heroine, Florence, met the man she believed to be her father — the father she had last seen in 1956 when, as a terrified little girl, she’d been torn from his arms by the Hungarian revolution…
The death penalty is an obscenity in itself, and the ways in which it’s applied are equally vile: the endless waiting on death row, where prisoners can sometimes see fellow inmates led to slaughter or hear the readying of the death equipment; the capriciousness of the appeals process; the countdown…
After Ashley. We first meet Ashley while she’s watching one of those smarmy television shrinks with her teenage son, Justin. The shrink, Dr. Bob, is giving advice to a sexually incompatible couple, and this leads Ashley to reveal far more than Justin wants to know about her relationship with his…
The United States could recover from an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in just two to four years…. Nuclear war is not nearly as devastating as we have been led to believe. If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it. Dig a hole…
The most interesting character in After Ashley disappears after the first scene. This is Ashley herself, whom we meet while she’s watching one of those smarmy television shrinks with her teenage son, Justin. The shrink, Dr. Bob, is giving advice to a sexually incompatible couple, and this leads Ashley to…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
I’ve been dancing around this conclusion, trying to find a way to put it more tactfully, but I can’t: Waitin¹ 2 End Hell is a nasty, misogynist play. You can dress it up all you want with theories about the problems of the black family and the unfair and emasculating…
Quartermaine¹s Terms simply refuses to come to life. In fact, from the current Germinal Stage production, I can’t quite figure out what the play’s supposed to be about. It seems like one of those gentle, wistful British comedies in which all the meaning lies beneath and around the actual lines,…
The Clean House. The first act of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is close to a perfect piece of theater. On a stunningly evocative, elegantly gray-and-white set, Matilde cleans house for a pair of doctors — Lane and her surgeon husband, Charles. Matilde hates to clean. She wants to figure…
The first act of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is about as perfect a piece of theater as I can imagine. On a stunningly evocative, elegantly gray-and-white set, with cool, beautiful lines and an abstract but vaguely human-looking sculpture lurking in the background, Matilde cleans house for a pair of…
Private Eyes is a very smart play. For a while I tormented myself trying to decipher the plot, but I couldn’t do it. Some critics have compared the story to a set of nested Russian figures, but I think it’s more like a drawing by M.C. Escher. An event makes…
