You’re familiar, of course, with the old theatrical plot line in which the lead gets sick, the understudy is forced to go on in her place, and, after a hesitant start, the young woman wows the audience and becomes a star overnight. Something like that happened on the evening I…
The Shakers were a utopian, egalitarian religious group, originally an offshoot of the Quaker community in eighteenth-century England, whose adherents dedicated themselves to God by separating themselves from the world and giving up all worldly pleasures — including sex. Shakerism was brought to the United States by a young woman…
Beirut. In Alan Browne’s play, Beirut is the name given to New York’s East Village, where, in a futuristic dystopia, HIV-positive people are quarantined (the play doesn’t use the terms “AIDS” or “HIV,” but the references are clear). Outside of this area, the world has changed. Sex is forbidden on…
No one goes to see a play in a vacuum, so let me put the evening I attended Cats in context: It came at the end of a week spent alternately reading student papers (in my other life, I teach writing at CU) and conferencing with the authors of those…
Beirut. In Alan Browne’s play, Beirut is the name given to New York’s East Village, where, in a futuristic dystopia, HIV-positive people are quarantined (the play doesn’t use the terms “AIDS” or “HIV,” but the references are clear). Outside of this area, the world has changed. Sex is forbidden on…
These are brilliant songs. They’re wonderfully performed at the Theatre Cafe by four singers and three musicians. And that’s all you need for an evening of pleasure and insight — along with a glass of wine, a table with a white cloth, and a single red rose for your hair…
Beirut. In Alan Browne’s play, Beirut is the name given to New York’s East Village, where, in a futuristic dystopia, HIV-positive people are quarantined (the play doesn’t use the terms “AIDS” or “HIV,” but the references are clear). Outside of this area, the world has changed. Sex is forbidden on…
Let’s start with the obvious: It embarrasses me to see a naked guy on stage. Not when he’s standing motionless, bathed in golden light and looking like a statue of Apollo, but when he’s wandering around a cluttered, filthy-looking room, spooning food out of a can with his fingers or…
These days, I can’t watch a Sam Shepard play without having my brain thronged with ghosts of Shepard viewings past. So as Chasm View’s Fool for Love unfurled in front of me, I found myself clicking off the expected elements in my head. A cheap motel room. Check. Somewhere in…
Angels in America: Part I: Millennium Approaches. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a complex, seven-hour masterwork about the lives of two couples and one quintessentially evil historical figure, and the inextricable way in which politics, history and private life intertwine. There’s also an angel, along with other supernatural and…
For the entire first act, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Boston Marriage is pure enjoyment. It’s light and fast, and the language is dizzying — clever and cleverly self-punctuating. The plot concerns two nineteenth- century women who live together in an arrangement termed a “Boston marriage.” Some such arrangements were…
Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home begins as a tart-tender look at an overworked topic — the way family dynamics become exacerbated, for good or ill, at Christmas time — and ends up floundering in sentimentality. The play’s defining feature, the thing that should have lifted it from the…
Angels in America: Part I: Millennium Approaches. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a complex, seven-hour masterwork about the lives of two couples and one quintessentially evil historical figure, and the inextricable way in which politics, history and private life intertwine. There’s also an angel, along with other supernatural and…
Nagle Jackson is an intensely visual director. For the Denver Center Theatre Company’s The Misanthrope, he utilized the talents of set designer Vicki Smith, lighting designer Peter Maradudin and costumer Andrew V. Yelusich, and the production is flat-out gorgeous. The set is simple and elegant: white alternating with panels of…
No question, the Angel at the center of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a tricky creature — neither divine nor malevolent, sometimes comical, highly sexual. She’s not any old angel, either, but the angel of America, which accounts for the frequent stuttered iteration of the first-person pronoun: “I. I…
Angels in America: Part I: Millennium Approaches. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a complex, seven-hour masterwork about the lives of two couples and one quintessentially evil historical figure, and the inextricable way in which politics, history and private life intertwine. There’s also an angel, along with other supernatural and…
Would I have preferred not to know that John Patrick Shanley’s Dirty Story was an allegory about the struggle between Israel and Palestine when I sat down to view it? If I hadn’t known, the last line of the first act would have been a complete shock. Up until that…
In putting together their original comedy Macblank, the folks at Buntport relied on the theatrical superstition that there’s a curse on Shakespeare’s Macbeth and that those performing it are in danger of unknown catastrophe. There really are actors who refuse to speak the play’s title in a theater, and it’s…
Angels in America: Part I: Millenium Approaches. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a complex, seven-hour masterwork about the lives of two couples and one quintessentially evil historical figure, and the inextricable way in which politics, history and private life intertwine. There’s also an angel, along with other supernatural and…
Starving through the leafless wood Trolls run scolding for their food; And the nightingale is dumb, And the angel will not come. Cold, impossible, ahead Lifts the mountain’s lovely head Whose white waterfall could bless Travellers in their last distress. — from “Autumn Song,” by W. H. Auden So much…
Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden was published in 1964 as fiction, but in fact described the author’s own teenage struggle for sanity and the help she received from Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, herself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Dr. Fromm-Reichmann had strong theories about the practice of…
The Fourth Wall. Playwright A.R. Gurney is angry. He considers the Bush administration a disaster; he condemns its boneheaded policies, its indifference to the plight of the poor, its pre-emptive war on Iraq. But Gurney is a kind-spirited, bourgeois, WASP kind of guy, and in this play, his anger is…
