Seven months after Arthur Kopit’s father suffered a stroke, National Public Radio commissioned the author of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad to write a play for NPR’s Earplay series. While Kopit longed for a deeper understanding of his father’s altered…
Atticus Finch is perhaps the only resident of Depression-era Maycomb, Alabama, who believes that it’s possible to live by high-minded principles. He doesn’t merely espouse empty eloquence — the Southern lawyer accepts “payments” of turnip greens, hickory nuts and firewood from a dirt-poor farmer who desperately needs legal help he…
1776 winds up being more — and less — of a history lesson than audiences might expect. Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s award-winning musical, which premiered on Broadway more than thirty years ago, is an enjoyable retelling of the events that led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence…
The African Company Presents Richard III recounts events that, four decades before the Civil War, prompted the nation’s first African-American theater group to perform a Shakespearean tragedy next door to the Manhattan auditorium where a white company’s version was in production. Despite threats of civil unrest and objections from an…
Years before playwrights decided that raw emoting was preferable to shaded feeling and thought, Harold Pinter masterfully exploited the ambiguities of modern communication. Like Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot was described by one critic as a collection of “wordless meanings and meaningless words,” Pinter delved into the notion that…
He had already written Othello to explore the jealous impulses that precipitate a great man’s tragic downfall, fashioned As You Like It to teach a few comic lessons about the strangely similar romantic yearnings of courtiers and country types, and penned a historical series about the Wars of the Roses…
Although most people might think of Romeo and Juliet as a lusty, melodramatic love story, Shakespeare’s play is more a tragic tale about the sometimes catastrophic clashes between parents and children. After all, the two lovers aren’t thwarted by bouts of jealousy, sexual incompatibility or even Romeo’s refusal to share…
If the befuddled characters in Three Men in Search of a Pair of Shoes seem unusually eager to share their endless observations about life, that’s mostly because playwright and director Eric C. Lawrence has yet to compress his freewheeling comedy into a more succinct discussion about the male psyche. The…
Generally regarded as two of the greatest performers of their day, French stage diva Sarah Bernhardt and English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell played opposite each other in a 1904 London production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelleas and Melisande. Although they weren’t ideally cast as the pair of young lovers — Mrs…
A few years before Martin Luther King Jr. thundered his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a quartet of black college students stood up for equality by sitting down at a “whites only” lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. That singular act of courage,…
Like the rotting entrails of the butchered animal one of them has dumped in the backyard, a Queens family’s darkest secrets ooze with stultifying frankness as a holiday barbecue unfolds. Knit together by tears as well as blood, the Robinsons and the O’Conners have dutifully gathered for their annual Labor…
Near the end of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, an immigrant worker strides through the streets of Brooklyn in search of the drunken longshoreman who has wronged him. Waving away another’s placating pronouncements, the fiery man lifts his voice heavenward and cries, “He degraded my brother, my blood!…
If contemporary Texas politicians were as endearingly funny as the small-town folk who bustle to and fro during Red, White and Tuna, then having a whole bevy of Texans in the White House someday might not seem so unsettling. It’s easy enough, for instance, to snicker at the small-minded observations…
No matter how dedicated they are to presenting plays that provoke as well as entertain, most independent theater artists face the same middle-of-the-road, bureaucratic issues that plague large, established companies. That’s especially true when a troupe earns acclaim and immediately sets its sights on becoming “the next Steppenwolf” — referring…
Decades before self-help books, therapy sessions and touchy-feely television shows complicated our understanding of relationships, playwrights like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Edward Albee were crafting absurdist dramas that illuminate the problems of human communication. These days, an absurdist outlook on life isn’t limited to artistic endeavors. In fact, that…
Sleeping Beauty — The Panto begins as five performers clad in medieval costumes flounce through a portal in the Nomad Theatre’s faux-castle setting and sing, “It’s a good day/How could anything go wrong?” Those words prove as prophetic as the merry goodbyes uttered by passengers boarding the Titanic. Indeed, a…
Ever since Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and his band of Claymated misfits fled the North Pole’s hidebound environs, Santa’s helpers have had a hard time keeping their nonconformist attitudes in check. It’s not unusual, for example, for shopping-mall elves to adorn their ears with tree ornaments, coin suggestive greetings or…
Veteran critic Mel Gussow’s fine biography of Edward Albee reveals that most people who knew the artist as a young man had an inkling of his potential but not a clue about his destiny. Nearly all agreed that Albee, whose streak of hedonism could sometimes turn self-destructive, would pursue some…
Part of the promise of an evening of Rodgers and Hammerstein favorites is that the audience will be able to enjoy the company of charismatic artists. No matter how cleverly the selections have been juxtaposed for continuity’s sake, theatergoers rely on the actors to provide a sense of import and…
Is total sincerity the key to maintaining healthy relationships, or should people bend the truth now and again to spare each other’s feelings? That’s the underlying dilemma facing seven disparate academic types in Germinal Stage Denver’s production of The Philanthropist, Christopher Hampton’s charming and erudite “bourgeois comedy.” Among other exploits,…
Lonely Planet, through December 11 at the Denver Civic Theatre, 721 Santa Fe Drive, 303-595-3800
Plays that illuminate the predicaments of entire cultural groups are inevitably propelled by richly detailed characters whose everyday struggles epitomize larger concerns. August Wilson’s soul-stirring dramas about twentieth-century black life, for example, strike universal chords because their theme of racial oppression never displaces the playwright’s broader message about the common…
