Few American playwrights have demonstrated the ability to effectively transform their vivid childhood memories into something other than a highly personal cautionary tale. Mere mention of the words “socially relevant family play” is usually enough to conjure bizarre images of a metaphorical free-for-all between the Bronx-accented denizens of yesteryear’s kitchen…
British playwright George Bernard Shaw once remarked that fabled escape artist Harry Houdini was, along with the personages of Jesus Christ and Sherlock Holmes, one of the three most famous people in the world. Although today’s culture of instant celebrity has considerably altered Houdini’s standing among the greatest entertainers of…
Their blazing eyes fixed upon the majesty of the firmament, three creative geniuses stand shoulder-to-shoulder in Paris in 1904, speculating about their collective capacity to influence twentieth-century life. Momentarily bringing to mind Cyrano de Bergerac’s lyrical odes to rugged individualism, a fiery Pablo Picasso murmurs, “The modern world waits to…
As you watch Whiteline Productions’ presentation of An Evening of Three One-Act Plays by Luigi Pirandello, it becomes increasingly clear just why the Pirandello Repertory Theater (and its cash-cow second-stage cabaret, the Laugh-a-Minute Luigi Comedy Club) has yet to take hold in Denver. Of course, lack of popular demand has…
Teeming with macabre, whimsical episodes and peopled with bizarre, charming characters–all 23 of whom, save one, are played by a first-rate quartet of actors–Giles Havergal’s acclaimed adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt is now being presented at the Space Theatre by the Denver Center Theatre Company. But…
Sixty years before American audiences were entranced by the 1992 Mexican film Like Water for Chocolate, a mystical fable about a young woman’s repressed dreams, Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca wrote a trilogy of tragedies about the hopes and fears of his country’s peasant classes. Shortly before he died, in…
If you grew up participating in duck-and-cover air-raid drills and memorizing the exact location of your neighborhood’s official fallout shelter, then you probably didn’t regard the end of the Cold War as just another over-hyped media event. As the first images of a collapsing Berlin Wall flickered on your television…
Hardened by years of debilitating despair, a young woman shuffles into a Midwestern living room, saunters over to the dining-room table and matter-of-factly declares, “I’m going to kill myself, Mama–in a couple of hours.” Ninety intermissionless minutes later, the character of Jessie Cates regrettably fulfills that awful promise. Apart from…
For better or worse, the wobbly wheel of sexual politics as entertainment appears to be shimmying out of control. Prurient as it may be, theatergoers’ interest in sexual power plays is hardly a twentieth-century phenomenon. Even 2,400 years ago, the subject occupied center stage in such bedroom farces as Aristophanes’s…
Based on a familiar legend packed with graphic sexual references and written almost entirely in verse, David Ives’s play Don Juan in Chicago is a wholly fictionalized, occasionally amusing look at contemporary sexual mores. And if your idea of a rip-roaring good time includes listening to such thigh-slappers as “Do…
Ever-admiring of her husband’s pioneering spirit but increasingly contemptuous of his overriding ambition, a young wife reacts to one of her mate’s first scientific discoveries by murmuring, “In these moments with you, I understand the allure. They say that man was meant for the earth, but I think you are…
By the time the two main characters in Horton Foote’s The Young Man From Atlanta sit down to confront their nameless fears during the drama’s riveting final scene, most theatergoers are likely to have either forsaken the playwright’s meandering spiritual odyssey or determined that the less-than-fruitful trip wasn’t worth taking…
When Murray Schisgal’s play Luv premiered on the Great White Way 34 years ago, the two-act comedy was an overnight hit with New Yorkers who had little trouble identifying with the Brooklyn-born playwright’s incisive observations about metropolitan living. Oddly enough, the play’s underlying theme that one man’s perceived paradise can…
Ever since one of the king’s men stepped forward amid a sea of Elizabethan spectators and intoned Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, playwrights have continually asked audience members to join them as silent partners in the commission of existential crime. To be sure, such probing into…
In the opening moments of Emma’s Child, a self-described “local nothing” of a teenage mother permits her unborn baby to be adopted at birth by a well-meaning, well-to-do childless couple. This might lead audiences to believe that playwright Kristine Thatcher is gearing up for a probing discussion about, say, class…
Ten years ago, when the only marquee Ragtime graced was the imaginary one glimmering in the eyes of its creators, the musical’s current director, Frank Galati, was earning a well-deserved reputation as one of this country’s most innovative, if enigmatic, showmen. An actor, director and college professor, Galati mesmerized Chicago…
Celebrated warbler Sophie Tucker was the most famous of the Prohibition-era “naughty girls” who belted out honky-tonk melodies, jazz tunes and torch songs in vaudeville acts that also sometimes included trained animals, female impersonators and famous criminals holding forth about their checkered pasts. The collective drawing power of speakeasies, talkies…
Is it possible to save another human being from himself? Are the exhortations of politicians, sociologists and religious types the best answers to the problems plaguing the three downtrodden New Yorkers in William Hanley’s play Slow Dance on the Killing Ground? Or is it more likely that, as one character…
Despite recent events in Jasper, Texas, it’s difficult to imagine a group of modern white men brazen enough to pose for a snapshot as they gather around a black man’s mangled and lynched body swaying from a tree amid the tranquility of a Southern forest. More difficult still is to…
A couple of years ago, playwright Arthur Miller sounded something of a death knell for commercial theater when he remarked, “The theater culture on Broadway is dead. You can’t expect people to pay forty, fifty, sixty, a hundred dollars to sit down for a straight play.” Ironically, the acerbic dramatist…
Back in the late Eighties, when a team of New York producers announced that a stage version of the classic 1952 film Singin’ in the Rain was in the works, two questions crossed the minds of every prospective audience member: “How do you pull off the rain scene in a…
As strains of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” waft through the smoke-tinged air of the Mercury Cafe, a young woman haltingly enters the local establishment’s Jungle Room and takes up residence in one of its remote corners. Her oddly vacant eyes darting to and fro, Rootie (Elizabeth Rose) stuffs a…
