Why not make theatre more like a holiday?
With this thought in mind, British playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn created the “Absurd Person Singular.” The show is presented in the Denver Center Theatre Company , at the Space Theatre.
According to the Denver Post, Ayckbourn, who has been called the world’s most produced playwright behind Shakespeare, once told The Denver Post that theater has gotten too stern an image. “It’s the job of theater to make you laugh and disturb you,” he said. “Ideally, a play should do both.”
The play is set over three Christmas celebrations in the kitchens of three couples: Sidney Hopcroft, an ambitious merchant and his meek wife Jane; architect and adulterer Geoffrey Turner and his depressed wife Eva; and Ronald Brewster-Wright, a banker and his snob of a wife Marion.
In this dark British farce, Ayckbourn hopes that “any couple will see something of themselves in one or more of those three couples.”
The show goes on until December 19. Buy tickets
Dowling takes the stage this week in Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer,” one of the Irish master’s finest plays. The Guthrie director is one of three actors — with Raye Birk and Sally Wingert — who deliver lyrical monologues centering around Frank Hardy, an itinerant preacher who has wandered across the British Isles with a healing ministry. Dowling plays Hardy.
The original play ran on Broadway 328 times and was given a Tony Award in 1947.
September 5, STC celebrated the launching of a new performance starring Cate Blanchett and Tim Richards. A Streetcar Named Desire, written by Tennessee Williams in 1945, was once called a “tragedy of misunderstandings and insensitivity” by the playwright himself.
This play tells a story, or rather, it tells 9 stories about the interweaving fates of 9 different people. The blend of languages and cultures that lasts 9 hours brings forth the main point of the play – in this forgotten world these people can survive only through the self-sacrifice of others.
“Matthew Bourne’s version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray has generated some wildly varying responses since its official premiere in Edinburgh. Bourne can be far more explicit in revealing the emotional alienation and moral drift that are endemic to Dorian’s world of narcissism and self-gratification. In combination with Lez Brotherston’s genius design (the voodoo mix of Bacon, Hirst and Chapman Brothers imagery in the second half accumulates a real Heart of Darkness horror), Bourne presents a world where the quest for sensation represents both a holy grail and an impossibility, as Dorian’s drug- and sex-numbed body loses the ability to feel.” Judith Mackrell guardian.co.uk
“The Navigator is a part-opera, part-theatre, part-contemporary music performance that draws inspiration from the Indian epic the Mahabharata and the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The result is a provocative and visually delicious work which feels more like an erotically charged fashion show in a dollhouse than an opera.
