I ponied up for a glass of wine at the concession stand at the Aurora Fox Arts Center because I was there to see Squirrels, and the billing for it made me wonder if I was about to see an interation of CATS, but with more incest and a political agenda. It seemed like wine might be the drop of social lubricant needed to help me appreciate the experience. Here’s how it went. The setting of Robert Askins’ play is a drey (a squirrels nest) and it’s a time of inequality and distress. The fox squirrels, hailing originally from “the other side of the 7/11,” have encroached on the territory of... Read More

So, Othello is one of Sheakespeare’s plays. Billy the Bard himself wrote this rag hundreds of years ago and we just can’t get enough of it. You see, we’re still all f—ing and fighting and all hot and bothered about women making their own choices about who to f— and we get especially uptight when pale-skinned women decide to f— less-pale menfolk. Here’s how the story goes, basically.  Othello is a black dude who lives in Venice a long time ago. Desdemona is a hot, white chick who also lives there. She catches the feels for him and they elope or something, but anyway, her... Read More

“A story doesn’t have to be real to be true.” One of the opening lines of Kyle John Schmidt’s new play The Secretary could just as easily be flipped around to say, “A true story has many realities.” A dark and darkly funny new play at the Curious Theatre dives deep into the twisted and conflicting meanings of guns in America and how we all are related to the violence and power that they bestow upon us. The scenario is this: a small town, probably in the South or Midwest, based on the characters’ accents, is slowly dying from economic starvation. The only real moneymaker in town is... Read More

Sometimes, writing about art and theater feels a lot like falling down the proverbial rabbit hole as I try to find the angle to write about wandering through a haunted-theater immersive experience, getting splashed in a Halloween horror show in the basement of a spaghetti emporium, sweating through a DIY D&D in a comic shop, savoring (har har!) Sweeney Todd’s enraged high notes, and trying to quiet my howling dog in a public house. I’ve found myself in some odd and awkward scenarios. To update the metaphor, writing this column is a lot like drunk-clicking through an endless algorithm of... Read More

Puppets are like drugs: every culture has them, most people have tried them, and some of us have succumbed to non-salvageable addictions to their pleasures. I include myself in the ranks of that latter group. I find all kinds of live theater to be magical, but I especially love puppets. I find them enchanting; they’re just the right distance away, on the other side of the uncanny valley, where we trust them as humans (regardless of their corporeal form) AND they can do and say things that actual humans can’t. They embody the whimsy and fantasy of our imaginations, but are tangible in the present.... Read More

I don’t have a child, but I do have an obnoxious dog, which often seems equivalent to me, even though I can hear all you overstretched parents out there screaming into your computer screens that a dog is nothing at all like a child. I hold my line on this because, while I think that my dog is the most adorable entity in the universe, I recognize that other people do not find my dog even remotely appealing, and this seems like the same cognitive dissonance that parents of tiny humans must embrace. At any rate, I am always delighted to find places that I can bring my dog along with me, which is... Read More

I went to see The Thanksgiving Play at the Curious Theatre this past week and I’m having a hard time writing about it. Not because it wasn’t well-produced (it was) or beautifully played (it was indeed), but because I walked out of the venue feeling like yet another clueless white person who should probably just shut up for a while. That’s a weird thing to write and it makes the play seems like kind of a downer, which it both totally is and completely isn’t. It was simultaneously both one of the most uncomfortable and one of the funniest things I’ve seen in 2019. The premise is this: the... Read More

The Denver Film Festival unleashes its craziness all over the mile-high metropolis this fortnight. I had the pleasure of attending the arguably least-film segment of the entire event, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth my time. It definitely was. In fact, you could say it was “worth the wait.” The event that I’m talking about is “Escape from Godot,” which is just about exactly what it sounds like. The classic, curmudgeonly piece by Samuel Beckett (“Waiting for Godot,” for those who live in the present and don’t waste their time on post-War philosophical struggles) showcases... Read More

October is known as “gig-tober” amongst performers because the modern incarnation of Halloween lends itself so well to dressing up and being dramatic; every troupe in town has a zombie-themed show running this month, and I’m here to talk about one of them. It’s Audacious Theatre’s Grimm’s Scary Tales. The production nicely represents the two things that humans fear: death and the unexplained (which arguably includes death). October is the season when we get to exorcise and process those fears in a way that involves slutty outfits and huge volumes of high-fructose corn syrup. How completely... Read More

I’ve mentioned in previous columns that “immersive theater” is having a moment. At the Aurora Fox Arts Center, it’s having an orgasm. Or perhaps a petit mal seizure. Or maybe both. Petit mal, petit mort…whatever; I walked into Control Group Productions’ staging of Cutting Room Floor and walked out 90 minutes later, not quite sure how that time-loss had happened, but desperately hoping to make it happen again. The idea is this: the historic Fox Theater, founded in a Quonset hut in 1946 and thriving for decades as a movie house, was gutted by a fire in the early 80s, by which time it... Read More