Putting on a play is one complicated proposition. Think about how difficult it is to coordinate with a small handful of your friends for a Saturday night jaunt to Pearl Street or (gasp!) Denver and you immediately get the idea.]]> Two years ago, performance poet Sonya Rene Taylor was chatting with a friend who was having an issue in the bedroom. Her friend had cerebral palsy, and she felt awkward asking her partner for the special attention she needed because of her disability.]]> To quote Public Enemy, “Don’t believe the hype.” To paraphrase the Dead Milkmen, I’m not saying that The Other Place isn’t a good play. It’s a fine play, an all-American play full of good, upstanding people.]]> Most people don’t like to hurt their friends’ feelings, even with good intentions. Yet sometimes it is of necessity.]]> In fact, it amuses me to no end that some of the material on their website (particularly the description of Penumbra in the Garden of Twilight’s Cucumbers, the fictional play they’d intended to produce before settling on Delirium Tremens) and in the program so far exceeds in cleverness and craft the dialogue in Delirium Tremens itself.]]> Samuel Avital speaks many words about the art he has spent his entire life perfecting. Strange, because Avital’s art is practiced wordlessly. He is a mime.]]> "It's getting closer all the time,” says Cheech Marin about what he calls the “quasi-legal” state of marijuana use in America. “You can walk down the street of just about any city smoking a joint, and nobody’s gonna hassle you. It’s ridiculous that it’s not legal. Sometimes our country has this puritanical element about it that just pops up like a mutant gene.”]]> Even if you are a Dawkins-lovin’, God-mockin’, card-carryin’ atheist, the odds are that during your youth you spent some time in and around a church or synagogue.]]> After the rather lackluster The Other Place, the usually metronomically reliable Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company (BETC) comes back strong with Bach at Leipzig. If you enjoyed the movie Amadeus — and if you haven’t seen that film I can’t recommend it enough — you’ll revel in this jaunty, cheeky, fictionalized look at the cutthroat competition to assume one of the highest posts in the rarified world of music in Germany circa 1722.]]> A few days before her African dance class presentation, University of Colorado Boulder student Jessie DePasquale’s dance partner said she wouldn’t be there.]]> The festival is a proud product of the University of Colorado Boulder and a cherished cultural gem in the city of Boulder. But according to numbers provided by the university, in only one of those years, 2000, did the festival post a profit.]]> As a longtime fan of Oscar Wilde, the corners of my mouth go instantly north whenever I hear that some industrious theatre company is mounting one of his plays.]]> Like “Heart and Soul,” Elijah: An Adventure requires a piano and is an amusing entertainment that evaporates from the audience’s consciousness as soon as it concludes.]]> Say what you will about Tybalt or Iago, Edmund (the bastard!) or Lady Macbeth. For my money, the greatest Shakespearean villain is Richard. He opens Richard III as the Duke of Gloucester and ends it as the King of England. He is, by his own hand or through his devices, a serial killer of prolific pedigree.]]> If you’re having a hard time this holiday season doling out your entertainment dollars, kill three birds with one stone.]]> For troupes like Playback Theatre West, audience participation isn’t about who can shout their ridiculous word loudest. Audience members are instead invited to share personal stories for actors to interpret on stage.]]> For that reason alone, I encourage all you overwhelmingly white, privileged, sheltered Boulderites to get out of the bubble and make the trek down to Denver for a performance of Clybourne Park. Continuing its tradition of bringing intelligent, challenging plays to the stage, the Curious Theatre Company opens its 14th season with the regional premiere of Bruce Norris’ 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning examination of racial issues both in contemporary America and in its more, er, black-and-white past.]]> A date takes a wrong turn and ends up in an orgy; someone spontaneously kisses a cab driver with irresistible eyes; McDonald’s serves as the backdrop for a break up; a guy decides he’d rather stay single than fall in love with a girl named Aphrodite.]]> For 35 years, Philip Sneed has been hearing that the theater is dying as quickly as its gray-haired audience. ]]>