In an early draft of Phoenix playwright Carol DuVal Whiteman’s Katsina, the story ends with a stage full of extras dressed as elaborate approximations of Hopi kachinas. But Whiteman spiked the scene when her Hopi friends objected to public representations of their deified ancestral spirits. Would that some benevolent organization…

The musty old warehouse at Second Street and Roosevelt is better known for its garish mural than for what goes on inside. After five spotty seasons, Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre is still looking for its audience, even while its founders–Peter Cirino and his wife, actress Mollie Kellogg Cirino–are preparing to…

Michael Grady is a playwright/actor/director who not only turns out fine work, but is content to stay in Phoenix putting out for a theater audience that’s still developing a taste for new plays. Lured here in the late ’80s by Actors Theatre of Phoenix, Grady has remained, appearing in lead…

In 431 B.C., Euripides’ Medea took last place in an annual festival of plays held in honor of the god Dionysus. Although the dramatist usually took top honors in this contest, the judges were loath to give high marks to a play in which a mother kills her own children…

The last time you looked, the Orpheum Theatre was probably either boarded up or maybe hosting a concert by your favorite rock band, say R.E.M. But last week, after a 12-year-long, $14 million fix-up, the formerly run-down vaudeville house was reopened as a mirror image of its younger self. Its…

There’s nothing worse than bad Shakespeare. A successful mounting of any of the Bard’s plays requires confident acting and a director and cast with a detailed knowledge of the material. Nevertheless, a pair of local stages have been overtaken by comedies of error that provide abundant laughs–both intentional and otherwise–at…

There are more reasons not to see Shear Madness than there are alternate endings to the play. The device of this senseless shriek fest, which is now playing at Theater League’s New Scottsdale Playhouse, is that it allows its audience to select one of four different wind-ups to its highly…

On opening night of Phoenix Theatre’s production of Chapter Two, when its star Kathy Fitzgerald took her final bows, she received what could only be called conventional first-night applause. One could be excused for having expected a rafter-shaking ovation. This was, after all, Fitzgerald’s first new role since she returned…

The king of Seventies comedy still reigns in Phoenix: Rare is the community theater company that each season doesn’t feature one of Neil Simon’s plays. What’s baffling is that they’re about as pertinent as a pet rock. But even more perplexing than the popularity of Simon’s shopworn comedies is the…

If theater is a microcosm of the universe, then we must be a godforsaken, consumer-driven society, more interested in what’s under the tree than how it came to grow there. I’m not a Christian, but I’m concerned with the low state of holiday plays in our fair city: Not one…

Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre has made a name for itself with overwrought dramas and dark translations of prominent plays. Whether this uncommon company is presenting a contemporary comedy or a Shakespearean tragedy, its productions are distinguished by stacks of video screens and crowds of women in singed nightgowns, stroking potfuls…

Theater has been braving the AIDS pandemic for more than a decade. Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart in 1985 was the first of a subgenre of plays that has evolved beyond commentary on the crisis to a more artful form of entertainment. Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz, which is being…

The strengths of Sam Shepard’s plays are in the peculiar humor he brings to them. In most of his better-known work, the playwright/actor blends comedy and tragedy, pulling laughs from unseemly places. A new staging of Shepard’s True West that’s produced by a local movie company called Sudden Death Pictures…

I didn’t much like The Cocktail Hour, which surprised me. Not only because it’s one of the more amusing and sophisticated of A.R. Gurney’s comedies, but because the company presenting the play–and the director who staged it–normally offers more muscular fare. This time out, director Betty St. George and her…

Early in the beautifully written first act of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, one of the characters says to another, “I remember everything!” To which the other replies, “That must be a burden.” Albee, at 68, knows that memory can be a wily, artful thing, and freeing oneself of one’s…

Patient A is a small, infrequently produced play about the life and death of Kimberly Bergalis. Bergalis died in 1991 from complications of AIDS, which she presumably contracted from her dentist. Her case became national news and Bergalis a media figure and penultimate “innocent victim.” In this solemn one-act–presented by…

With its current production, Arizona Jewish Theatre Company has managed to cram both comedy and tragedy onto the same stage. The comedy is Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig. The tragedy is that this nearly three-hour-long play is enormously unfunny. Wasserstein’s relentless comedy concerns a trio of sisters who gather to…

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is among the most stirring dramas written this century. The critically acclaimed play, about a black American family’s struggle to come to terms with its legacy of slavery, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1990. It is Wilson’s intention to write a play…

Phoenix Theatre’s current production, Dial M for Murder, pits a killer against a mystery writer/police inspector team, but the plot is no puzzler. My mystery-writer friend and seatmate Karol had the whole plot figured out in the first act when the leading lady (Heidi Ewart) sat down to work on…

I hate mimes. Who doesn’t? Say “mime” and I think of Marcel Marceau. Or worse, Shields and Yarnell. No matter who, it’ll be white face and a striped tee shirt and those loose-limbed bits with titles like “Climbing the Stairs” or “Walking Against the Wind.” Right? Not anymore according to…

I’ve been a big fan of Paul Rudnick’s writing ever since I read his first novel, Social Disease, in the early Eighties. That book, and most of Rudnick’s subsequent work (the play I Hate Hamlet; several screenplays, including the two Addams Family movies; and his hilarious monthly movie column in…

Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris is a musical revue that became an off-Broadway staple nearly 30 years ago. Truth be told, Jacques Brel is quite dead. If he weren’t, Todd James Smeltzer Productions’ current version of this tired homage to the late Belgian lyricist might…