At one point in Good Standing, certainly among the top three original plays ever produced by Plan-B Theatre, Curt (played by Austin Archer), facing the 15 men who will decide if he should be excommunicated from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because he married a man, tells us there are no secrets … Read more
Indeed, life imitates art. On Oct. 8, a packed Browning Center for the Performing Arts room on the Weber State University campus in Ogden patiently waited for the first public performance of Plan-B Theatre’s Zombie Thoughts, the sixth play of its annual Free Elementary School Tour (FEST) program. Developed around the theme of generalized anxiety … Read more
Five years ago, when Matthew Greene’s first play was produced by Plan-B Theatre, Adam & Steve and the Empty Sea centered on how two characters (Steve, a young gay man, and Adam, whose Mormon mission was cut short by illness) in California develop a close friendship then struggle to preserve it as they come of … Read more
At 11, Oliver Grey Kokai-Means already can claim that a play he created and wrote with his mother, playwright Jennifer Kokai, is being produced and will be viewed by thousands over the next month and half in Utah. Zombie Thoughts is the sixth play of Plan-B Theatre’s Free Elementary School Tour (FEST), which takes the … Read more
Want to know what it really means to take enormous risks in the arts? Exhibit A: The just concluded premiere production of Riot Act’s Mopey Wrecks, a play written and directed by Whit Hertford as adapted from Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. In their original form, Chekhov’s plays can confound a director’s tendencies, which might emphasize … Read more
We rely on skilled journalists and editors to make sense of a volatile news cycle. Forty years ago, Umberto Eco wrote about the artist who protests through form in The Open Work. In part, he suggested that the artist, while rejecting the current order and system, also accepts the world in its crisis terms. The … Read more
NOTE: This is Part II of reviews of shows from the 2018 Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival. For Part I, see here. Austin Archer’s Marty Has Cancer – Prufrock Productions Every performance of this play sold out or had standing room only, which likely makes it one of the most successful productions ever presented at … Read more
NOTE: This is the first of two parts about this year’s Great Salt Lake Fringe, which includes reviews of three shows. Part II will highlight reviews of four other shows. For its fourth year, the Great Salt Lake Fringe festival (Aug. 2- Aug. 12) is testing its new venue space at the Gateway shopping center … Read more
“He not only started to doubt America, but he started to doubt himself. He started doubting the gift that Allison claimed he was born with. She had first whispered that word a year and half ago, that strange, sacred word, she had whispered it into his ear one morning, and it had sent thrill and … Read more
In Hindsight, Sackerson’s premiere of Morag Shepherd’s newest play that is performed in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City at indoor and outdoor locations, Ford (Connor Nelis Johnson) and Chase (Tyler Fox) compete to win the heart of Lorraine (McKenzie Steele Foster). Two men could not be more different. Ford is playful, unabashedly romantic … Read more