Two outstanding premieres: Salt Lake Acting Company’s Hairy and Sherri, Pygmalion Theatre Company’s Mountain Meadows

SALT LAKE ACTING COMPANY: HAIRY AND SHERRI Watching Hairy and Sherri, Adrienne Dawes’ new play which is receiving outstanding acting performances in a premiere production by the Salt Lake Acting Company (SLAC), requires the audience member to focus on the characters’ nuanced body language and nonverbal actions. Those subtleties propel the significant epiphanies of Dawes’ … Read more

When suppressed truth becomes its own lie: Debora Threedy’s Mountain Meadows set for Pygmalion Theatre Company premiere

In a scene in the middle of Mountain Meadows, a new play by Debora Threedy, Nita tells a Mormon elder, “We can’t put Mountain Meadows behind us if we won’t even admit it happened.” He replies that no one has denied its occurrence and that not talking about it might be the “best thing for … Read more

Free Plan-B Theatre offerings of Radio Hour Episode 15: Sleepy Hollow, Alli and #3 signify strengths of two of company’s outstanding programs

RADIO HOUR EPISODE 15: SLEEPY HOLLOW For Plan-B Theatre’s Radio Hour series, in addition to his original science fiction episodes, playwright Matthew Ivan Bennett has penned outstanding adaptations of Frankenstein, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s only Christmas-themed short story The Blue Carbuncle.  But, his latest adaptation, which premiered last week in … Read more

Plan-B Theatre’s newest Free Elementary School Tour production, Alli and #3, featuring alligator and heron characters, introduces K-3 children to basic science of nature and climate

Children attending school in Utah or the Intermountain West region might be surprised to learn that even in the southernmost Rio Grande River Valley, alligators and herons have been known to congregate together. In Alli and #3, the latest children’s play in Plan-B Theatre’s Free Elementary School Tour program (FEST), Alli is an alligator who … Read more

Overcoming the echo chamber emerges front and center in Plan-B Theatre’s (in)divisible

Being a conservative in the arts has also been great for me because those in the arts give me a full environment to hear other perspectives. Being close to those with different viewpoints has opened my mind and sometimes changed it (and sometimes reinforced it), but either way it’s been an expanding experience. I sometimes … Read more

Retrospective: Plan-B Theatre’s 26th season filled with original, rare, essential plays by Utah writers

NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series about Plan-B Theatre, which just completed its 26th anniversary. Part 2 will preview the company’s 2017-2018 season. As audaciously experimental as Plan-B Theatre’s silver anniversary season was last year, the small theatre company in Salt Lake City set forth in its 26th season an original, rare, … Read more

Welcome to the union! Plan-B Theatre’s One Big Union is a Utah Enlightenment jewel

Come, all ye workers, from every land, Come join in the grand Industrial band. Then we our share of this earth shall demand. Come on! Do your share, lend a hand! – Joe Hill At the beginning of One Big Union, the cast of six actors walks through the audience, welcoming members to the evening’s … Read more

Plan-B Theatre’s newest production One Big Union highlights Joe Hill, Wobblies

In the century since Joe Hill, the Swedish immigrant miner, musician and union activist who was executed in Salt Lake City after being wrongfully convicted of murder, there have been only a very few plays about this figure who recently has emerged from the footnotes of history in relevant ways. Last year, John McCutcheon, an … Read more

Plan-B Theatre’s 26th season features plenty of past, present enigmas and mysteries

NOTE: This is Part Two of a series about Plan-B Theatre, which offers a glimpse of the four new productions for the 26th season. For Part One, see here. Enigmas and mysteries – two wrapped with music and a third with the perplexing question of whether a murder actually did happen – will comprise a … Read more