Utah Theatre articles published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including theatre reviews, interviews with playwrights, directors, actors and more.
“Morag Shepherd never plays it safe,” is what Matthew Ivan Bennett wrote about the Utah playwright in 2022. His words ring true a year later, as Immigrant Daughter’s Theatre prepares to stage Shepherd’s “Worship,” a play that delves deep into the complexities of devotion and the dark undercurrents of […]
Can I Say Yes to That Dress is a brand new play, written in two exceptional creative bursts ten years apart, which Salt Lake audiences are fortunate to have premiered at a moment in time when love and laughter are welcome distractions. While it sprints through five hundred […]
The Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival, or as one fan so lovingly described it “…Disneyland for theatre lovers,” is Salt Lake City’s pinnacle of live theater. The annual festival garners fans, actors, writers and theater lovers alike from across the state for a two-weekend lineup of performances. Festival […]
If you’ve been in Salt Lake City’s art community over the past two decades, you’ve probably run into Lane Richins. Maybe at Weller Book Works, in Trolley Square, where Richins has helped stage countless readings. Or you might have seen him at Salt Lake Acting Company, or Plan […]
My friend Jen loves dogs. And dogs love her. Over the years in which I’ve been lucky to know Jen and call her a friend, she has fostered many, many dogs—lovingly called her pack. One day I ran into her on the street near Liberty Park while she […]
Pygmalion Theatre Company’s upcoming production is Mountain Meadows, a play by Debora Threedy exploring one of the most violent and controversial episodes in Utah and Latter-day Saint history. The play weaves together the stories of two women: Nita, granddaughter of one of the perpetrators of the massacre, and […]
I have known Julie Jensen’s work ever since I came to Utah over 30 years ago, and we have been members together of the Playwrights Lab at Plan-B Theatre for a number of years now but this interview with her was the first time I learned about her […]
“Imagine making plays as if Beckett, Churchill, Shawn, Fornes, Gambaro, Anouilh, Kennedy, Sondheim … hadn’t happened.” – Caridad Svich As a theatre student in the late ’90s, drinking Pabst beer and staging “True West” on the six-foot stage of Groovacious Records in Cedar City, a pastime for me […]
Melissa Leilani Larson’s new play Mestiza, or Mixed is a work that brings together all of the complicated facets of Larson as a person refracted through her characteristically arresting turns of phrase. It tells the story of Lark, a queer, Asian American filmmaker seeking her big break and […]
Allen Smith’s set for Annie Baker’s play Body Awareness at Pygmalion Theater is a kitchen and a bedroom — as Ikea-perfect as a dollhouse. There is something so orderly about the kitchen it’s startling; it ‘s too precious to be real. It seems it’s still a drawing on […]
Let’s say you’re a single, 45-year-old woman in a religion where people marry young and procreate often. Now you’re about to age out of your LDS “mid-singles” ward, and on top of that you’re still haunted by an earthquake that compounded the isolation you felt during a global […]
“What a tremendously hostile world a rat must endure. Yet not only does he survive, he thrives. And the reason for this is because our little foe has an instinct for survival and preservation second to none. And that, Monsieur, is what a Jew shares with a rat.” […]
Why would a writer like Harvey Fierstein, author of plays like Torchsong Trilogy, La Cage aux Folles, and Kinky Boots, write a one-woman show about the New York politician Bella Abzug? Look at when it was written: 2016, the year Trump was elected president. Fierstein was influenced, he […]
Playwright Alexandra Petri, a Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, a Washington Post columnist and a humorist (author of A Field Guide to Awkward Silences, New American Library, 2016), must have wanted to gather misery like a bouquet. So she gives us — and in some ways it seems […]
In fair Cedar, where we lay our scene, there is now fully an entire block that is made to conjure up the Bard. You can’t, in truth, escape him. From late June until early October the Utah Shakespeare Festival presents “life-affirming classic and contemporary plays in repertory, with […]
Internationally celebrated playwright Catherine Filloux has always had a penchant for traveling to haunted places filled with hunted people and then writing eloquently about their plight so that the rest of us can wake up to what is really going on in our world. White Savior, the play she is […]
The world premiere of playwright Jenny Kokai’s and director Jason Bowcutt’s Singing to the Brine Shrimp (at Plan-B Theatre through February 23) gives the Salt Lake City public a funny and insightful look at belonging, culture shock, and silliness in the art world (for more about the play, […]
Deadline: Dec. 8, 2023
35×35 is Artists of Utah’s showcase of work by Utah’s young generation of visual artists. Occurring every three to four years, this exhibit features work by 35 artists 35 years old or younger, providing the artists with a unique exhibition opportunity as well as extended media coverage to help further their career.
