Utah Theatre articles published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including theatre reviews, interviews with playwrights, directors, actors and more.
It’s called the problem play. A problem because no one can agree what it is—tragedy, comedy, satire—least of all audiences, who think they’re in for one thing and discover another. So it’s rarely staged (1999 was the last time it appeared in Cedar City). But it opened the […]
Students at Yale can’t finish an entire book. Film students won’t sit through a two-hour movie. These are the headlines used to announce the decline in attention, deep thought and intellectual stamina of America’s rising generation. Enter Darryl Stamp, whose new play, DUMBED DOWN, opens with a scene […]
For more than a decade, playwright Elaine Jarvik has been asking big, uncomfortable, and often funny questions on Utah stages—about belief, identity, power, and the stories people tell themselves. With Sunny in the Dark, now receiving its world premiere at Salt Lake Acting Company, she turns that curiosity […]
In February 2012, when Cheryl Strayed revealed herself as the writer of Dear Sugar, the wildly popular anonymous internet advice column, her coming out was detailed in a New Yorker interview. This was on the cusp of the publication of Strayed’s memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on […]
A scene: Two women walking through north Sugar House streets, pre-dawn, on cold winter mornings. Usual topics: the declining water levels of Great Salt Lake, what a lost flamingo and a seagull might have in common, the toxicity of lakebed dust, and how to write plays about all […]
Now in its 11th year, the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival continues its mission of platforming independent theater with a lineup that reflects the city’s growing appetite for bold, locally driven performance. Running from July 24 to August 3, this year’s festival features 24 original productions across two […]
In its development, not every play needs the same things. Enter the dramaturg—a role that combines the duties of editor, historian, researcher, fact-checker, audience manager, and more. “Really [the job is] to help the playwright do their best version of their play and hopefully enrich people’s experiences,” says […]
We have come to rely upon artistic director Jerry Rapier and his Plan-B Theatre for moving productions that require intellect as well as a certain amount of soul surrendering to absorb. Physical tension, too, is usually present—you realize immediately that this likely will not be a relaxing evening […]
Pygmalion Productions opened its 2024/2025 season Friday with Tender Hooks, Julie Jensen’s sad, funny and (under Fran Pruyn’s uber-talented direction) completely captivating play that centers on LaPriel, a nervous, 60-something widowed piano teacher (perfectly played by Jensie Anderson) who buys Postum by the case, devoutly reads the Doctrine […]
If you value intelligent theatre that has a bite, don’t miss Bitter Lemon, Plan-B’s marvelous season-ending one-act production in the Rose Wagner Studio Theatre through April 28th. I’d see this riff on Macbeth again in a heartbeat, and surely would get as much joy out of a second […]
Plan-B never misses and they have another absorbing evening of socially conscious theater on hand with Debora Threedy’s “Balthazar,” a world premiere running through March 3 at the Rose Wagner Studio Theatre. Threedy has degrees in law and theatre arts and retired fairly recently from teaching law at […]
“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 […]
