Utah Theatre articles published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including theatre reviews, interviews with playwrights, directors, actors and more.
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 […]
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 […]
