Welcome to the Wicked Stage

This is the Wicked Stage, a blog of theatre reviews by the students of the Watershed School. What happened was this: I was approached by Jason Berv, who runs the school, to create a week-long theatre class for students, using my perspective as a playwright, actor, teacher, and theatre critic. I decided to have the class focus on theatre from the point of view of a critic. I used the model of nytheatre.com, where I where I was a senior reviewer for several years, as the template for the kind of reviews we would write. So each day the students and I talk about theatre and reviewing and all the elements that comprise a play, and each night we go to a different theatre, take backstage tours, attend shows, and have talk backs with the cast after the show. So far, we've seen Mariela in the Desert at the Denver Center Theatre Company, Hamlet- Prince of Darkness at the National Theatre Conservatory, and Opus at the Curious Theatre. Tonight, we see our last show, Nine, at the Arvada Center. In the blogs that follow, you'll see the reviews that the students have written about the shows.
Enjoy.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Mariela in the Desert
by Luke the Nuke
With my class at the Watershed School in Boulder, Colorado, we went to see a play put on by the Denver Center Theatre Company. To give a quick overview, the play is set on a small ranch in the Northern Mexican desert, in 1950. The play highlights a time in the family where the father, Jose (played by Robert Sicular), is dying of diabetes. This causes the daughter (Blanca, played by Vivia Font) to come home from Mexico City to see her father. Mariela (the mother of Blanca and Jose's wife, played bye Yetta Gottesman) has to take care of Jose in his dying state, and she has flashbacks to show how the family got to this point.
When I heard the general outline of the play, I have to say, I didn't have very high expectations. As I walked into the theatre that the performance was in, I noticed one thing. It was very small. There were about two hundred seats in the theatre, and that really helped you become immersed in the play and forget what was going on in the outside world. For me the play was very interesting and intriguing. Even though it was 2 hours long, it felt like an hour long play. There wasn't much action, but it still kept me feeling entertained the whole way through. I loved the performance of Jean-Pierre Serret (who played the mentally ill son, Carlos). He had great energy coming on the stage and he made me believe fully that he was the character. The scene that I think he shined the most in, was the first flashback. In this flashback he runs in because a scorpion was chasing him. the mother ends up killing the scorpion. He stops for a second, and has great difficulty grasping the concept of death. "It was running and now its still!", he screams over and over, and proceeds to start banging his head against the wall. It was startling to see and it had a huge impact on me. I think that he stole the show.
I think that for a small production show it was very good. If you think that this show sounds un-entertaining, I can tell you that I was very pleasantly surprised. I would encourage you to go, and to keep an open mind about it. If you are planning to go, the show runs until May 15, 2010, in the Ricketson Theatre.

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