News & Reviews

The following are a number of reviews of Fort Lewis College Theatre productions from area newspapers. They are listed in reverse chronological order. Please click on the link at the end of each brief to read the full story.

Dante's Inferno

Eternal Damnation & A Bad Date: Fort Lewis stages adaption of Dante's Inferno
March 27, 2008
By Judith Reynolds
Durango Telegraph

"It’s happened to me several times with women,” Kurt Lancaster said over the phone. “You pine after someone you think you love, and you go deeper and deeper.”

That’s one reason Lancaster said he’d been preoccupied with Dante’s “Inferno” for almost a decade. What a metaphor for modern-dating Hell.
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Play Explores the Medieval Hell of Dating: College offers modern take on Dante's 'Inferno'
April 4, 2008
By Patricia Miller Arts and Entertainment Editor
Durango Herald

Has high Christian art been leading only to an allegory about dating hell during all these centuries? Perhaps not entirely, but at Fort Lewis College, Kurt Lancaster and Desiree Russell have rewritten Dante Alighieri's classic 14th century poem "Dante's Inferno" to focus on increasingly worrying vignettes of lovers getting it wrong. Click here for more of Dante's Inferno...

Win/Lose/Draw

Conversation With Strangers: Fortlewis College Theatre stages three one-acts
February 14, 2008
By Judith Reynolds
Durango Telegraph

"I kept thinking something would happen,” Annmarie tells Delia “something would change things.”

Funny what strangers will tell each other. Dark secrets, hidden agendas, highest expectations. And disappointments. That’s the deep-sea kind of conversational mining two contemporary playwrights conduct in a trilogy of one-act plays.
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Speak Truth to Power

Speak Truth to Power: Human-rights festival highlights Fort Lewis' autumn
October 12, 2007
By Patricia Miller, Arts and Entertainment Editor
Durango Herald

Fort Lewis College is staging more than a week of arts events centered around human rights this month.

It all started with the routine trolling for material, said the play’s director Felicia Meyer on Wednesday at the Herald offices. Meyer, who is in her second year of teaching Acting for Camera at the college, remembered Kerry Kennedy’s book of interviews with 50 human-rights activists along with beautiful portraits of them by Eddie Adams. She also knew that the book had been adapted for the stage by Ariel Dorfman as “Speak Truth to Power: Voices From Beyond the Dark.”
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Speak Now or Forever...: FLC stages docudrama, 'Speak Truth to Power'
October 18, 2007
By Judith Reynolds
Durango Telegraph

We’re not bred to stand up to authority in our society,” Felicia Lansbury Meyer emphatically said. In an interview last week, the Fort Lewis College adjunct professor commented on what she sees as a national paralysis of moral courage. Meyer started the engine for this week’s Speak Truth to Power Fest. And she’s also the director of the Ariel Dorfman docudrama, which is the centerpiece of the collegewide effort.
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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Accomplished Actors Shine in 'Wizard of Oz': FLC Stages Classic Production
March 30, 2007
By Patricia Miller Arts & Entertainment Editor
Durango Hearald

Incendiary.

A fire alarm emptied the theater during rehearsals of the Fort Lewis College production of Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" on both Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

Someone forgot to turn off the alarm when they lit the pyrotechnics attached to the Wizard's massive mask that he used to hoodwink the people of the Emerald City.
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On the Yellow Brick Road: Fort Lewis Stages The American Fairytale
March 2007
By Judith Reynolds
Durango Telegraph

Forget Harry Potter. I’ll take Dorothy Gale anytime.

As children’s literature goes, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” by L. Frank Baum, has established itself as The American Fairytale. First published in 1900, the story centers on the dream vision of a Depression-era Kansas farm girl. When a cyclone threatens, only Dorothy fails to find safety in a storm cellar. She and her dog, Toto, are swept up by the cyclone and magically dropped into the Land of Oz. Everybody knows the rest of the story, thanks to Baum and the 1939 classic film starring Judy Garland.
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Waiting for Godot

Stripped to the Basics: FLC's 'Waiting for Godot' has few decorative elements
Febuary 20, 2007
By Richard Malcolm
Special to the Herald

Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, arrive on a stage that is bare but for a rock and a windblown tree, where they wait, wait, and wait some more, for someone named Godot, who never arrives. A New York Times reviewer in 1956 called Samuel Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot" "a mystery wrapped in an enigma."
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Three Tall Women

Three Tall Women: FLC ’s production of Albee play full of glorious dialogue
November 3, 2006
By Patricia Miller Arts & Entertainment Editor
Durango Herald
 
Edward Albee must have taken great satisfaction in "Three Tall Women." He has called it his most autobiographical play, and in it he got even with his adoptive mother who disapproved of his homosexuality and his being expelled from school, or schools. She threw him out of the house at 18. Click here for more about Three Tall Women...

The Dark Side of Aging
November 9, 2006
By Judith Reynolds
Durango Telegraph

Edward Albee is as far from “Grease” as a glower is from a smile. But for anyone interested in contemporary American drama, “Three Tall Women” ought to be in your repertoire.

In Act I, the 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning play appears to be conventional in form. In Act II, Albee turns the tables with a coup-de-theatre that is brilliant, especially if no one has revealed its secret. Click here for more about Three Tall Women...

Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir

 

Nuclear fallout: FLC Students tackle Hiroshima
October 17, 2006
By Patricia Miller
Arts & Entertainment Editor
Durango Herald

"Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir" a play adapted from the work of Durango-area poet Leonard "Red" Bird was staged by Fort Lewis College students from the United States and Japan during three performances on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Click here to read more on Folding Paper Cranes...

 

 

Voices in American Drama: Play Reading Series

FLC actors make the most of the amphitheater
May 30, 2006
By Zane Lyon | Special to the Herald
Durango Herald

Fort Lewis College's new summer series "Voices in American Drama" got off to an exceptional start Thursday. Warm weather and a cloudless sky greeted the nearly 40 people who gathered outside at the campus amphitheater to see the first in the series: "An Evening of Experimental Shorts," and the discussion that followed. Click here to read more about Voices in American Drama...

 

 

Angels in America - Part II: Perestroika

Dark 'Angels': Second part of play doesn’t disappoint – or lose its edge
April 7, 2006
By Patricia Miller Arts & Entertainment Editor
Durango Herald

I've never seen a play as ambitious in its themes as Tony Kushner's spellbinding "Angels in America." The playwright warms up by tackling AIDS, political corruption in the Reagan era and hate for homosexuals, blacks and Jews. Then he throws in the dilemma of whether to leave one's lover once she or he has turned sick and unattractive, self-loathing, Mormonism and a women's ability to fight her way out of an unhappy marriage. Click here to read more about Angels in America...

Hope in a time of trouble: Fort Lewis stages second part of Kushner's epic drama
by Judith Reynolds
Durango Telegraph

"You who live in this sour little age cannot imagine the grandeur,” an aging Russian tells the audience at the beginning of “Angels in America Part II: Perestroika.”

In his epic drama, playwright Tony Kushner constantly wrestles with two worlds. He intertwines the mundane and often treacherous with the fantastic and visionary. In the process, this “Gay Fantasia on American Themes” considers disease, love, death, loyalty, and American history through a particular lens. Written at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, the work is now considered a masterpiece of late 20th-century American drama. Fort Lewis College staged Part I last fall, and next week the Drama Department presents Part II.
Click here to read more about Angels in America...

The Guys

"The Guys" a play in remembrance of 9/11
September 2, 2005
By Ann Butler | Herald Staff Writer
Durango Herald

Playwright Ann Nelson melds her experience of helping a fire captain write eulogies for four of the eight men his company lost on that day with her own grief and rage. It puts an immensely personal face on the tragedy, and at the dress rehearsal Wednesday, it proved to be an engrossing and cathartic evening of theater. Click here to read more about The Guys...

 

 

 

 

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Abridged

Smart-alecky Shakespeare: Fort Lewis College abridges corpus with a sophomoric script
February 21, 2006
By Patricia Miller Arts & Entertainment Editor
Durango Herald

The show must go on as the actors say - or more accurately as the impresarios say - so they don't have to refund any ticket money. And the show did go on Saturday night in the Fort Lewis Gallery Theatre.
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Angels in America - Part I: Millennium Approaches

'Angels' flies into FLC
November 8, 2005
By Patricia Miller
Arts & Entertainment Editor
Durango Herald

The Fort Lewis College Department of Theatre presents "Angels in America: Part I: Millennium Approaches," the Pulitzer-Prize and Tony Award winning play by Tony Kushner. The play will be preformed at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $10/$5, Main Stage, Theatre Building, 247-7089.
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