Shocking and Hilarious
The New Curious Theatre Offering Will Leave You Thinking. Hard.
These days, after years and years of reviewing theatre, I’m retired and free to pick and choose the productions I want to see, and which of these I might want to write about. I know exactly how to judge: First, check the cast list to see who’s performing. The best script in the world falls flat if badly acted, while the flattest script can be worth watching if there’s bright talent and energy coming from the stage.
Second, if the director is Christy Montour-Larson, don’t bother asking questions. Just call the box office and beg for tickets.
Here, at the end of the page, is the stellar cast line-up for Tracy Letts’s The Minutes, which opened at Curious Theatre in Denver a couple of days ago, and which I’ll see Friday (the show runs through October 14). I wish I could give you a brief bio on each of these eleven actors, but you’ll have to take my word for it that they are among Denver’s finest. And that’s Christy in the bottom, right-hand corner of the image.
Tracy Letts is best known for August: Osage County, which won the Pulitzer in 2008. The Minutes is a Tony nominee and Pulitzer finalist and the Curious production is the play’s regional premiere. The Curious page describes it as a “scathing new comedy: Hilarious Dynamic. Shocking.”
“The play is a comedy until it isn’t,” Christy explains. “Typical of Tracy Letts to tend to lean at the end to more of an expressionistic moment. It’s more about how does the ending make you feel than about reality. The whole theme of The Minutes is the suppression of history.”
It should do well in Christy’s hands. Some of her earlier work still coruscates in my memory. In 2012, she directed 9 Circles for Curious, a play that deals with the trial of a soldier for hideous war crimes. It teeters dangerously on an edge—can the perpetrator of such crimes be understood and even in some way forgiven? Or is the soldier who committed them beyond mercy? The script is tense and grim—and also full of grace. Under Christy’s direction Sean Scrutchins, at that time a newcomer to the Denver theatre scene, gave what I described in Westword as “a breath-stopping performance, twitchy and out of sync at first, coming slowly to inhabit his own brain and body, truthful and entirely without self-pity.” The performance won him a Henry Award and a Best of Denver from Westword.
Red, a powerful two hander that investigates the meaning of art and the life of an artist—in this case Mark Rothco and a young emerging talent—was also beautifully directed by Christy.
And one of my favorite productions of all time was Charles Ives Take Me Home, in which playwright Jessica Dickey explores the relationship between a professional violinist who never got along with his sports-obsessed father and his daughter who is a dedicated jock—a daughter who becomes a high school coach. He communicates with the ghost of the turn-of-the-century composer Charles Ives, thought of as the father of contemporary music and known for his use of dissonance and ability to bring together differing styles and forms. In the play, music and basketball twine and separate, and we’re invited to contemplate the marriage of art and sport, the meaning of rhythm and music. (I wish I could list all the actors in these first-rate productions, but lists can become tedious. Dear actors: You know who you are.)
Christy moved to Denver with substantial theatre experience under her belt, including having directed several productions for Rochester Civic Theater in Minnesota. Curious, she says, is one of the first places that welcomed her, and the first production she directed here—David Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Mears—took place in 2002 on that stage. Over a dozen productions at Curious followed, and she has also worked in several other venues, including the Denver Center Theatre Company, the Arvada Center and Creede Repertory.
“I always feel the plays I’ve been honored to direct at Curious are some of the best I’ve done,” Christy says. “They’re the kind of play that’s always well written and makes you think about what it means to be a human being on this planet.”
The Minutes, with its large cast, is especially risky to produce as the theatre world emerges by degrees from the emptiness and distress of the pandemic: “We could do one-two- or three-person plays, but you get tired of that eventually,” Christy says, adding that she’s pleased at the opportunity to employ so many Curious company members in The Minutes: “Nobody took a hit in the theatre community more than actors did. And also it’s fun to work together.”
Curious faced a huge changeover last year, when founders Chip Walton and Dee Covington decided to retire after twenty-four years. Jada Suzanne Dixon, a luminous actor, experienced theatre director and long-time Curious company member has taken over the reins.
But “The company is the same in many ways,” says Christy. “The legacy Chip and Dee have left goes down to the foundation of the building. They’ll always be there.”
And, she says, the company is “still on the same quest: to share the most provocative theatre we can and to support local artists.” As for material, the motto the founders created persists: “No guts, no story.”
Christy says her training taught her that a good director “needs to prepare, even over prepare—and then, once in rehearsal, go with the flow. I take in all that information and put it in my back pocket—though sometimes you can pull something out of your butt and it’s a diamond.
“Being a woman, as a director you have to work twice as hard. You have to know everything. You have to know, Does the play need an approach or a big concept? If you’re doing Shakespeare you probably want to come in with a big concept. But a lot of good plays don’t need all that extra stuff, and it can hurt the story. You have to be a good clear story teller, and also create a room where artists feel willing to take risks.”
She concludes: “I don’t need to be a great director. My role is to be a good director. Stand by to support, guide and step in when I’m needed.”
As for The Minutes—“There’s a big plot twist and a surprising ending, and in typical Curious fashion, we’ll have people thinking and talking for days about it.”
For information on dates, times, and prices: https://www.curioustheatre.org/event/theminutes
/