Plainsong
Stage Theater, Denver
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
★★★★
This adaptation of the best-selling novel by Kent Haruf is “a paean to the strength of a place and the people who live there,” said Bob Bows in Variety. Set in the mythical town of Holt, Colo., Plainsong unpacks the lives of multiple characters—36, to be exact—dealing with the hardscrabble facts of modern life in the rural American West. Mike Hartman and Philip Pleasants are the play’s “emotional center” as cattle ranchers Raymond and Harold McPheron, who take in a displaced, pregnant 17-year-old, and Tiffany Ellen Solano shines as the shy and introspective transient, who charms the audience and the old ranchers. But that’s just one of many subplots. Under director Kent Thompson’s deft management, the 46-scene, three-hour-long play rivetingly “taps the rural integrity of the American ethos.”
The play may be a little long, but this production is “satisfyingly executed in nearly every conceivable way,” said John Moore in The Denver Post. Here in three acts is the whole of small town living, a kind of how-to (and how-not-to) on sharing life with others to whom one is tenuously yet unavoidably tied. Plainsong deserves plaudits “for being harrowing, then heartbreaking, and finally for being just some kind of wonderful.” A blessedly untidy ending leaves the audience ruminating what Haruf means when he says, “You have to know how to look at this country. It’s not pretty, but it’s beautiful.”
-
Boat strike footage rattles some lawmakersSpeed Read ‘Disturbing’ footage of the Sept. 2 attack on an alleged drug-trafficking boat also shows the second strike that killed two survivors who were clinging to the wreckage
-
Elizabeth Gilbert chooses books about women overcoming difficultyThe Week Recommends The bestselling author shares works by Tove Jansson, Lauren Groff and Rayya Elias
-
Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals – a ‘thrilling’ exhibitionThe Week Recommends Celebration of two of the UK’s ‘greatest landscape painters’ at Tate Britain is a truly ‘absorbing’ experience
-
If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
-
Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
-
Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
-
The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
-
Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
-
The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
-
No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
-
The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.