Appliance

2005 season · Production archive

Sometimes you have to run away to find yourself. An interfering mother, a best friend always ready with a snappy comeback, and a fear of all things technological: these are the challenges Ruth deals with — or more precisely doesn’t deal with, and that is the problem. Add editors, deadlines and an ex-husband and you begin to see why Ruth’s life, and her apartment, are so cluttered. Appliance made audiences laugh and cry as the reality of Ruth’s life unfolded in front of them.

Written by

Lindsay Price

Directed by

Susan Lyles

Ran

October 20 – November 19, 2005

Produced by

And Toto too Theatre Company

About the production

Appliance was billed as a world premiere and as the inaugural production of a visiting company, staged at the newly reopened playhouse. That arrangement — a resident producer letting the room out to other Denver companies for a slot in the year — became one of the Vic’s defining habits, and it is why the archive that follows contains work by several different producers rather than one house style.

For a small company, the appeal of the room was practical as well as sentimental. A seventy-five-seat house can be filled by word of mouth; it forgives a modest set; and it puts a new script in front of an audience close enough that the writer can hear exactly which lines land. New work of this kind is the ordinary business of small American theatres, the layer of the field that the Theatre Communications Group exists to represent, and the Vic carried more than its share of it for a house of its size.

Where it sat in the season

It was production 2 of 3 in the Vic’s 2005 season. It followed The Voice of the Prairie (Sep 9 – Oct 16, 2005) and was followed by Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge (Nov 25 – Dec 18, 2005). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.

The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.

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This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.