The Holdup (2006) — Denver Victorian Playhouse production archive

2006 season · Production archive

The Vic presented the regional premiere of The Holdup by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Marsha Norman. In 1914, near a remote shack on the New Mexican high plains, two young brothers — innocent Archie and hot-headed rancher Henry — accidentally meet an ageing gunfighter, “The Outlaw,” who has just shot his injured horse. They are joined by Lily, a former dance-hall girl and former flame of The Outlaw. Each, it turns out, has a proposition for the wily survivor of the Hole-in-the-Wall era. The Myth of the West collides with the reality of the West in Norman’s picaresque tale: four souls at the end of their individual roads, where in one starry night four endings become three beginnings.

Written by: Marsha Norman
Directed by: Terry Dodd
Ran: January 13 – February 18, 2006
Cast: Stephanie Jones · Jude Moran · Dan Mundell · Matt Zambrano

An antique brass wall sconce with an etched glass shade glowing against dark brick — A single interior, one night, four characters — the shape of play the room did best.

About the production

Norman is far better known for ’night, Mother and for her book for The Secret Garden, and a regional premiere of an earlier, rougher play was exactly the kind of programming a small house could offer that a subscription theatre could not. The Vic’s scale suited it: four characters, one night, one location, and a stage small enough that a rifle laid on a table stayed in the audience’s eyeline for the whole act.

The production opened the 2006 season, the first full year under the new management, and the director’s programme note — preserved in this archive — sets the play against the Frederic Remington prints of a New Mexico childhood.

Where it sat in the season

It was production 1 of 8 in the Vic’s 2006 season. It was followed by Dead Man Walking (Feb 23 – Mar 5, 2006). 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.

Also in this section: the director’s programme note for this production.

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.