Stones In His Pockets (2008) — Denver Victorian Playhouse production archive

2008 season · Production archive

Jake and Charlie are thirty-somethings who meet while working as extras on a big American movie being shot in Ireland. Charlie’s video shop in Ballycastle has gone bankrupt and Jake has returned to Kerry after a futile few years in the US. The movie is a wonderful break from worrying about their futures, until the harsh realities of rural life break through.

Written by: Marie Jones
Directed by: Wade P. Wood
Ran: February 22 – April 5, 2008
Cast: Seth Maisel · Austin Terrell

A dim rural Irish bar interior with a peat fire and empty wooden stools — Two actors, fifteen characters, no costume changes — a play that needs proximity rather than scenery.

About the production

Two actors play fifteen characters between them, switching in the open with no costume changes and no interval to hide behind. It is one of the purest tests of ensemble technique in the modern Irish repertory — a body of work whose national home is the Abbey Theatre in Dublin — and it is completely unforgiving in a small room, because the audience can see the join if there is one.

Which is also why it belongs in a house like the Vic. The play needs no set worth the name; what it needs is proximity, so that the audience does the transformation work along with the actors. It ran for six weeks, the house’s standard length, alongside a children’s musical sharing the same slot in the calendar.

What the press said

“Director Wade P. Wood and his cast…strike just the right balance between self-effacing humor and hopelessness…(Seth) Maisel and (Austin) Terrell have a solid grasp of Jones’ easy banter…“Stones” truly shines… ★★★½”

John Moore, The Denver Post

Where it sat in the season

It was production 2 of 10 in the Vic’s 2008 season. It followed The Lion in Winter (Jan 4 – Feb 16, 2008) and was followed by Selggin and the Battle of the Mollinduffs (Mar 1 – Apr 5, 2008). 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.

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.