Production archive
Voices in the Dark
2010 season · Production archive
Celebrated talk-show host Doctor Lil is taking a much-needed holiday with her husband in a remote cabin in the Adirondacks. Except her husband doesn’t show up — and an unwanted guest does. Soon she has more to save than her marriage: she is fighting for her life. A classic thriller by the award-winning author of Agnes of God.
- Written by
- John Pielmeier
- Directed by
- El Armstrong
- Ran
- January 7 – February 20, 2010
- Cast
- Annie Gavin Li
About the production
A stage thriller lives or dies on blackouts, and a basement is the darkest room in any building. The Vic had no windows to seal, no ambient spill from a lobby and an audience seated within a few feet of the action, which is why the notices for this production keep returning to the physical experience of watching it rather than to the plot.
The show’s sound design was nominated in the Colorado Theatre Guild’s Henry Awards for 2010 — one of only two Henry nominations in the theatre’s history, and a notably appropriate category for a play staged in a room where the audience could hear the house above them.
What the press said
“Voices in the Dark is a brilliant example of a thriller on stage that truly works.”
“It takes skillful writing, direction and acting to get an audience to lose itself in a thriller…For thrills, chills, and jump-out-of-your-seat shock value, the Denver Vic is the place to be.”
“Theatre director El Armstrong is the new Hitchcock…Annie Gavin Li plays Lil with a professional ease that is astounding…This is awesome work.”
Where it sat in the season
It was production 1 of 7 in the Vic’s 2010 season. It was followed by The Creation of the World and Other Business (Mar 5 – Apr 24, 2010). 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.