One way to get over the end of summer is to find your way back to the theater. Here are four area shows at companies beyond the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ lineup.

Feeding Beatrice

Aurora Fox Arts Center

A young Black couple has moved into their dream home, but there’s an unwelcome guest – the ghost of a white girl, ravenously hungry, who must be fed at all cost. If you’re over the usual Halloween fare but need some horror, Kirsten Greenidge’s gothic tale is here for you.

Betty Hart, known for her many acting and directing roles in the area, directs the production. Unlike many horror stories, Feeding Beatrice digs deeply into its characters’ traits and motivations. “You may not agree with their actions, but you will understand why they do what they do throughout this piece,” Hart says. “ It’s also incredibly thoughtful and insightful into the experiences of June and Beatrice, in particular.”

The play, which premiered in 2019, drew accolades for its underlying themes of race and class, which Hart acknowledges, but says doesn’t overshadow the spookiness of the story. “People go into gothic and horror experiences because they want to be scared,” she says. “They want to face some fears. So when you combine the scary aspects of life — social commentary — with the things that cause us to be afraid,  perhaps people can digest both at the same time.”

Hart is approaching the play with the same quest for authenticity she brings to all of her work. “I’m not a horror person. I’m a truth junkie. I pursue life and theatre to learn more about what’s true,” she says. “I find theatre allows audiences to discover truth by going into the imaginary lives of others. In the midst of their story, we’re able to see truths that aren’t always evident in our viewing of the world. Feeding Beatrice takes audiences into the lives of characters who desparately want a home and are willing to do a lot to acquire their home. Horror, truth, and social commentary all rolled into one.”

Feeding Beatrice runs Oct. 1 to Nov. 1 at the Aurora Fox Arts Center. 

Drag Queen Magic, or The Torturous Purgatorial Experience of One Miss Letta Celebrate

Local Theatre Company

Playwright Ian August lives in New Jersey, but this world premiere is Colorado-grown, having been workshopped by August at Durango Playfest, where Local Theatre Company leaders pitched the play for a Boulder/Denver premiere.

Steven J. Burge, one of Denver’s comedy favorites, will take the stage as Letta Celebrate, a small-town drag queen. Nancy, whose life is a mess, meets Letta at a bus stop and drags her on a quest that is complicated by the fact that Nancy keeps dying in different ways, requiring a Groundhog Day style reset.

“This play is thrilling,” says Local co-artistic director Nick Chase. “It’s the hero’s journey wrapped in a buddy comedy laced with the best elements of farce. Like drag itself, the artform its central character practices, the play is a pastiche of narrative forms, each used to great effect. At its heart, Drag Queen Magic is a story of unlikely friendship, and individuals finding their power in unexpected places (most often, themselves).”

Drag Queen Magic by Local Theatre Company runs Oct. 1-17 at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, followed by a run at Denver’s Mizel Arts Center from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1, the latter in partnership with the Denver JCC. 

The Vampire of Lafayette

Buntport Theater

Buntport Theater is known for finding classic or arcane source materials and putting its own absurdist, design-heavy spin on things. When company member Hannah Duggan pitched the idea of a play about the vampire buried in the Lafayette cemetery, her colleague Erin Rollman dug up a 1993 Rocky Mountain News article, and the troupe was sold on, based on a quote from “a self-proclaimed amateur folklorist and vampirologist who also worked as an assistant manager at Sonic,” says company member Brian Colonna.

The article began: “In a deserted corner of Lafayette Cemetery lies a crude concrete marker with an epitaph that’s intrigued residents for generations:

Fodor Glava

Born in Transylvania

Austro-Hungaria

Died Dec 1918

Generations of Lafayette kids have carried on the legend of the vampire buried in Lafayette.The company did some more research with the Lafayette History Museum. “Otherwise,” Colonna says, “all pop-culture vampire lore was fair game! So, in a much shorter version of the answer: it is a fictionalized story of real Colorado lore, which is based on the xenophobic belief that a man with a Romanian name must have been a vampire.”

The full company will be performing the new piece, and as usual, there’s a design twist: a rotating stage that turns from a vampire’s grave into the Sonic drive-thru where his wife obtains the cherry limeades on which he survives. “After all,” Colonna says, “in our fast-food obsessed culture, what’s the difference between high-fructose corn syrup and blood anyway?”

The Vampire of Lafayette runs Oct. 2 through 25 at Buntport Theater.

One of the Good Ones

Curious Theatre Company

Playwright Gloria Calderón Kellett knows how to update a classic. In 2017, she rebooted the ’70s sitcom “One Day at a Time,” depicting three generations of a Cuban-American family sharing a home. With One of the Good Ones, the playwright casts her eye on “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” but rather than white parents looking askance at a Black fiance, this comedy digs into the subtleties of Latino identity. 

“They think they’re going to meet someone whose name is Marcos Cruz, and they just have certain expectations of who they’re about to meet,” says director GerRee Hinshaw. “In walks a blond-haired, blue-eyed, white dude. The Marcos who shows up at their front door is not the Marcos they were expecting.”

That white dude is from Mexico, and the U.S.-born Hispanic parents are forced to confront their own preconceptions. “At this time when we’re asking about what does identity come from, what does culture come from, what makes an American, a construct like this is a great, funny way to realize there’s a lot to ask.”

For U.S. Latinos, the question can be fraught. “Many of us, like myself, are not actually familiar with the day to day, quotidian life of being Mexican,” Hinshaw says. “They do not look the part, you look the part, but they have the day-to-day culture. Who’s more of that heritage than the other?”

One of the Good Ones runs Nov. 12 through Dec. 13 in the new Curious space at Cleo Parker Robinson Dance. 

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