Archive: Arts & Entertainment

The Tricky Part tells the true story of playwright Martin Moran. In the Kitchen Theatre production, Carl Danielsen plays Marty, growing up in a very Catholic section of Denver, attending Christ the King parochial school.  The tale eventually heads in the direction we expect from a Catholic boyhood, but with a twist that could only come from real life.

At first, the audience lights remain on, and Danielsen actually chats with people about the weather. He’s charming and friendly, with a twinkling eye and an easy manner.  Growing up Catholic is, after all, funny—the heavy nun who looks like a black box, the schoolyard bully who invokes the story of St. Martin, the priest who gives incoherent advice about sex to a group of confused sixth graders.

As Danielsen/Marty explains that the nuns left him “stuck in unreliable flesh struggling to make our way to a nicer neighborhood”, the audience lights face, leaving him on a bare stage with only a carpet, a stool, and a table with his boyhood picture on it. No set designer is listed, but E.D. Intemann’s spare lighting makes only a few such perfect points. Similarly, Hannah Kochman has costumed Marty so simply that we feel he’s just stopped by in his ordinary garb to chat.

That low-key approach gives this script both its power and its problems. For example, it doesn’t offer the actor much in the way of taking on a number of characters, although Danielsen does that very well when the opportunity arises, and just a guy quietly talking can be slow work. Director Sara Lampert Hoover wisely doesn’t try to wrench the script into theatricality, although a little more of it might have been justified.

Fortunately, just at the point where I was looking for a change in the steady pace and hoping for some kind of theatrical crisis, Marty sits in a spotlight and reads from his journal, while no one in the audience breathes.

“Is it possible that what harms us might come to restore us?” Marty asks. He doesn’t have an answer, but the question is worth asking.

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