It has been a busy winter for numerous indie theater companies in Salt Lake City. The Utah Review offers reviews of three productions.
Voodoo Theatre Company: The Antipodes
At once, the idea of setting a play around a nondescript conference table that could be in an equally nondescript workplace is ripe with surreal theatrical possibilities. However, the creative brief for giving some concrete and calibrating spiritual sense of the surrealistic storytelling task at hand in the script for Annie Baker’s The Antipodes ends up falling surprisingly flat in emotional desire.
Nevertheless, the Voodoo Theatre Company steps up nicely to the challenges embedded within these imperfections with a solid Utah premiere of this 2018 play by Baker, aided heavily by an excellent acting ensemble.
In recent years, Baker plays, which often stand out for their hyper-realistic bite, have been given very good productions in the independent Utah theatrical scene. These include a 2018 production of Baker’s The Aliens by Riot Act and her play Body Awareness by PYGmalion Theatre Company in 2022. No question, the Voodoo Theatre Company production of The Antipodes rises to these worthy benchmarks.
The play’s script is at its strongest in the first act and the actors snap quickly into rhythm, especially in its comedic elements. There is a corporatist mindset at play here, as the characters struggle to come up with a story that will stick for whatever purpose that might be. There is a tower of cases of Le Croix seltzer water,
Initially, this writer thought this is Baker’s sharp critique about how the art and process of storytelling have been hijacked for uses other than its universal human purpose of a culture, group, civilization, society searching for meaning, clarity, unity and manifestation of consciousness. We have a not-so-small cottage industry of workshops, how-to books, leadership training sessions. seminars, leadership conferences, consultancies, technological apps, institutes about storytelling. In culture and media, the ubiquitous presence of storytelling is treated with a not-just-an-awkward approach but also a gravely erroneous grasp of the edifying roots of storytelling in a specific place and context. After intermission, strangely enough, the play wades deeper into surrealism, and the rhythm suffers. Ironically, The Antipodes does not give the actors the opportunity to break the internal conceit that was established nicely in the first act.
Directed by Jack Cobabe with Jax Jackman as assistant director, the production is to be admired for Voodoo Theatre Company staying true to the integrity of the playwright’s work. And, the actors definitely relished the surrealistic tasks handed to them. Leading this ‘team’ is the character of Sandy, delightfully rendered by Matthew Ivan Bennett. There is a bit of delicious irony in this casting, as Bennett is a successful playwright and screenwriter and his plays emanate with spiritually intelligent storytelling. Bennett exudes the executive presence called in the character while also coming off as a likeable guy who is not ashamed to breach politically correct rules that a Human Resources office might have in place. Zoe Fossen is wonderful as Sandy’s assistant, always helpful and generally upbeat. She is seen most frequently taking lunch orders from the workers. Pedro Flores is outstanding as Dave, perhaps Sandy’s best buddy and loyal sycophant and his monologue describing suicide is among the longest in the play
With her usual strong comedic timing, Olivia Custodio is ideally cast as Eleanor, easily the smartest person in the room and that includes Sandy. She has a passion for almond butter. There are two Danny characters in the cast. Rendered with equally good effect by Kelly Branan, Danny M1 is one of the veterans in the room and has the most salacious monologue of anyone in the play, Sophia Van Nederveen is excellent as Danny M2, who is clearly not with the program and is destined for a hasty exit. Curiously, Danny M2’s monologue recalling a farm job tending to a chicken coop when they were younger is perhaps the best of the lot in the play.
Ellie Otis is astutely believable as Adam, one of the recent hires who is somewhat confused but is earnestly trying their best. Playing another recent hire, Jared Kamauu is just as credible playing Josh, who has yet to receive a paycheck and relies on others to let him in at work because his company ID has not been activated. Finally, Jaden Richards takes full heart in his role as Brian, a seemingly dutiful stenographer except that he avoids taking notes especially when Adam or Eleanor are talking.
The opening premise in The Antipodes is not as far-fetched in its surrealistic vibes, as one might imagine. IDEO, an innovative design company in Palo Alto, California has, for years, coached its employees on the art of storytelling as a design discipline. They realized that it would be better if people told stories from their own life experiences than in struggling to articulate in a formal corporatist way. In a company blog, the impact was seen as positive: “It was a rewarding process because we had these events where people surprised themselves with how good a story they could tell, and we had this unforeseen effect that IDEO people telling their life stories brought everyone together in a new way. It was like, I’ve been working with you this whole time and I never knew that about you. It worked as a cultural bonding and was really gratifying.”
If Baker’s script does not actually complete the brief, one can take heart that this particular Voodoo Theatre Company cast bonded beautifully on stage with gratifying performances, to drive home the point of what can make storytelling better. The show continues with performances March 14-16 in the Studio 5400 Theatre at the Mid-Valley Performing Arts Center in Taylorsville. For more information, see the Voodoo Theatre Company website.
Classical Greek Theatre Festival: The Oresteia
The history of theatrical excellence in Salt Lake City would not be complete without citing the Classical Greek Theatre Festival, which started 54 years ago at the University of Utah and was later moved to Westminster University. It is the oldest continuous festival of its kind in the U.S.
The 2025 edition was among its most ambitious in history, as the production comprised the three surviving parts of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, whittled nicely down into an excellent two-hour performance. Directed by Emilio Casillas, who also adapted the trilogy for the production, The Oresteia rendering paid eminent homage to the cathartic dramatic irony that characterizes this Aeschylus masterpiece. Casillas is only the second artistic director in the festival’s history, succeeding the beloved James Svendsen, one of the cofounders, who died last year.
The three surviving parts of The Oresteia — Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides. — could not be more timely, considering current news headlines about the vicious politics of revenge in Washington, D.C., and a compromised American system of justice that shortchanges the opportunity of genuine relief for those whose true grievances are burdened by and exploited for tangible pain and loss.
The quality of acting was reverent to the material source, which took the audience on a streamlined pace from Agamemnon’s murder to the revenge exacted by Orestes, his subsequent escape to Athens, and ultimately to his exoneration before the court of Apollo and Athena. Aeschylus was responding to his own experience which coincided with the Second Persian Wars and the cycle of defeats and triumphs, including the burning of Athens by the Persians after the defeat of allies at Thermopylae and then finally the Greek victories at Salamis and Plataea that finally drove the Persian armies from Greek soil. In The Oresteia, the jubilance of reunion after war is short-lived and vengeance leaves blood on everyone’s hands.
Even as it is compacted down from the source material, Casillas’ adaptation is particularly effective in showing us the complex depth of characters, most notably in Orestes and the equally complicated circumstances of The Furies. This is the strongest explication of the central themes that are handled well in this adaptation. “They are the manifestation of tradition, a tradition rooted in that retributive understanding of ‘justice,’ a perversion of justice, the call for vengeance,” Paul Krause, editor-in-chief at VoegelinView, writes. “Moreover, the furies can also be seen as a manifestation of the human condition, the twists and turns, turbulence and turmoil, of the human life in its complex miseries. The call for revenge is always hanging over us. Literally. Some might say that the desire for vengeance that the furies shriek for is all too hauntingly natural.”
This points to the enduring viability of a Westminster University annual festival that ensures artistic commitments to keeping audiences literate and connected to one of the world’s most important and edifying performing arts traditions.
MadKing Productions: Proof
Known for its Drunken Shakespeare adaptations, MadKing Productions recently ventured into contemporary drama and its recent production of David Auburn’s 2001 play Proof shows that this local independent theater can flex nicely with different source material for the stage.
Directed by Kristina Stone, who was assisted by Sara Goldberg-McRae, the chamber theater production evidenced many solid acting moments. Proof, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Best Play, has held up as a fresh timely vehicle, as Auburn deftly weaved through themes touching on STEM, the patriarchal mindset that persists in research, parent-child relationships, grief, mental illness and the stresses of being a genius.
There are two rotating casts during the production. Regarding the specific performance for this review, what really stood out was the casting of a real-life father and daughter for the two main roles: Annabelle Durham as Catherine and Mike Durham as Robert. Both actors pushed through effectively in extracting the relationship dynamics in their respective characters. The younger Durham was striking for how she rounded out the complexities of emotions that were bitter on the surface but shielded the counterpoint of emotions converging from the aforementioned thematic threads. Catherine had sacrificed a good portion of her life in her twenties to care for her father, a famous mathematician beset by mental health issues, who died recently. The elder Durham who played Robert, the father, was a veteran on the stage but this role was his first in 35 years, and it was clear their simultaneous presence easily facilitated a genuine set of emotional dynamics asked for in their characters.
Catherine is exasperated by the arrival of Claire (Bridgette Long), her estranged sister who has no idea about the value of her father’s legacy. Then, there is Hal (Percy Cordero), a former student whose research was once supervised by her father. He is intrigued to explore the large volume of notebooks left by the father to see if there is anything of scientific value. The relationship between Catherine and Hal is prickly at first but eventually the two warm to each other in a budding romance. But, then the discovery of a specific notebook tosses their relationship into a storm, which worsens Catherine’s fears about what she has really inherited from her father. The exchanges between younger Durham and Cordero in the second act are among the most absorbing. It puts the familiar aphorism about not judging solely upon appearances in a riveting way that showcases the strengths of Auburn’s script.
This was a satisfying meat-and-potatoes production, staged in the company’s new home, MadKing’s Fellowship Theater, at The Gateway in downtown Salt Lake City. Performance continue March 14-16, and for more information and tickets, see the MadKing Productions’ website.