Just Desserts

Cheshire Dave

Rotten to the Core: Adrienne Papp as the apple-cheeked Miss Late Teen Colorado.

Details

Through Oct. 28 at Impact Theatre, La Val's Subterranean, 1834 Euclid (at Hearst), Berkeley. Tickets are $10-15; call (510) 464-4468 or visit www.impacttheatre.org.

Impact Theatre

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More About

• Don McLean
• Adrienne Papp
• Tracey Ackhart
• Wes Anderson
• Maury Povich

Colorado lacks much of the sly irony, polish, and depth of Hunter Gatherers, the last of the writer's plays seen by Bay Area audiences. You have only to compare the endings of the two works to see the difference. While watching the protagonist exit the stage into a tragicomic storybook version of Eden in the closing moments of Hunter Gatherers left much to the imagination, Colorado takes "burying the hatchet" too literally. I don't want to give away the plot, but the sudden, squeaky optimism of the tidy conclusion rings both hasty and false. That Colorado was written several years before Hunter Gatherers comes as no surprise.

Colorado may not be the playwright's best work to date, but I'm not for a minute suggesting that Nachtrieb should eat humble pie. The image of all those untouched desserts cluttering up the Ackharts' house testifies to the writer's fluid imagination, even if the levee on this occasion was rather dry.