Pub crawls lead you on a tasting of beers or cocktails at different watering holes on a single night. Swap out booze for theater and you get the Play Crawl. Wednesday night, And Toto Too Theatre Company offers a sampling of two- to three-minute plays in shops and galleries along Denver's Tennyson Street. Susan Lyles, who founded and directs the theater troupe, says this event is a fun way to engage people with theater.
"There's generally not seats," Lyles says. "Everybody stands so you're kind of stepping into the world. And then the businesses are also open for business. So you get people coming into the store and suddenly they're in the middle of a play."
The crawl includes dramas and comedies, such as "The Wine Snob" which will be staged at Small Batch Liqueurs. "The Wine Snob" is by Colorado playwright Catherine Wiley and features actors Mark Collins and Maggy Stacy. Lyles shared an excerpt from the short play with Colorado Matters.
All of the works featured in the Play Crawl are by female playwrights. Lyles says that's intentional. A 2015 study from The Dramatist Guild and The Lily Awards found that of the plays professionally produced in the U.S., 22 percent were written by women. Lyles sees that as a problem, and has committed to only producing work by women.
"As a woman, I want to hear my stories on stage written in a woman's voice," she says.
The 6th annual Play Crawl is Wednesday night along Tennyson Street in northwest Denver.
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