Review: ‘Winter’ poses timely questions about life and death in knockout Salt Lake premiere

The essence of theater is collaboration. We’ve all heard that before, but occasionally a production exemplifies it so perfectly that you want to bottle it for drama students. Peggy Battin wrote a story; Anne Cullimore Decker read it, was impressed and gave it to local playwright Julie Jensen; Jensen wrote a play and enlisted “Mockingbird” collaborator Tracy Callahan to direct it. The result, “Winter,” is making its world premiere at Salt Lake Acting Company in a production that promises to be one of the best of the season.

The subject couldn’t be timelier. Annis, Decker’s character, is having a crisis; she might ironically call it “a matter of life and death” because she loves to play with language. Strings of connected words fall from her tongue. When husband Robeck (Bob Nelson) says she is “obsessing,” she counters with “compressing, distressing, regressing,” and the name Calhoun elicits “balloon, baboon, buffoon, lampoon, raccoon.” But lately “I’m losing it. And it frightens me,” she tells Robeck. “Big chunks of my mind fall away.”

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The essence of theater is collaboration. We’ve all heard that before, but occasionally a production exemplifies it so perfectly that you want to bottle it for drama students. Peggy Battin wrote a story; Anne Cullimore Decker read it, was impressed and gave it to local playwright Julie Jensen; Jensen wrote a play and enlisted “Mockingbird” collaborator Tracy Callahan to direct it. The result, “Winter,” is making its world premiere at Salt Lake Acting Company in a production that promises to be one of the best of the season.

The subject couldn’t be timelier. Annis, Decker’s character, is having a crisis; she might ironically call it “a matter of life and death” because she loves to play with language. Strings of connected words fall from her tongue. When husband Robeck (Bob Nelson) says she is “obsessing,” she counters with “compressing, distressing, regressing,” and the name Calhoun elicits “balloon, baboon, buffoon, lampoon, raccoon.” But lately “I’m losing it. And it frightens me,” she tells Robeck. “Big chunks of my mind fall away.”

Read the full article from The Salt Lake Tribune here.