Theater review: ‘Resolutions’ portrays a night of hell in Vail

So you’ve gotten sole possession of your ex-husband’s plush cabin in Vail and are hosting friends for your annual New Year’s Eve get-together. The snow is falling outside. The bar is stocked. Your BFFs are arriving. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything, as it turns out — and in so many incredibly odd and darkly hilarious ways.

It’s a little difficult to write about “Resolutions” without spoilers, so if I’m a little vague on some of the plot, then it’s to save the shocking surprise that occurs about a third of the way into this intermission-less, 80-minute play.

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The Edge Theater Company is often up for staging some material more mainstream theaters wouldn’t touch, and “Resolutions” qualifies in that regard. Written by Josh Hartwell and directed by Edge regular Missy Moore, it’s a world premiere that will have some theatergoers rolling in the aisles while others make for the door.

Because yes, things get a little bloody. OK, a lot bloody. Fight choreographer Seth Maisel had his hands full as the plot has the cast members turning to the prop weapons hanging on the walls of the cabin owned by Dellen (Emily Paton Davies). As her friends arrive, we learn everyone was, at one time, active in theater. Those days are mostly past, and the first part of the show finds them reminiscing about the good old days as they dolefully assess their current, mid-life situation.

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Gregory (Scott McLean) is recently divorced from his husband and his realty business is on the rocks. Peter and his wife Mindy (Andrew Uhlenhopp and Karen Slack) are having trouble keeping their Denver weed shop afloat while Mindy is hiding a secret. Meanwhile, Dellen is wrestling with how to maintain an expensive second home in a town where she knows no one and whose inhabitants she decries as a bunch of fake, entitled ninnies with more money than brains. She’s also got some secrets of her own, as well as a young, snowboard instructor boyfriend who’s mysteriously late to the party.

All of that setup had the audience expecting the show would continue in this vein, perhaps with some emotional outbursts and reveals as the characters’ liberal swilling of martinis loosened their tongues and tempers.

And then …

And then something appears out of the basement that propels the cast into a painful and immediate reckoning with all of those secrets. Old friends who thought they could trust one another are suddenly at each other’s throats, as “the thing from the basement” orchestrates a macabre and unsettling forced confession out of each of them.

And much more than that I cannot say, other than to offer a hearty recommendation to see “Resolutions” if you’re looking for a bit of theater in an intimate space that plumbs the depths of human frailty in dark, unexpected and often hilarious ways.

Well known as an actress, Moore shows her directing chops in “Resolutions,” putting together a great deal of complex blocking with an extremely physical piece of theater taking place in a very small space. She’s taken Colorado playwright Josh Hartwell’s script and pushed it to its logical extreme with an A-list of Denver-area actors and helped create a memorable — if disturbing — rumination on the worst-case scenario for the conclusion of a messy divorce.