Reading Is Fundamental in The Book Club Play

 

Maya Burton, Lauren Paris, Arlando Smith in The Book Club Play (courtesy Village Theatre)

 
The Book Club Play
Village Theatre
Issaquah: Through April 3, 2022
Everett: April 8 – May 1, 2022
 
Book clubs probably comes in all shapes, sizes, and tastes. But the stereotype is that snooty people get together to read heavy classics of hundreds of pages. Karen Zacarias, a nationally known and produced playwright, chooses to skewer just such an elitist book club to explore the idea of classic versus popular culture.
 
The Book Club Play, now at Village Theatre, pinpricks a lot of very current cultural tropes and pitfalls, as many of her plays do. She likes to play with racial and class stereotyping with an eye to bring it up in a way that allows us to laugh a little while we explore our internal responses. Here, she brings us Ana’s book club (Marquicia Dominguez) and shows us what happens when it’s suddenly forced to change.

Enchanting New "Red Riding Hood" Is a Hit With the Kids!

 

Claudine Mboligikpelani Nako and Conner Nedersen in Red Riding Hood (Angela Sterling)

Red Riding Hood
World Premiere
Seattle Children’s Theatre
Through March 6, 2022
 
Playwright Allison Gregory and director Steven Dietz make a great team. Long-time marital partners, they also have a lot of experience in the realm of children’s theater. And here is the world premiere of Gregory’s new play, Red Riding Hood, they have teamed to produce a winning production.
 
They’ve mind-melded with two of Seattle’s best performers, Claudine Mboligikpelani Nako and Conner Neddersen for a two-person, enchanting, silly re-enactment of the famous fairytale. Neddersen plays a theater-geek named Wolfgang who sees an empty theater and decides he’s going to treat the audience to a one-person show about this tale. Suddenly, he’s interrupted by a deliveryperson who is intrigued by his idea and wants to join the fun.

Look what March is blowing onto Seattle stages!

 

The Cake, As If Theatre, 3/3-3/20

Here in this list, you will find what, in March 2019, was considered a “normal” month of show openings! Are we back to “normal”? While no one can quite say, there is a blessed lot of theater to see in person in March 2022! (ALSO!!! Covid-19 protocols are changing in March of 2022 in Washington State. Masking and providing proof of vaccination requirements are being dropped by the state during March. But, masking is still mandated in some situations like in healthcare facilities and public transit as well as at the discretion of business and organization owners. Theater companies, venues and producers can still require/request you wear a mask/provide vaccination proof. If in doubt, we suggest checking with individual theaters/producers about their requirements and/or bring your mask/proof of vaccination just in case it’s required!)

 
The Book Club Play, Village Theatre, 3/2/22-5/1/22
Issaquah 3/2/22-4/3/22 | Everett 4/8/22-5/1/22
The Book Club Play follows a group of people whose book club is the subject of a famous documentary filmmaker. The members of the club differ in perspective, race, sexual orientation, and viewpoint on the world so completely, that their colliding assumptions also create a ripe environment for the comedy. With novels that audience members of all ages will recognize, this is a comedy that everyone can love, and a booklover will adore.
www.villagetheatre.org
 
A Thousand Ways (Part Three), On the Boards, 3/3-12/22
Obie Award-winning 600 Highwaymen present A Thousand Ways (Part Three): An Assembly, a timely and intimate return to togetherness. 16 strangers construct a unique and intimate theatrical event, using a stack of instructive notecards. The audience will collectively recount a story of audacity in the face of uncertainty. This elucidating experience invites participants to consider one another—individually and collectively—and the significance of coming together after so much time apart. A Thousand Ways (Part Three): An Assembly is the final experience of the triptych of encounters between strangers, following Part One: A Phone Call and Part Two: An Encounter. Each installment brings people together in the creation of a moving live experience. The work explores the line between strangeness and kinship, distance and proximity, and how the most intimate assembly can become profoundly radical. 
www.ontheboards.org

"Third" demonstrates Wasserstein's power to ignite, illuminate, challenge

Kate Witt and Marti Mukhalian in Third (photo Michael Brunk)

Third

ArtsWest

Through March 22

Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein died far too early (of cancer when she was 55 years old). Third was her last play, which played Off-Broadway in 2005, just before her death. It is now performing at ArtsWest with a tight cast of five, directed by actor/director Peggy Gannon.

Wasserstein focused resolutely, sometimes, on women’s issues and women’s voices, as she dissected and illuminated specific time periods and encompassed women’s rise to bang against the glass ceilings and find their voices. However, she did not neglect the classics, and in Third, her theme is King Lear.

Laurie Jameson (a vigorous, take-charge, and accomplished Marty Mukhalian) is at the peak of her career, having helped generate change and awareness of women’s issues and political power at a select, small Eastern university. She lectures on literature from a feminist perspective. As the play opens, Professor Jameson lectures the audience on King Lear.

A young man, Woodson Bull III (a convincing, earnest Mark Tyler Miller), presents a paper with his analysis of Lear. However, he is at the school as a wrestler, with dreams of becoming a sports agent. Given his name, legacy number (“the Third”), “jock” status, and white male privilege, Jameson profiles him and decides he doesn’t have the intellect or capacity to have written the analysis himself and accuses him of plagiarism.

The play can be looked at as a metaphor for Shakespeare’s King Lear, itself. Professor Jameson loses everything she worked for after mistaking Third’s honest opinion as stolen analysis, just as King Lear loses everything after rejecting his honest daughter’s expression of love.

 It can also be viewed as what happens when an outsider struggles so long and hard to become an insider that she forgets to be open to another’s viewpoint. So she becomes just exactly like those she supplanted in the first place, who judged her, as a woman, insufficiently intelligent or accomplished to be the professor she aspired to be at the beginning of her career.

Jameson’s portrayal is softened, enhanced, and explained by interactions with three key people: her daughter Emily (Kacey Shiflet), her dementia-increasing father Jack (Bill Higham), and her colleague Nancy (Kate Witt), who is battling cancer. Each of these strong performances and wonderful scene dialogues enlarge who Jameson can be, if she’d let herself, with Third. As we witness her compassion, her trials as a daughter, her difficulties as a mother of a grown child and a friend to a suffering colleague, we can see what she could offer Third as a mentor and teacher, and the tragic blinds she willfully keeps on her eyes.

This may sound like a tragedy, ala King Lear, but it’s far from that! It’s an absorbing, thoughtful play with loads of ideas and ways of examining what Wasserstein is saying. There are funny moments, wry moments, and especially heart-breaking moments where Mukhalian and Higham can move you to tears.

Gannon’s vision of Third is spare. Burton Yuen’s set design has a cloud-strewn backdrop and stately windows hung from the ceiling, implying the grandeur of the college. Costuming by Anastasia Armes is simple, yet effective. Lighting by Tristan Roberson is muted and subtle. Sound design and song choices root the play in 2003 (by Johanna Melamed). The simplicity sets of the complex clash of ideas nicely.

It’s a terrific opportunity to have a Wasserstein play on Seattle stage again. Third proves her power to ignite controversy, discussion, changing perspectives, and even an opportunity to see where feminism might have gone off the rails for some people.

For more information, go to www.artswest.org or call 206-938-0339.