Classic Albee takes stage for first time at Seattle Rep

(l to r) Amy Hill, Aaron Blakely, Pamela Reed and R. Hamilton Wright in Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Photo: Alabastro Photography

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Seattle Repertory Theatre

Through May 18

The explosive, immersive, three hour drama, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, by Edward Albee is on stage now at Seattle Rep. If you thought August: Osage County was caustic, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, sister. This play will blister your paint and warp your wood. The games played by George and Martha make Russian roulette look silly.

This is an American classic that practically became classic the minute Albee stopped writing it in 1962. It won the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play. You may know it best from the 1966 movie starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal and Sandy Dennis. Here, the four dynamic talents are R. Hamilton Wright, Pamela Reed, Aaron Blakely and Amy Hill.

This production is lovingly mounted by director Braden Abraham, with delightful set by Matthew Smucker with massive help from the Seattle Rep scene techs. During the two intermissions, you might take time to look at the academic flotsam and jetsam collected on multiple floor to ceiling bookshelves, as if jammed in there over years. Lighting by L.B. Morse and sound by Matt Starritt perfectly accompany the evening.

See "Shackleton" first, before NYC gets ahold of it

Valerie Vigoda and Wade McCollum (photo by Jeff Carpenter)

Ernest Shackleton Loves Me

Balagan Theatre

(at Seattle Repertory Theatre)

Through May 3

A hallucinating new mother/musician conjures explorer Ernest Shackleton via Skype to help her weather the winter storms of her failed relationship and her disappearing job in Balagan’s newest show. Ernest Shackleton Loves Me (in a co-production with both Seattle Repertory Theatre and ACT Theatre) is a tour de force performance from both of its two stars!

ESLM is well worth a visit. It’s a dense sound-and-light, rocking, lyrical extravaganza, with a bit of hootenanny thrown in.

Valerie Vigoda is both the lyric writer (book by Joe DiPietro and music by Brendan Milburn) and the hallucinating musician who creates the music right in front of us through the use of automated keyboards, sound looping, playback, an electric violin, and even an old reel-to-reel tape recorder! Vigoda is a wonder as we watch her swiftly and deliberately latch on her violin and flip switches and sing! She has a gorgeous voice, too.

"Venus in Fur" Tries for Real Human Sexuality but ends up on Mount Olympus instead

Gillian Williams and Michael Tisdale in Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Venus in Fur (Chris Bennion)

Venus in Fur

Seattle Repertory Theatre

Through March 9

So, an actress walks into an audition late. Very late. And the director/adapter is tired and frustrated, having auditioned dozens, he lets us know, DOZENS of young women who can’t even begin to speak the language of his play. His masterpiece is an adaptation of an 1870 novel, Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. But the actress dispenses with the novel as “S&M porn,” offhandedly, challenging and taunting the director to allow her to audition, since she’s already there.

Thus begins the latest production at Seattle Repertory Theatre, Venus in Fur, by David Ives. In a co-production with Arizona Theatre Company, two actors from there, Michael Tisdale and Gillian Williams, and director Shana Cooper mount this electrifying, titillating, challenging, funny, whiplashing, role-reversing, sexuality-exploring one-act.

The somewhat lengthy (100 plus) minute one-act is a fast-paced exploration of both the subject of the novel, masochistic relationships (named after author Sacher-Masoch), and who’s on top. Is it the slave or the master? Is a woman by definition the weaker sex, or does the man give over to serve the woman?

What makes this play particularly fun is the lightning fast switches from modern vernacular and slang back to 18^th Century refined speech. Williams is fantastically good at the minute moments of back-and-forth, with a faint New Yorkese, and brash American style, giving way in parts of seconds back to a pseudo-British refinement.

Tisdale starts out promisingly, but does not plant himself firmly enough in the asshole category to hang on to his ascendance in the face of Williams’ immediate disarmament. He does a good job, but when he has to change to a certain submission, the change is undercut by too much passivity at the beginning.

David Ives’ play is very well written and very fun, particularly at the beginning, though he doesn’t end up challenging the male/female relationship nearly as much as he promises. And the ending seems like he decided he had written a long-enough play and had to finish it somehow.

The very first sentences Ives has the man say are completely unbelievable to me: that he couldn’t find any good female actors. Ives may not know that there are dozens of fantastic female actors for every male, because so many women develop theatrical skills for so few female parts! So, it undercuts his understanding of women, and as the play goes along, so do his postulates for feminine power.

Director Shana Cooper plainly revels in the strength of the female character, but unfortunately doesn’t help her create levels of intimacy or a real sexual chemistry with her male counterpoint, and therefore the production misses any highs or lows. The first half of the play feels fun and involving, but it flags and then stays about the same for the last half.

Ives’ decision to transform the female into an archetype (at the end) seems in a perverse way to suggest he is not at all comfortable with real human female sexuality.  In a battle of sexual power, only a Goddess can win over a lowly man, not a real woman. And in that dilemma, Ives fails to illuminate anything useful or new about our sexual lives.

The play is smart enough, then, to end up disappointing. Both a testament to and a failure of a set up that has promise, but does not cut through the musty ideas of female sexuality that continue to hamper us in the rest of life.

Review/Discussion: "A Great Wilderness" is a complicated, valiant effort

Braden Abraham and Samuel Hunter (Andry Laurence)

Playwright Samuel Hunter chooses uncomfortable characters or they choose him, as evidenced in his play, The Whale, about a morbidly obese man, and in the world premiere play, A Great Wilderness, now being presented at Seattle Repertory Theatre. Here, the uncomfortable character is an old man ending a career working as a gay-conversion therapist.

When we get invited to a play, we reviewer-types get press releases with blurbs written to entice audiences to come to the show, while encapsulating what it’s about. The Rep said this about this play:

Walt has devoted his life to counseling teenage boys out of their homosexuality at his remote Idaho wilderness camp. Pressured to accept one last client, his carefully constructed life begins to unravel with the arrival of Daniel. When Daniel disappears, Walt is forced to ask for help—both in finding the missing boy and reconciling his past with the present.

Sometimes, even when only reading the press releases once, and cursorily at that, their context can be very influential and not always in a very positive way. The phrase that resonated with me prior to seeing the play was “reconciling his past with the present.” In fact, after seeing the play, what was on the stage really had nothing to do with reconciling his past with the present.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hunter is demonstrably a brilliant, up-and-coming playwright and his challenging topics are gripping. In this play, he clearly desires to get inside of and “play around in” (no fun intended here) the mindsets of people he came into contact with as a boy in small-town Pacific Northwest who believe deeply in Scripture and have been taught that Scripture declares homosexuality a sin, and therefore, want to help anyone they know stop sinning, if at all possible. They have been told that homosexuality is a choice, that it is a “lifestyle,” that it is mutable. Therefore, they can influence someone and train him (usually him) out of it.

An industry developed, as we know, that worked to “cure” young boys of their sins of homosexual thoughts or actions, and psychology participated in the wrong-headed notion of mutability for many, many years. Often, this therapy was also given in a wilderness camp environment, a get-away from normal life in order to allow new ways of living to be cemented before returning.

Now, we are evolving, and we begin to understand that this is not a “choice” and not mutable. It is as biologically determinate as blue eyes or brown hair or left-handedness. And we know traits are dominant and recessive. Yet no one who is righthanded can change to being lefthanded without almost superhuman efforts after losing an arm, for instance.

We know that boys who went through this kind of conversion therapy were essentially told that they could not stay who they were, were sinners, and could be saved. We know that boys who went through this therapy sometimes committed suicide, probably because they couldn’t change and didn’t feel like there was any other choice left.

Hunter wanted to illustrate the issue with a man who he reveals in the play to have had homosexual feelings when younger, and by having dialogue that states that those who often feel drawn to be therapists in the field are probably those who struggled with the same feelings as the boys they take on as clients.

What we see on stage, however, does not nearly get to Walt, the older man, working to reconcile his past with his present. That would really be a longer play or a different play.

What is on the stage is more about the legacy of building something and letting it go when the builder is gone. Much of the dialogue focuses on Walt’s transitioning to an elder facility and his friends’ desire to sell the camp he built rather than continuing the services of conversion therapy he offered there.

If the couple who wants to sell had wanted to go in a completely new direction, that would have been a clearer topic. But as Hunter writes this version (who knows if he will consider a rewrite?), it turns out that the couple consists of his ex-wife and her second husband, a … wait for it … conversion therapist, though a townie one. At one point, she accuses Walt of never having loved her, the implication being that since he was homosexual, he was unable to give her the love she needed. Then why would she marry another conversion therapist, if conversion therapists are mostly all men who struggled or struggle with homosexual issues themselves? (Not to mention that it’s a terrible accusation to say homosexuals can’t love people they’ve committed to, unless it’s supposed to be a statement from a still bitter ex-spouse.)

Braden Abraham directs a wonderful cast of acting talents in this interesting subject, who flesh out these characters as fully as they can. Michael Winter is compassionate as Walt, who is ending his career and uncertain of his impact on his “boys.” Jack Taylor displays great instincts as Daniel, the boy at the center who is lost and afraid and gentle and suspicious. Christine Estabrook plays a bossy, but understandable ex-spouse, with R. Hamilton Wright as her caught-in-the-middle spouse with few options to know what to do. Gretchen Krich has a fairly easy role as a forest ranger who doesn’t need to involve herself in the controversy. Mari Nelson does a solid turn in an underdeveloped role as Daniel’s mother.

As a non-Christian who is hyper sensitive to Christian thought, one of the surprises for me was how little Scripture there actually was in the play. It feels like Hunter missed the boat in this regard: the whole reason these Christians feel they must root out the sin is because of how central Scripture is to their whole lives. Everything revolves around the Bible and everything comes back to the Bible. I feel like I have some insight here from personal experiences.

Even the mother, married to a man who shunned his son, yet was one of the pastors of a mega-church, apparently, rarely mentions anything Biblical. No one prays for the missing boy. No one prays, at least out loud, for him or herself and for guidance. There is a crisis and yet no prayers are said? No one holds hands? No one invokes God or Jesus, almost at all?

There is, perhaps, a very important exploration here. Boys continue, and girls continue, to commit suicide. The It Gets Better project and online musicals like TheHinterlands try to penetrate the vast middle of this country to get word to those small-town boys and girls who feel different and who are afraid of themselves and what they are told is their sin that they control.

While the production of A Great Wilderness begins to explore the issue, the best parts of that exploration are the scenes between Walt and Daniel. The rest of the characters get in the way, right now, and distract from what probably should be the heart of the experience, and the challenge to Walt should probably be right in front of him: Daniel. Staying put. Believing in himself. Showing Walt that Walt can love himself, too.

I welcome your comments.

(Information at www.seattlerep.org or call 206-443-2222.)