 |
| Kevin McKeon, Jennifer Lee Taylor, Chris Ensweiler (photo Chris Bennion) |
Truth Like the Sun
Through May 18
Jim Lynch’s meticulously detailed book, Truth Like the Sun, is no straightforward history lesson. It weaves
back and forth in time with major mysteries to explore and perhaps unfold. Creating
a fictitious “Mr. Seattle” who becomes the face of the 1962 World’s Fair, he
explores and exposes the seamy underbelly of graft and corruption that others
have mined similarly. He creates a tenacious and overly cynical journalist out
to get the “real” story any way she can, in 2001, and has her dig hard into Mr.
Seattle’s possible corruption.
Book-It Repertory Theatre has chosen, for the third time!,
to adapt a Jim Lynch novel, and Truth
Like the Sun is riveting, ambitious, ambiguous, and challenging, all at once.
This is not the kind of play to allow you to sit and let it wash over you.
Sometimes there are evenings like that, like last month’s excellent Seattle
Shakespeare Company production of The
Importance of Being Earnest. Oscar Wilde’s skewering trifle is fun but not
terribly taxing to watch. This production calls upon you to sit up, fasten your
seat belt, and PAY ATTENTION!
Kevin McKeon’s adaptation and Jane Jones’ direction creates
a cacophony of voices from time to time, from the beginning bustle of World’s
Fair Seattle hubbub forward. It’s a bit cinematic in style, and it does make it
a bit hard for those who can’t decipher the speaker or the short sentences, at
times. There is also a well-done theatrical technique to throw us back and
forth in time (without using sign titling) that takes two or three iterations
to get used to so we know the “when” we’re looking at.