Sparkly – if long – comedy, “Balconies” bubbles at Annex

Katherine Karaus, Drew Highlands, Evelyn DeHais in Balconies (photo Dangerpants Photography)

Balconies

Written by Scotto Moore

Annex Theatre

Through August 30, 2014

Opposites attract premises, particularly the conservative/liberal variety could be kind of eye-rolling, but at the hands of playwright Scotto Moore, it turns out to be a whole lot more fun than hackneyed. His newest work, Balconies, at Annex Theatre, has many of his signature elements: fast-paced dialogue, high tech speak, agile plot devices.

Instead of a just-ahead-of-its-time future fantasy (Moore’s previous works), this play stays rooted in 2014, but makes fun of a Scientology-type cult and lets the geeks win. Characters who, at first glance, seem stereotypically boring turn out to be a whole lot quirkier than their book-cover.

Cameron (Drew Highlands) is having a best-launch-ever party in his condo for Sparkle Dungeon 5. (I would love for that game to become a reality!) He’s invited dozens of geek friends in costume. But just next condo over, Annalise (Katherine Karaus) is hosting a fund-raiser for her politician mother (Laura Hanson), politicians including the Chief of Police, and a key funder, Lonso (Jason Sharp), a creepy world-thought-dominator.

Raucous “The Hunchback of Seville” fits the WET audience taste to a “V”

Maria Knox and Samie Detzer (photo by Cassandra Bell)

The Hunchback of Seville

Washington Ensemble Theatre

By Charise Castro Smith

Directed by Jen Wineman

Starring Samie Detzer, Libby Barnard, Rose Cano, Maria Knox

Through June 30, 2014

Washington Ensemble Theatre doesn’t do plays most other companies would do very often. Their tastes run to bizarre, outlandish, boundary-stretching, unconventional, fantastical, and other such adjectives that denote unusual theater choices. Their world-premiere presentation of The Hunchback of Seville by Charise Castro Smith fits them very well (the “V” in the header).

Castro Smith and director Jen Wineman brought their baby to WET via the outreach that former Ensemble member and Yale graduate Michael Place enabled. They brought their project as a team and agreed that they would both come and be resident during a development process that resulted in Castro Smith being present for a month of rehearsals. Devin Bannon, an Ensemble member, says that is “unprecedented” in their history of developing scripts.

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.

Tails of Wasps stings So Good!

(Paul Morgan Stetler and Sylvie Davidson. Photo by Chris Bennion)

Tails of Wasps

New Century Theatre Company

(at ACT Theatre/Central Heating Lab)

Through April 27

A taut, world premiere morsel of explosion just opened via New Century Theatre Company in ACT’s Buster’s Event Room. Tails of Wasps is a new play by their “resident playwright,” Stephanie Timm. It is the next “must see” moment in a month of key moments, here in Seattle! It is exquisite and exquisitely painful. It truly is as good as good theater can get.

Timm has been known for some pretty far out playing, including On the Nature of Dust, where a teenage girl devolves from human into tinier and tinier animal species, and mining fairytales and myths for Sweet Nothing and part of ACT’s production of Ramayana. This is nothing like any of those. It is a direct, real-human to real-human mining of power and relationship and self-justification and self-delusion.

Playwright Goodisman talks "Checkoff in the Sun"

Playwright Leonard D. Goodisman

(via Capitol Hill Seattle)

The subtitle of Leonard D. Goodisman’s new play, Checkoff in the Sun, staged at Eclectic Theater, is “a comedy about dying.” There’s a very obvious pun in the title and the flavor of the famous playwright Chekhov permeating the play. Goodisman says, “The pun just sort of popped out when (my character) Victoria asks, ‘Why did you come here, just to check me off a list?’”

Goodisman’s subject is Victoria, a woman who is in the end stages of dealing with cancer, yet still in control of her decisions and desires. Victoria calls together her family and best friends to a villa in the Southwestern desert. It’s a Palm Springs or Tucson type property that her real estate friend hasn’t sold yet. Though they really shouldn’t be in the property, they accept her wish and travel to this destination to say goodbye and resolve what they can of loose ends, things unsaid, broken moments unmended.

Yet, there is a lot of humor woven into the play. Goodisman, who says he is a fan of Chekhov, reminds that Chekhov thought of himself as a humorist. He says that the leading figure of Russian theater, Stanislavski, chose to direct The Cherry Orchard as a tragedy, and “Chekhov stood for that and it’s been done as a tragedy ever since. I see the comedy in all his plays.”

Royal Blood: The heart of the play is Love

ROYAL BLOOD
ONWARD HO PRODUCTIONS
(AT WEST OF LENIN)
Through April 4

Cast of "Royal Blood": Merat and Love front, Hsieh in tie, Nelson and Moore on upper step (photo by Chris Bennion)

 
Royal Blood is a new play by local Seattle playwright Sonya Schneider and she believes in it so deeply that she and her husband have self-produced it in grand style. Directed by capable director, Laurel Pilar Garcia, with a terrific and accomplished cast, they have also invested in a marvelous set by Jennifer Zeyl, beautifully rendered costumes by Anastasia Armes, exquisite sound and music design by Robertson Witmer and well-crafted lighting by Evan Anderson.

Overall, this is a highly successful production. It focuses on a pretty dysfunctional family and an unfolding of some secrets, but almost all the revelations are earned, and the relationships and choices are clear and ones we might identify with in our own families. The members of this family deeply want to feel 'special.'

As the play begins, a woman we will realize is somewhat mentally challenged digs a hole in the wonderfully detailed backyard set, in real sod, to bury her dog, Lady Di. Deb (Amy Love) looks up from her labors to find her sister, Dorothy (Mari Nelson), has come home from Europe and Deb thinks Dorothy has been brought home due to the dog's death. In fact, Dorothy has come to bury their brother Leo, but their father Cliff (Todd Jefferson Moore) has not yet told Deb of Leo's death.

It's easy to identify with Dorothy's desire to be independent of a challenged little sister, to have tried to leave and make a successful life on her own. It's a little less easy to accept that Dorothy might be on the verge of leaving behind her 16 year-old daughter, Cassiopeia (Nicole Merat), though her ex-husband is apparently a decent father. But then Dorothy learns that her father has cancer and the stakes become much higher.

We also learn that Leo committed suicide and that he had a lover, Adam (David Hsieh), though his homosexuality lies uneasily with Cliff. Cliff is an uncomfortable, though believable, character who is also racist and loves to sarcastically tease his family. Moore handles all of that thoroughly and well, not letting us like him as he struggles to deal with how to manage this new illness.

Nelson, an assured veteran of stages such as the Rep and ACT, holds everything together just like the older sister should, and makes it clear how burdened and uncertain she is, though never displaying her vulnerability to her family. Merat is terrific as the headstrong and difficult and brilliant young girl, ably portraying the know-it-all attitudes and emotional outbursts of that age. Hsieh is restrained and formal in a role that is the least well-rounded of the play.

But the heart of the play is Love in a beautiful portrayal of an older woman who has been sheltered and protected from life while longing to be 'normal.' The title comes from the family's supposed descent from the British Spencer Family, the one that Princess Di came from, and Deb lives out the fantasies of their dead mother, dressing in clothing that would be appropriate on Jackie Kennedy or movie stars. Her quirky obsession with movies provides a unifying through-line and some of the best laughs.

A mentally-challenged character still rarely shows up on stage, and this is a great character. Her fate, with her father sick, is definitely a problem anyone can relate to. The dialogue of the play is smart and virtually all the issues raised in the play are wrapped up by the end. In fact, there are almost too many issues and almost too much neat wrapping up! The second act could be strengthened by judicious pruning of a few problems and maybe even leaving one or two unsolved for now.

It's definitely a solid work and an absorbing evening of storytelling. Sometimes around here, you just have to do it yourself, if it's going to get done. Do yourself and Sonya a favor and go see her show. You'll be glad you did!

For more information, go to Brown Paper Tickets or http://www.onwardhoproductions.com/ or call 800-838-3006.

"Black Like Us" furthers important community explorations about race

Florence (Chelsea Binta) & Maxine (Dior Davenport) in Black Like Us (photo by Shane Regan)

Black Like Us
Annex Theatre
(co-produced by Brownbox Theatre)
through March 1

Black Like Us wades in where a lot of others fear to tread, a full-out discussion of race in our veins. A recent Pacific Science Center exhibit focused on race and scientists discovered about a decade ago how one mutation in one gene (out of 3.1 billion?) may be the genesis for the lighter pink/yellow skin coloration that proliferated across Europe. Yet, skin color became the great divide in society.

The premise of the play starts with varied skin color within the same family. Two sisters are shaded differently: one lighter and one darker. That truth, already a head-shaker one might think, to those who see only "black" and "white," in 1950s Seattle, leads the one with lighter skin to escape the oppressive nature of the racial divide by "passing as white" and even loving and marrying an Italian and not introducing him to her family.

"Passing" was considered a trick and a con. Regardless of how absurd it was and is to categorize people by skin hue, "passing" was ... ummm... illegally claiming to be white, even though that is what any "white" person does due to skin color. So, it's with a mixture of shame and defiance that Florence (Chelsea Binta) leaves her family behind. The consequences, to both sides of the family, are what the rest of the plot focuses on.

Florence's children and grandchildren appear as white as their father/grandfather. Her choice to hide apparently does not get revealed through DNA transfer in skin color. We meet, in the play, her daughter and three granddaughters (Devin Rodgers, Alyson Scadron Branner, Lindsay Evans and McKenna Turner). 

Florence's sister, Maxine (Dior Davenport), becomes a black activist, marries, has at least one child we don't meet, and two granddaughters we do (Marquicia Dominguez and Kia Pierce). Maxine becomes acquainted with Florence's daughter, Donna, when Donna moves into a neighborhood she can afford - aka the diverse neighborhood that Florence grew up in and Maxine remains in. 

Fertile ground is plowed in the script when the three white granddaughters figure out their grandmother was "black" and go looking for their cousins. Branner's role, Sandra, gets to be the outrageous and funny say-it-like-it-is sister who relishes how she now has a lot more to talk about, and maybe her kids might benefit by "minority status" in applications to college. 

There are a lot of laughs in the play, both easily enjoyable ones and uncomfortable titters, as we are forced to examine our own deeply buried (perhaps) thoughts about skin color, how we were raised, who we are now, whether we behave the way we believe, if we have knee-jerk reactions we'd rather not have. Sandra addresses head-on, in her way, whether it's ok to call people "black" or "African-American" and embarrasses her sisters by having "I'm Black and I'm Proud" as her ring-tone. 

So, kudos for considering and then creating this play and getting it on stage to help us all look inward and explore, and perhaps revise.

Now for hoped-for revisions:

The play grew from a ten minute short to a 30-minute short to what is now close to a two and a half hour marathon. It is massively too long and undercuts the challenge it presents to audiences to look inward by awkwardly inserting soap-opera-like elements.

The "how" the granddaughters find out Florence was black includes a sister who won't tell why she already had suspicions before they find a mysterious box. Scene after short scene simply ends when Michelle just doesn't answer her sisters' questions. It takes them forever to push back and finally get the answer: she had infertility tests which revealed sickle cell anemia genes (a gene known to most-often be a hereditary possibility among African-Americans). That fact is important, but the character development it adds is nil and the addition of some odd kind of cliff-hanger scenes is incomprehensible.

The interactions between Maxine's granddaughters and Florence's granddaughters are fun and interesting and there could be more there. There are realistic questions on the part of the "left behind" family as to why they should wish to interact with the "white" family that just found out they are "black." The question of who we are and who the world perceives us to be is quite important.

The relationship on stage between Florence and Maxine is also mysterious. Short scenes between the two of them at different decades of time show that they never reconcile, but not why. They don't include more information except one tangential mention that Florence had apparently reconnected with her parents and even financially supported them in their declining health, but Maxine didn't know.

There is a scene saved to the end that shows how Florence gets her idea to "pass" and that it could provide benefits. However, the reasons Florence chooses this direction are never made clear, and that is one potent area for theatrical exploration. There doesn't seem to be any fear that her choice will be revealed to her husband upon delivery of a child, which would add to her danger of discovery. 

There are some great moments in the play and some telling and intelligent exploration of the topic. Playwright Rachel Atkins has created interesting and unique characters who have distinct voices. There is almost material there for two plays, though, one between the sisters and one among the grandchildren! But for the moment, the substantive play has been allowed to grow with the help of cliche'd moments of melodrama that detract, bore, and release the audience from their tensions. Once released, we too often tune out and then ignore. There is too much here that needs attention to allow that to happen.

For more information, go to www.annextheatre.org or call 206-728-0933.

Annex brings "Black Like Us" world premiere to Capitol Hill

(Posted on Capitol Hill Seattle blog:)

Rachel Atkins, playwright

February brings a new play to Annex Theatre, co-produced by Brownbox Theatre, Black Like Us by Rachel Atkins. Annex says that while its scheduling during Black History Month is intentional, it is “more than race… of the sweet, complex, and exasperating relationships that exist between sisters…The history of the Central District and the Civil rights movement in this city are woven into the narrative.”

Rachel reports that as many as 3 million people have seen her work presented around the country, but most people in Seattle aren’t even aware of the (local) company. Living Voices focuses on social justice issues of many sorts: civil rights, women’s suffrage, Japanese American internment, the Holocaust (Anne Frank), immigration. All their scripts are written by Atkins and then integrated with video or archive photos, and the actor interacts with voices from the past.11th and Pike’s Annex is no stranger to new plays, many of its presentations deliberately chosen from local playwriting submissions in a hotly contested annual company debate. Nor is Rachel Atkins a stranger to playwriting, with a long history as a writer and teacher and 20 years as a script writer for Living Voices, historically-based multimedia one-person theatrical events.

“This play is about families and sisters,” Atkins said. “I wrote the play so it could be double-cast but (director) Jose Amador decided we would keep individual roles for four African American women instead of two, so there would be a maximum opportunity for more actors of color, since there are so few on stage, often.”

Atkins said this work is also purely female. “The relationships they have with each other have nothing to do with men,” she said. “I’ve gotten good feedback about that. ‘Hey, none of their problems have to do with if they’re going to get some man or keep some man.’”

Atkins said she turned to her own background to write characters of a different race. “My parents are Jewish but my step-dad, who raised me was black,” she said. “I grew up in the ‘70s when a mixed-race family was not nearly as common as now. I grew up aware of those issues and questions about race and it was a complicated situation for my mom and step-dad.”

“The play is from 1950s until today, so characters in the ‘50s speak differently than contemporary characters,” Atkins said of the language she used. “Part of this is about the assumptions we make about people and these characters needed to sound like themselves, whatever their skin color. Also, the play is set in Seattle and there is a regional sound to it.”

“I had a shorter version of this play run last year and black audience members actually talked to the characters,” she said. “I don’t think any white audience members did that. Tyrone (Brown, artistic director of Brownbox Theatre), my director, did mention that might happen because black audience members might have something to say about what was happening on stage.”

American folk tales
Also playing until February 26th on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at Annex is Story and Song. Bret Fetzer performs two American folk tales with backing a small group of singers a la the movie O Brother Where Art Thou?

For more information, go to www.annextheatre.org or call 206-728-0933.

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.)