"Odysseo" rides into Seattle in a big way

(photo by Francois Bergeron)

Odysseo by Cavalia
Big Top at Marymoor Park
February 19 through March 9

Cavalia, the amazing acrobat and horse event, has come through Seattle a couple of times in the last decade, generating a lot of excitement each time. Developed by Normand Latourelle, who was one of the pioneers of Cirque du Soleil, it has an atmosphere very similar, but with the addition of dozens of horses, led almost invisibly to perform incredible feats. 

Anyone who is a horse-lover, and it's probably hard to find someone who is not, would love this performance. This year, a new iteration arrives in mid-February called Odysseo. It is bigger, at least twice the size, and innovates the tent structure to remove the inhibiting tent poles. The resulting tent is bigger than a hockey field and can house as many as 30 horses at once. 

They've also expanded the range of the acrobats who perform with and around the horses. Their innovations create, they claim, a theatrically equipped performance space that rivals anything on Las Vegas or New York City stages. Yet, they have moved it from city to city. They also include an enormous projection screen the size of 3 IMAX screens that use 18 3-D projectors. It is a massive undertaking that immerses an audience into a fantasyland. 

Two of the performers with the show are married acrobats, Tomoko Onishi and Michel Charron. Tomoko grew up in Japan, where Michel (from Canada) met her, and they became interested in the circus arts and began training in the United Kingdom. After more training in Montreal, Canada, they performed all over Japan until the tsunami of 2011. 

While they do primarily aerial work, they do get to work with the horses, too, at least by riding them. Michel says,"'Our primary act is a pole act on a motorized computerized carousel as one of three couples. It's quite a contraption. It comes in from the sky on the grid." Tomoko adds, "We bring the horses on stage, walking together, without any rope and the horses will follow us." 

Tomoko says,"'It still scares me sometimes (working with the horses), somebody moving a way we don't expect. For example, when I started training with horses, they didn't follow me at all ... they are supposed to follow me, but I didn't have a connection. Slowly, as I trained, I knew how to touch them with a stick as an extension of my hand, and they began to walk with me. That was an interesting progression."

Michel adds, "We see the different aspects of their character. They can be afraid of a curtain and want to flee. Or the first time they hear an audience applaud, it can sound like a hiss to them, which is dangerous. We have to help them be calm. Also, they have to determine who is the top horse in the hierarchy. When you see them angry, they are very powerful. They can seem gentle, but they have awesome power. If horses are going to fight it out, you can't get in the way. When they spin, you don't want to be in their way. You see where (the term) 'horse power' comes from." 

Tomoko continues, "A gentle kick for them is huge for us. I also do a silk act and horses spin us from underneath. We also train the horses and they are afraid of the fabric. We go up and down, and the horses run away, so we have to do the same thing over and over and let them be comfortable with the fabric." 

They joined the show and were part of the 2011 official opening. They had skills beyond the aerial work that were useful to the tour, as well. Michel says, "I have experience in aerial rigging and Tomoko was in costuming before." They continue to have fun in this work because every show is different, both in audience and even horse behavior. 

The tour travels by car, from town to town, so participants can experience sightseeing on the road. "We can stop and see the small towns in between the big cities," Tomoko notes."'We can pull over and have lunch in a town you might not have the opportunity to see," Michel adds. "In Vancouver, we saw the bald eagles and spent New Year's Eve on a mountaintop."

Asked about both the advantages and disadvantages of living and working together all the time, Michel notes, "Tomoko and I have been really lucky and established boundaries. If you're in a strictly professional relationship, you always have that politeness, but when it's your partner, you can express frustration or anger and that can work against you. It's better to meditate on it before. You can have a bad training session and at some point you have to say that was work and we're back to us."

Tomoko adds, "On the other hand, being comfortable together, on stage, a couple act is very easy to express ourselves and express emotion. It's easier for me. I'm Japanese and shy. I wasn't good at expressing myself." 

They've never been to Seattle before and are looking forward to exploring another great city. "I feel like I'm paid to travel,' Michel says. 'We have comfortable living quarters and we get to go explore on our days off."

For more information on this unique event, go to www.cavalia.net or call 866-999-8111.

Mirror Stage Company's "Honky" as provocative as it gets!

Mirror Stage Company just mounted another excellent play reading that provoked some great audience participation. Their Feed Your Mind play reading series has been doing that kind of thing for ten years now, and artistic director Suzanne Cohen's choices are terrific plays that usually present interesting and less-travelled-than roads of issues.

This time, the play was Honky by Greg Kalleres. More than almost any play I've experienced, this play went straight for the heart of racism, how we speak to each other, how we think of ourselves, and included advertising, as well. Kalleres' bio mentions his experience with writing and producing commercials for ESPN, Nike, Brand Jordan, and Budweiser. The play focuses on a company that makes basketball shoes, focusing on marketing to black teenagers, and on the marketing department folks who write the ads and create the buzz.

The play starts after a teen gets shot for his basketball shoes. The shooter apparently uses an advertising tagline. The white man who wrote the commercial, with a hip-hop tag line "'sup now?" is full of angst and remorse for his part in writing the ad and even goes so far as to try therapy to feel better.

A white executive in the play says, "When white kids shoot each other over these shoes, then we'll know we won." It's in reference to the company now focusing on widening their audience of purchasers to white teens who follow black teen culture to figure out what's hot and what they should emulate.

But Honky shoves in all kinds of other aspects of race, from the executive talking about "your people" to a black associate, to the black associate trying to figure out what's "black enough," to the white ad writer's calling his girlfriend "as white as you can get," to the white girlfriend's attraction to the associate in a random encounter at a bar, to the therapist of the ad writer turning out to be a) black and b) the sister of the associate... It's complicated, though not confusing during the reading.

As usual, a group of talented actors included Elena Flory-Barnes, Sara Coates, Tim Gouran, Carl Kennedy, James Lapan, Andrew Litzky, Corey Spruill and Tyler Trerise. For those who like to talk about the subject matter of a play they've just seen, FYM is particularly enjoyable for the diverse audience opinions shared.

This year's theme for Feed Your Mind is racism and the last reading was Race by David Mamet, which also zeroed in on aspects of racism in a current and challenging way. The next reading is April 5 and 6 (at the Ethnic Cultural Theatre in the University District) and is Detroit '67 by Dominique Morisseau.This play focuses on the riots that happened there in 1967, and includes the music of Motown and a sister and brother's after-hours music joint.

For information or tickets to Detroit '67, go here: http://www.mirrorstage.org/detroit67.

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: Mr. Pim Passes By is a lovely drawing-room comedy for a delightful evening

April Poland and Ryan Childers in Mr. Pim Passes By (Erik Stuhaug)

Most people know A.A. Milne, if they know him, from his wondrous creations in Winnie the Pooh. But he wrote many more stories and even plays. One of his theatrical creations is currently on stage at Taproot Theatre. Mr. Pim Passes By is what is termed a “drawing-room comedy,” taking place entirely in one room of a turn of the century house, and often focusing on manners of the time.

This gentle comedy has a lovely cast with just the right style of arch delivery, mostly from leading lady, April Poland. Poland plays Olivia Marden, fairly recent wife of the middle aged master of the manor, George Marden (Ryan Childers), a man set in his ways, but crazy about his new wife. Olivia never goes about stamping her foot and confronting her man. She seemingly meekly accepts his edicts (“No, you can’t put up patterned curtains in my established old home”), yet continues sewing curtains confident in finding a way to bend him around her finger and get her way.

Mr. Carraway Pim (Chris Ensweiler) is actually a mild-mannered occasional popper inner, who is mostly a device to deliver partial bits of information that stir the household into a tizzy. His remembering more bits of information and popping back in to deliver them creates continuing moments of changing tizzy. It’s enjoyable fun, though it doesn’t stack up to anything more meaningful. Drawing-room comedies general don’t.

The main pleasure is in watching the actors have fun with their characters, which they all do. A darling performance of note is the youngest character, a ward of Marden, Dinah (Allie Pratt) who folds Mr. Pim into the family and tells him all sorts of secrets in a charmingly offhand way. She is matched in her charm by Daniel Stoltenberg as her almost fiancée, Brian Strange, who, as a painter, does not earn enough for Marden to take him seriously as a suitor. Olivia must find a way to convince her husband that Brian will manage and he should let the match take place.

A fun cameo role of “Aunt” Lady Marden has Kim Morris sweep in and wave her hands about and strut out, and Ginny Hollady maintains social prestige as the maid. They are all veddy British, of course, and lovely costuming (as always) is reflected of the period by Sarah Burch Gordon.

Director Karen Lund is a past master at this type of play, with Taproot liking to produce so many of these lovely, light productions. And set and sound designer Mark Lund has done so many plays here that he probably has every measurement ingrained in his brain. They’ve got it down!

If an entrancing evening is desired and the most taxing thing you want to think about is to wonder whether Olivia really will solve everyone’s problems, this is definitely the play for you. Suitable for all ages. For more information, go to www.taproottheatre.org or call 206-781-9707. 

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.)

Endangered Species Project moves to ACT Theatre

Next Up: The Madwoman of Chaillot, Monday February 3 at 7:00pm at ACT Theatre

Mark Anders, an originator of ESP, and talented actor and director and musician in town, is passionate about Endangered Species Project and their move to ACT Theatre, this month, as part of ACT’s Central Heating Lab adventure. I asked Mark about how ESP started and a bit about the move and what they expect in the future.

Mark says, “A group of actors and a director or two, including Cynthia White and Dan Kremer, Jeff Steitzer, and Larry and Jeanne Paulson, and Amy Love (and a couple of other people) and I began some conversations about how there are plays that just don’t get done anymore. Either because they’re too many characters for modern American theaters to remount them, or look too expensive to theaters, too many sets, or because they’ve been forgotten or fallen out of fashion.

“We gravitate to what is known as the ‘well-made play’ though I don’t quite know what that means, since every play should be a well-made play. All those plays that are silent on the bookshelves. So, we’ve rediscovered a bunch of playwrights, new to me, and it’s been thrilling for me to read them.

“We also knew that Susan and Clayton Corzatte would have extensive knowledge of the kind of plays we would want to do. We didn’t know, at first, that Clay was suffering from ALS, but later, there were ways we were able to keep him involved. With Susan’s help,he directed The Show-Off, for example After he passed, we picked The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker because it was the play on which Susan and Clay met (they were both acting in it). And that was one of the reasons we wanted to do it. The only month we’ve skipped since we started was the month that Clayton died.”

Back at the beginning:

“Cynthia White had been in charge of a reading series down in Ashland, OR, and the group was talking about plays we missed, like The Little Foxes. I was in it and think it is so tightly and expertly written and you just get on the ride. You get sucked into the plot and off you go. Those are the kinds of plays that appealed to all of us. That old narrative joy that we all learned to love as kids, ‘Tell me a story.’

“One of the great things about doing readings, more than a regular play, is that the audience has to enter into it with us, and their imaginations are being called into play. It’s like an exalted radio play. I’d love to see these plays on stage, but in some ways, readings make the plays come alive in a way that done fully with a big set wouldn’t necessarily do.

“We wanted to do the readings with top notch actors, given limited rehearsal time. We put our toe in the water and started a monthly reading. The name (ESP) arose out of our discussion, that these plays were endangered, in danger of dropping out of the culture."

The very first play they did was Both Your Houses by Maxwell Anderson, on February 14, 2011. Both Susan and Clayton Corzatte were actors in that reading.

“We started scheduling plays and finding directors and the director usually casts the play. Our members often make proposals of plays they’d like to do. Our first list was huge and it's just grown from there. Some of the time, we pick plays that are good for a time of year, or one time the Seattle Rep was doing Or, a play about Aphra Behn and we did an Afra Behn play (The Lucky Chance, April 2012).

“We’re getting more adventurous and doing plays that hardly anyone would recognize now. Like Miss Lulu Bett by Zona Gale that (director) John Dillon brought to us. I didn’t know Zona Gale and now I’m a huge fan.

“It’s a huge amount of work to keep the organization going. We now have a steering committee which I am on. Casting was difficult for me because I had some guilt about calling up my friends to ask them to do a play with me for no money. I’ve always wanted to pay actors. I don’t need to be paid because I’m part of the organization but we’ve always paid for the permission to do a reading, unless they’re in the public domain. It’s not terribly expensive but it’s one of our costs, including copying scripts. We’ve mostly not had to pay for the venue.

“We had no idea if we were going to make any money and in the beginning we only had 20 or so audience members. We asked for donations to cover costs. Then we started getting nicer amounts of donations, averaging about $5/person, and we bought some music stands for ourselves to replace broken ones. We have a little money in the bank, now. Not enough to pay actors what we'd like, yet, but seed money.

“We’re hoping the move to ACT Theatre will help us do a lot more in the way of raising funds. We grew a much bigger audience at North Seattle Community College up to around 140. We didn’t really outgrow NSCC, but another of Richard Ziman and Leslie Law’s efforts (Sandbox Radio Collective) was moving to ACT Theatre’s Central Heating Lab, a coproducing relationship, and with Richard’s and Leslie’s priming, ACT asked us if we wanted to produce there, too.

“There are aspects that I like and aspects I don’t. Downtown means you have to park and there’s no way to park for free anymore. That’s a bit of a drag. But being in a big time theater doing these plays feels good to me. NSCC was incredibly supportive, going out of their way to make sure we were taken care of, but it’s great to feel a part of the theater scene, rather than away from it, as I felt a little at NSCC. I think it’s attractive (to actors) for people to be performing in the ACT space.

“$15/ticket is different. That came after heavy discussion with ACT about what we should charge. That’s what ACT charges for a lot of things. There are also people with the ACTPass which allows those subscribers to come to things at ACT included in the Pass. With this reading, we are starting compensating actors for their services.  And we’re paying for their parking.

“We’ve been encouraged by ticket sales and it’s doing well, though not sold out. ACT also takes their fair  share out of the $15. We'll see how this first reading goes.  

“When we move on to plays a little less famous than Madwoman, we’ll see how we do as far as how much we can pay actors, depending on our attendance. We’re planning on doing some huge casts as far as sheer numbers of actors. One of the impacts is for these audiences to see just how many people these plays had in them. Dead End by Sydney Kingsley is gargantuan. He talks in his introduction to the play that he had to diagram everything for himself because it was so complex. He directed it as well. He has boys in the tenement house and the rich apartment across the way.

“(The play is set) on the East Side in NY in the ‘30s and things are kind of dire. The rich apartment house is having its entrance repaired and the rich people have to come in and out the servants’ entrance and they had to rub shoulders with the poor people next door. It’s a very current feeling. The plays that ESP tries to pick still have things to say to us now.

“I’m thrilled we’re even considering attempting it! It’s 39 speaking parts! Once in a Lifetime by Kaufman and Hart (another play we might do) has 60 parts. We’re talking about a lot of characters and several settings, as well. Madwoman also has 17 or 18 actors playing slightly more than that number of parts. That’s a lot of actors on stage! And a lot of fun.

“We have such a devoted core of people who come. This is an experiment. We’ll see where this leads us. We want to try this and see if there is as much hunger in the Seattle community for this as we have in doing it.”

For more information, go to www.acttheatre.org or call 206-292-7676. Or you can go to their website at www.endangeredspeciesproject.org. Comments welcome on this blog.