Penetrating look at beauty and its pervasive effects on our culture

 Lisa Marie Nakamura, Ruth Yeo-Peterman, Kathy Hsieh and Sara Javkhlan in "Impenetrable Women" (photo by Rick Wong)

Impenetrable
SiS Productions
(West of Lenin)
through May 3

SiS Productions is presenting Impenetrable, a play by Mia McCullough, and it's a timely and important exploration of the impact of beauty in our culture. McCullough took a newspaper report about a real billboard erected in the suburbs of Chicago, depicting a bikini-clad woman with arrows pointing to areas she could improve with surgery, and fictionalized it into a challenging and provocative story.

As directed by Charles Waxberg, the play starts off with an even more challenging hurdle: many of the beginning speeches are presented directly to the audience. This has an interesting effect of first pushing the audience backward toward creating a bit of a defensive wall, and perhaps making it harder to identify with the characters. However, eventually in the 90 minute presentation, the story is made clear and many of the inner emotions and personal reflections have been opened to us.

The cast is strong, including Kathy Hsieh as a suburban mom who feels like her beauty has been compromised and is struggling to understand how to both empower and protect her bookish, loner daughter (Sara Javkhlan, a young and talented girl who we hope to see more of), Lisa Marie Nakamura as a manager/barista at a Starbucks who puts out an exterior of toughness and sarcasm masking some pain at being maligned as "fat," and Ruth Yeo-Peterman as the young woman who is the subject of the picture and has been so damaged by being seen as "pretty," that she dons a burqua in order to cover herself up.

Also, two men help the story along: Shane Regan in a nicely understated and offhand performance as the love-struck photographer who feels "out of her league" and behaves somewhat badly toward the model in response, and Erwin Galan as a French-speaking Arab spa-owner, who both attracts pity and ire for his lack of understanding for the effects of posting this divisive billboard as an advertising device for his spa.

"Young Frankenstein" at Seattle Musical Theatre is fun

Young Frankenstein
Seattle Musical Theatre
through April 13

Seattle Musical Theatre's production of Young Frankenstein is a pleasing one, with a solid cast of young singer/performers and a very well done set for a very complicated trick-stage show.

This stage version of the Mel Brooks movie is as romp-filled as the movie, with the same sensibilities. Since it is a riff on the pseudo-scientific making of a human, there has to be a complicated dungeon laboratory with gizmos that work and special effects. Also stuff like paintings that come to life and library doors that rotate when a candle is lifted. The credits go to Samuel Pettit for set design and Zak Scott (technical director) and Caleb Dietzel (sound and lights) for making it come to life.

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.

SSR's Kiss of the Spider Woman is perfect for Ryan McCabe

Ryan McCabe (seated), Justin Carrell (lying) (photo courtesy Billie Wildrick)

Kiss of the Spider Woman

SecondStory Repertory

Through April 13

SecondStory Rep has taken on a huge challenge in its production of Kiss of the Spider Woman. The musical with book by Terrence McNally and music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb is a dark, edgy undertaking, though it has some beautiful music and a morally uplifting message.

The musical is the story of two cell mates in a Latin American prison: Valentin (Justin Carrell), a Marxist revolutionary, and Molina (Ryan McCabe), a gay window dresser. At first, Valentin draws a line down the middle of their small cell in antipathy to the talkative and effusive Molina. Molina escapes their dark world into a fantasy world of the movies and a screen star he loves named Aurora.

But first, a “praise warning!” I am about to extol the virtues of Mr. Ryan McCabe.

Ryan McCabe’s time is now! His performance in Spider Woman is perfection and would be perfect no matter whose production he starred in, whether SecondStory or Village or 5^th Avenue. He has toiled in the trenches of Seattle’s musical theater companies and proven his value over and again. He is the perfect age and in perfect voice for this role. So, kudos to SecondStory for choosing this musical and allowing him his starring vehicle.

Can women support each other? Is it too much to ask?

Cast members: Shane Regan, , Sara Javkhlan, Ruth Yeo-Peterman, Lisa Marie Nakamura, Kathy Hsieh and Erwin Galan.

Women make up 51% of our country, yet make 77% of the income most men get in almost every profession. There was a feminist movement that gained great ground in the 1960s and ‘70s and now, everywhere you turn, we have given that ground away again in so many ways. “Girl” was a word that we were taught should go back to being applied ONLY to females under age 18, and now “girl” is used by 50 and 60 year olds: I’m a girly-girl. I’m a theater girl. She’s one of the girls that teaches in that school.

No, we are women. The word “girl” diminishes us and dismisses us. Yet, we are working so hard to stay submerged and diminished.

Makeup is a multi-billion dollar industry made to make women feel like they must fix “flaws” in order to present themselves well. And now, instead of rejecting the constant messages we can’t be just fine with flaws or that flaws individuate us in important and interesting ways, instead men are now being “allowed” to wear makeup, cover up facial flaws with base, add a little eyeliner to give them more interesting eyes.

SiS Productions is opening their next play this week. Impenetrable, by Mia McCullough, is a play that was inspired by an actual event in a Chicago suburb in 2007. A huge billboard of an amazing looking, bikini-clad woman appeared. A plastic surgeon put up the billboard and added  arrows pointing to areas of her body where this woman could have plastic surgery to fix her “flaws.” The people in that suburb protested until the billboard was taken down.

Mia McCullough was inspired to write a fictional story dealing with how women are perceived and the expectation that even that physical perfection is not enough. I talked to Artistic Director Kathy Hsieh about the upcoming production.

Kathy says, “What’s interesting about the play is that it explores four different women, one who is 10, one in her 20s, one in her 30s and one in her 40s and uses the billboard as a starting point. It’s a revealing look at how those kinds of images affect women’s perceptions of themselves. The men I’ve talked to who have heard rehearsals have commented that they find the script fascinating because it gives them insight to women they might not have thought about before.

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.”