"Emily Linder" at Taproot Hits the Funny Bone as Well as the Heart

Charity Parenzini and Laura Kenny in The Realization of Emily Linder (John Ulman)

The Realization of Emily Linder

Taproot Theatre

Through June 11, 2016

Emily Linder has had a realization. She’s going to die in a couple of days. She tells her daughters, who have mixed feelings of belief, and demands that they plan her funeral. But she tells them exactly what she wants to have at the funeral, including helium balloons!

So begins the current play, The Realization of Emily Linder, at Taproot Theatre. Playwright Richard Strand includes a lot of contemporary stressors of families: elder care issues, managing illness, losses of spouses in later life, adult children coping with aging parents, sibling rivalry and more.

ArtsWest Presents Exquisite "Death of a Salesman"

Kyle Anton Johnson, David Pichette, Drew Highlands in Death of a Salesman (Michael Brunk)

Death of a Salesman

ArtsWest

Through May 29, 2016

I can’t say I wasn’t a bit skeptical when I heard that ArtsWest was planning to mount Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in their season. It just didn’t seem like a play that fit all that well into their oeuvre, nor was I sure that it was a classic that stood the test of time all the way to now.

That was before I saw the production that slayed me with its precision and relevance! This is a stunning effort!

There are still two more weekends to see this play, and to see David Pichette play Willie Loman at the exact right moment in Pichette’s career. He is heartbreaking, alternately optimistic and caustic, and no holds barred either way.

Sprawling “The Brothers K” gives as much as it demands!

The Chance family (Chris Bennion)

The Brothers K

Part 1: Strike Zones

Part 2: The Left Stuff

Book-It Repertory Theatre

Through June 26, 2016

Last year, Book-It Repertory Theatre took a big gamble: they adapted a very long book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, into a two-part play that asked audiences to spend an entire day at Seattle Center, eat, wait, and watch the entire event. The plays were about the history of Jews in comic-book creation and a couple of fictitious cousins. Both productions were so well done, so well-acted, adapted, presented, that the experiment succeeded.

That success, following another blockbuster two-part presentation of The Cider House Rules, was apparently enough for them to contemplate trying again with another big book, The Brothers K, about a nuclear family, baseball, and the 1960s into and surrounding the Vietnam War. Since the plays just opened, the success at the box office is still to be determined, but my opinion is that they have again succeeded in presenting a compelling and excellent work that justifies the time demanded of an audience!

Don’t Miss “A Hand of Talons“

Stephanie Kim-Bryan in A Hand of Talons (John Ulman)

A Hand of Talons

Pork Filled Productions

Through May 21, 2016

The third time’s more than the charm! Ms. Maggie Lee has written three steampunk plays all set in the same “universe” and the third installment, A Hand of Talons, is now on stage at Theatre Off Jackson, produced by Pork Filled Productions.

Lee’s world includes magic and spicy Asian women who kick things and hit things and shoot things, if they need to. In this iteration, three scions of the Yao family are being threatened with expulsion from the larger Yao clan, and must put aside their differences to save their control of their portion of the world.

Where’s the Passion? Shakes’ "R&J" falls flat

Romeo and Juliet (John Ulman)

Romeo and Juliet

Seattle Shakespeare Company

Through May 22, 2016

So here are some good aspects of Seattle Shakespeare Company’s current production of Romeo and Juliet: the actors clearly know what they’re saying. This is a really good thing, because there are some unfortunate productions where the actors don’t appear to understand Shakespeare enough to know what their lines mean.

The music is wonderful. It is composed by rising star, Justin Huertas, and performed live by him and a few others. It’s kind of cool to have movie-atmospheric-music played live in the room.

There are aspects of the set (Craig Wollam) and lighting (Tim Wratten) that work really, really well (even though the set is so spare, but there are techniques like tying a bed to a bower to move it that are really keen).

"Puny Humans" Frames the Male vs. Female Gaming Debate with Spot-On Accuracy

(poster by Peter Hon)

Puny Humans

Annex Theatre

through May 14, 2016

Puny Humans, a new play co-written by Bret Fetzer and Keiko Green, is a fascinating look at what comic conventions have become, and even gives a bit of history (via Cole Hornaday's character of a comics seller) about how they started. The overarching theme of the play is that we all think we're "puny" and wish not to be, so we try to find ways to assume the heroic side of ourselves and if we can't live it, all the time, we can at least hope people see us that way.

Director Gavin Reub manages a very large cast (13) on the tiny stage where a half-dozen storylines interweave among ComiCon attendees ranging from old gamers to young bloggers. The storylines include a budding love triangle (Te Yelland, Grace Carmack and Kevin Bordi), a mom supporting her "spectrum" daughter (Heather Persinger and Rachel Guyer-Mafune), two long-time gamer friends growing apart (David Rollison and Ben McFadden), an older movie star living off old fame (Patty Bonnell) and a younger star trying to live off current fame (Nic Morden), a teen blogger who is trying to make a splash and isn't sure how to manage anti-woman troll commentary (Zenaida Smith), and a reporter (Kelly Johnson) who doesn't want to be there, an organizer who barely keeps it together (Lauryn Hochberg) and the comics seller.