Theatre News: Live Girls! Moving, Sheila Daniels Leaving, and Paul Mullin’s Newspaper Play

The SunBreak’s arts desk has been unusually busy this week and not keeping up on what’s going on around town. So here’s my attempt at catch-up:

Photo of the P-I globe by SunBreak Flickr pool contributor Great Beyond.

First off, a note from the Intiman popped into the inbox on Tuesday: “I’m writing to let you know that Sheila [Daniels] has decided to leave Intiman in order to make her life as a fulltime artist and activist, rather than an artist/activist who has a concurrent fulltime job as an administrator. We’re all very sad about it, but it’s a decision everyone at Intiman supports. Kate [Whoriskey, the incoming artistic director] was really hoping that Sheila would be able to direct next year and had offered her our American Cycle play, but Sheila had to turn it down, unfortunately, for a variety of reasons.”

Daniels, who directed the current production of Abe Lincoln in Illinois, has been a leading light in Seattle theatre since 1994. She did a lot of work with Theater Schmeater over the years, and in 2007, she produced the much-loved 90-minute, three-actor version of Crime and Punishment at the Capitol Hill Arts Center, which she brought to the Intiman earlier this year. Back in 2007, Daniels took a full-time position as assistant artistic director at Intiman, and her departure comes as Bartlett Sher is still transitioning the artistic director helm to Kate Whoriskey.

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Second, Ballard’s Live Girls! Theatre is apparently becoming homeless, and it’s at least partly by choice. TPS Online reported on Monday that artistic director Meghan Arnette had decided not to renew the company’s lease on their downstairs space on Market St. and would instead seek to produce their work at different venues around town.

“Having our own venue has been an amazing asset and we have used it to gain a national reputation for supporting women in theater,” Arnette wrote in her press release, “while presenting a wide variety of exciting and challenging new works.”

Moving around town may just be the tonic Live Girls! needs. I rarely get out to catch their shows in Ballard, where there’s not much theatre, which is unfortunate because Live Girls! typically does an excellent job, as evidenced by their current production of Bone Portraits. Going mobile, though, should help the company expand their mission to create meaningful opportunities for women in theatre, and Arnette apparently mentioned a potential collaboration with the Seattle Girls’ School.

And third, there’s an interesting show organized by local playwright Paul Mullin up at North Seattle Community College. Mullin and five other playwrights–Dawson Nichols, Scot Augustson, Kelleen Conway Blanchard, Pam Carter, Bryan Willis–collaborated to create a “living newspaper,” a form of agitprop theatre that started during the Bolshevik Revolution, called It’s not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper About a Dying Newspaper (7:30 p.m., tickets $10).

The idea behind living newspaper theatre was to perform the news for audiences as a way of urging social action. In this case, the show is about the death of the Seattle P-I and the state of media. It’s supposed to be quite good, and this weekend, after Friday and Saturday’s shows, the producers have cobbled together an impressive panel of media folks old and new to discuss the issues raised, including The Stranger‘s Paul Constant and the Seattle Times‘s cartoonist Dave Horsey.

Interestingly, the Times‘s theatre critic Misha Berson has apparently backed out of her advertised appearance on the panel.