"We've got birds so many different ways in this show!" Spike Friedman told me the other weekend, sitting on the patio of a Pioneer Square bar, enjoying the last little bit of sun during our uncharacteristically warm March. "We've got a bird that's a burrito, maybe..."
Caitlin Sullivan, who was sitting at the table next to me listening, grinned a bit sheepishly. "I may have cut the bird that's a burrito," she said with a chuckle. "Sorry."
"Imagine that!" Friedman responded sarcastically, as Sullivan, trying to stay on message, continued: "That is a great example of what you find in a collaborative process! Things that end up on the cutting room floor. But you have to do all of it to get to the 10 percent that's worth it."
Sullivan and Friedman are two of the founding members of the Satori Group, Seattle's most promising young theatre company. The two are helming the group's latest production, with Sullivan directing Friedman's adaptation of George Saunders' short story "Winky." The play opens this Friday in a studio in the 619 Western building, a series of art studios, in Pioneer Square, and plays through April 5 (tickets $15).
With Winky, the Satori Group is taking a big artistic step; although the group operates as a collaborative ensemble, with an unusually long and intensive development process, Winky is the company's first full-length self-generated work. Friedman, who's also a sketch and improv writer/performer who trained with the Upright Citizens' Brigade, discovered Saunders in college, and suggested the idea of adapting "Winky" to the company. But from the beginning, the story presented a variety of challenges.
"George Saunders wrote to me in an email that the story is anti-dramatic in nature," Sullivan said. "And you get that note as a director and you're like, 'Oh, shit!' I certainly can't tell my actors that! I certainly can't tell them that actually you have no arc."
While Friedman was able to bring in several scenes written almost to their finished form, a great deal of the material was developed in the workshop process. Saunders' story, which originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1997 and is included in the 2000 collection Pastoralia, is about a young man named Neil Yaniky, who takes a self-help seminar from a crassly capitalist guru named Tom Rodgers. Through the process, Neil identifies his sister Winky as his main hindrance in life. She's increasingly odd and religious, and her roommates have kicked her out at the same time her preacher is discouraging her from being so involved with the church, leaving Neil no choice but to take her in. Rodgers preps him to reject her, but when Neil gets home, he can't go through with it and sinks into a bout of self-pity and loathing.
"The thing about the story is that it moves really quickly through the mind and it gives you these details of the world around them," Friedman explained. "And a big question for us was, which of these details are important to telling the story the way we want to tell it, and how do we give them the relative weight necessary to create the experience in the right way? Because what Saunders gets out in four words, we can splay it out into a full image."
In the story, Saunders—a virtuosic prose stylist—crafts the narrative such that the voice shifts depending on the perspective of the character being focused on in each scene, immersing the reader in each character's particular mindset. This forms a crucial part of the theatrical experience the group is crafting. Rather than produce the show in a traditional theatre, the performances are being staged in an art studio, with several sets through which the audience moves. Whereas Saunders' prose immerses the reader in the characters' personal worlds, Satori externalizes them, the settings shaped to evoke the distinctive perspective—no matter how skewed—of the characters, with plenty of fantasy and dream-sequence elements throughout based on or developed from the imagery in the original text.
For instance, the aforementioned "burrito birds." "It was this problem of, how do we make this image of getting 'crapped on' real?" Friedman explained. "We have these birds, the bird is crapping on him, and we needed an image of him 'power boosting,'" he continued, referencing some of Rodgers' self-help jargon, "and we wanted it to be tied in with a Tom Rodgers marketing ploy. So Tom Rodgers has a line of frozen burritos. So Neil's reaching out, grabbing the bird, ripping into it, but the bird is actually a burrito, and he's back from his fantasy into his real life."
While that particular moment got cut, it's indicative of what you can expect to see at Winky. Winky's kitchen is a bit like a set piece from a Tim Burton film, constructed with odd angles and perspectives. There's video elements, a complex sound score, and even puppetry (Kyle Loven, the creator of My Dear Lewis, which recently played the Annex Theatre, was brought in as a consultant.)
"One of the big challenges is that she can't be crazy," Sullivan said of the challenges inherent in trying to craft Winky's world, "but we've got this world that is her brain that splays off into places that if we're not very careful, she's going to come off as crazy."
In the end, though, all the flair and craft is in the service of preparing the audience for what's oddly the least dramatic moment of all: the point at which Neil arrives home prepared to abandon his sister so he can get on with his own life, and then, without virtually a word, decides not to. Like Saunders' original prose piece, Winky isn't so much a dramatic story as a meditation on life choices. Neil loves his sister, but she's a burden, unequipped to think about or allow for what's best for him. But in the end, he chooses to stay with her, what Sullivan described as "his tragedy," and the majority of the play's 80 minutes is given over to developing the background of that juncture, so that the audience understands the stakes involved in the tiniest of moments.
"That's the heart of the story, for me," Sullivan said, "when Neil looks at Winky, and they have to look at each other. It doesn't matter what he thinks he has to do, it doesn't matter what he knows. The heart of the story fits in that space between them, where all of those truths that contradict each other but are still true exist. That he loves this woman, and she needs his help, and she's getting in his way and holding him back. And he could possibly be better without her, but she maybe can't function without him."
"As people, we strive for a kind of cohesion, where, if I want one thing to be true, it has to mean that anything that contradicts is not," she continued. "But that's rarely life."
Subscribe to our Front Page Stories
Most Recent Comments