Jess K. Smith & Co. Decompose Memory and Love Onstage

When it rains, it pours, they say, and in the case of devised theatre--normally in short supply in Seattle--this weekend is a veritable deluge. In addition to The Irrealist Theatre's Amniotes and the restaging of the apparently Seattle-legendary Frankenocchio, both of which opened last weekend, tonight Jess K. Smith, a theatre artist who worked with Seattle Rep, Live Girls!, and Redmond's Second Story before heading to New York to study directing at Columbia, presents a two-week run of deCOMPOSITION at the Erickson Theatre off Broadway (tickets $12-$20).

Earlier this week, I had a brief phone conversation with Smith, who's in Seattle working on the play, which she developed with collaborators at Columbia under the guidance of Anne Bogart and staged this last spring as part of the Schapiro Series.

The work is based around the scientific process of decomposition--a morbid enough topic in the abstract--but Smith and the company she worked with built out a show from that basic concept that's anchored not in abstraction but in the deeply personal.

"We were interested in watching the decomposition of a friendship over time," Smith explained. From that basic idea--Smith's own--the group developed three simultaneous tracks for the work. Besides simply tracking the downward spiral of friendship, they built out two other components--one a series of monologues on the life-and-death-cycle of salmon, and the other, based on work by dramaturg Hannah Hessel (another Pacific Northwesterner turned New Yorker), an exploration of a woman's "loss of the sense of her own loss," as Smith put it. This track is based around a recipe--an actual recipe, as it happens, that was used by Brown's grandfather--for a cake, which is prepared during the performance and served each night.

"We knew that there was going to be a recipe," Smith said chuckling, recalling the work's beginning as little more than a set of seemingly unrelated ideas. "And an Appalachian folk song." (In this case, "Oh, Death.")

As abstract as some of the ideas seem, Smith assured me they're rooted deep in her artists' personal experiences. The lectures about salmon, for instance, were developed and performed by Ty Hewitt, a performer originally from Ketchikan, Alaska, who spent several summers working as a fishing guide lecturing tourists on salmon.

"I think what we try to do," Smith explained, "both in process and product, we've tried to find a way to communicate something honestly."

"The essence of the thing is in the storytelling," she continued. "How a folk song tells a story, or how a recipe is passed down."

What strikes me as most exciting is seeing this sort of theatre being made by Seattle artists--even if they had to move away to get a start--and then being brought back home. For quite a while, there hasn't been many artists or companies willing to work outside the narrow confines of the standard process of selecting a text, rehearsing it, building a set, and running it for three weeks. There's a risk going into this sort of performance that's exciting compared to most other work you'll see, and I'm glad that Smith & co. have seen fit to bring their work home.