How Much Does "Sextet" Borrow from the Ensemble's Past (and Someone Else's Design)?

Hannah Victoria Franklin and Chris Macdonald in "Sextet." Photo by Laurie Clark Photography.

I went to Washington Ensemble Theatre for the opening weekend of Tommy Smith's new play Sextet (through November 15; tickets $15-$25) fully expecting to write a thorough review of it. A week later I'm still struggling to be able to say a whole lot about it. The Stranger, in its preview and review, has already covered the play itself much more thoroughly than I will here, so if you're looking for a more detailed accounting of the play or playwright I'll refer you there.

If you've participated in the Seattle theatre world much over the last few years you probably already know about the Ensemble, now in its seventh season. Focused primarily on new and experimental works, its alumni include designers and performers who have worked on stages all over the city, movies, TV shows, and beyond. Two of the eight theatre winners of The Stranger's Genius Awards were among the Ensemble's founding members, all of whom have since moved on to other things. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm telling you here that I, too, was a member of this company in its early years.

Director Roger Benington, returning to the Ensemble for a fourth time after previously directing Crave (2005), Never Swim Alone (2006), and God's Ear (2008), has a great eye for striking stage pictures, as well as a clear connection to the text. The performers are blocked with laser precision and the performances uniformly solid, though in an ensemble piece like this the individual performances are particularly less significant than their sum total.

The Ensemble's 2005 production of Sarah Kane's Crave explored despair with "musical agility" via four nameless characters "whose words and silences build a symphony of lust, loneliness, abuse, and persistence." This is lifted directly from the marketing copy on the Ensemble's recently relaunched website, (which incorrectly lists me as one of the show's designers--I was in fact its stage manager).

As I've watched the mostly glowing (and mostly deserved) reviews of Sextet trickle in, I've been waiting to see which reviewers might draw a connection between the two, and what they would say about it. So far, (with the exception of our arts editor), I haven't seen it addressed. I feel like it's important that somebody does, and here's why: Sextet looks and feels a lot like Crave. A lot.

Imagine an audience entering a theatre to be greeted by a solid wall of black. When the lights went down, a rectangular portal flew out, revealing a stark, featureless, white rectangular space that began to fill with water midway through the show's intense 45-minute run as the characters thrashed about within its claustrophobic confines. This was Crave, the show that put a fledgling theatre company on the map in Seattle and established Benington, then based in Salt Lake City at the now-defunct Tooth & Nail Theatre, as a presence to be reckoned with here. It also propelled scenic designer and ensemble co-founder Jennifer Zeyl to the Genius Award in 2006, complete with a profile calling the Crave set "her masterpiece". (Fellow co-founder Marya Sea Kaminski won the 2010 award, which profile also mentioned her work in Crave. Again for full disclosure's sake: I've known both Kaminski and Zeyl since before the Ensemble existed and count both as friends.) Crave is "that show" people mention to this day, their eyes lighting up (as in "I saw that show!") or their gazes narrowing disapprovingly (as in "Oh, I saw that show").

When I walked into the 49-seat Little Theatre to see Sextet, I initially thought nothing of being greeted by a solid wall of black. When the lights went down, a rectangular portal flew out, revealing a stark, nearly featureless gray rectangular space filled with a shallow pool of water, in which, for the duration of the show, the characters splash about. My first thought was, well, Seriously?

Let me be clear about this: Andrea Bryn Bush's set is striking. Outside the context of the play, it could stand up on its own as an art installation. Moreover, the Ensemble is the only company of its size even attempting design on this scale, You won't see this set at Annex. You won't see it at Balagan. You won't see it in a StrawShop show. I'd venture to say it's highly unlikely you'd even see it at Book-It or Seattle Shakespeare Co. This go-big-or-go-home ethos has been the Ensemble's hallmark in no small part because in the company's formative years artists like Zeyl and Kaminski made it so.

For a company with the Ensemble's size and budget to execute a production on this scale demands difficult fiscal choices, untold hours of volunteer labor, and scads of resources begged, borrowed, or stolen. It's clear that they've put the work in on this one, so the question in my mind is this: why pay the price for high concept when the bar is this low?

This recycling simply can't be chalked up to a youthful lack of institutional memory. Not when the similarities are this apparent, when the progenitor existed on this stage from this director. Even if 48 of 49 people on any given night didn't see Crave, don't remember or simply don't care, aren't these points worth raising?

It's obvious that the Ensemble and Benington share an artistic rapport, but this feels like loving the baby so much that you hang on to the bathwater for later. If I had seen the play in a vacuum I suspect I'd be joining the chorus of writers gushing over Benington and Bush's "chlorine-scented theatrical extravaganza". Except I didn't see it in a vacuum, my memory isn't that short, and Crave production stills are only a couple of clicks away.

There are a couple of things I can say unequivocally. First, Tommy Smith is a standout playwright, and he gives the ensemble a treasure trove of rich ideas to work with. Sextet is a fully realized production of a play that was workshopped at WET in a much earlier version several years ago. It is smart, impressively tight, even symphonic in its conception and construction. The text is musical, not a musical in the Rodgers and Hammerstein sense, but a choral work employing words as notes and actors as instruments.

I don't mean to harshly call out either Bush or Benington, both of whom are talented artists and lovely people. I'm not sure whether the blame for this shortfall in imagination should fall primarily on the director or the design team, but ultimately I think it reflects a certain failure in the artistic direction of the company to not push back harder against an idea that really shouldn't have made it past the first draft. I'm not suggesting that it's theft or that there was malice involved on anybody's part. I'm not even saying that you shouldn't see this production; I think you should. Since its inception there hasn't been anybody else in Seattle doing things quite the way the Ensemble has, and I believe that strongly enough that I put more than a year of my own blood, sweat and tears behind its success. This play, this playwright, this director--this is exactly the kind of show that the Ensemble excels at. As do all of us who have proudly borne the title of Ensemble Member, I continue to have high expectations of the Ensemble. In this case I think they needed to do better.