All posts by StefanDW

Theatre

A Dangerous World Viewed Best From Afar

Don’t try to grip Baron Samedi too tightly (through May 11 at On The Boards); close inspection will squeeze the pleasure out of it, and there’s a lot of pleasure here. The late Allain Buffard’s dance-theatre song cycle also features torture, enslavement, rape, child soldiers, and all the other social weapons of despotism and fanatical insurrection.

The music is mostly Kurt Weill, which does not cleave seamlessly to this world but complements it. Such environments breed the louche, distanced tone of Weill’s music and the characters of his songs. When vulnerability is fatal then cool remove and hostile seduction define the survivors from the fodder. Buffard’s choreography rarely takes enough focus in this work to speak in its own voice alone but rather reveals itself as integral to the language and physicality of this society.

Our set appears to be a giant sheet of paper, curled up at two corners and scrolling down from a platform to the orchestra floor. An upright electric bass, a keyboard, and a guitar with a deck of pedals live just off stage left. Out of the darkness we hear a voice—a hell of a voice—singing to an open, often discordant guitar melody, heavy on the contour, making a smooth, round, jazz ballad sound. As “Trouble Man” takes shape the guitar comes in from the hinterlands and connects more directly with the voice and light catches the singer.

Those eccentric orchestrations (by Sarah Murcia along with much of the playing) are the norm here often relying on either a driving bass (slapped, plucked, or growlingly bowed) or a wandering guitar (Seb Martel), sometimes an arch organ. Actor/Dancer/Singers support with slapping and snapping percussion.

Through all this we see and hear stories of disassociation by race, conflict, the criminalization of prostitutes, and more. We see the struggles of the dispossessed, mostly in broad, universal stories, occasionally with devastating specificity, often emotionally represented through dance.

These stories touch mostly on nations of European colonization in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. Zulu and Portuguese join German, French, and English, often in simultaneous murmured echoes. Here we are a planet unified in our dysfunctional response to colonialism.

The dances play, sliding down the curve of the paper from platform to orchestra. They struggle through asphyxiating tension. They play the roles of asymmetrical power structures: feeble tyrants who draw attention that totters between obeisance and the covetous salivation of hyenas circling the ailing. Dancers sing, singers dance, musicians act. There is a democratic feeling about the show.

Costumes, by Buffard with Nadia Lauro, share the general tone of decrepit decadence. A top hat embodies formal power, but a kilt has power too. Suits make uniforms for the anonymous as much as the iconoclastic. Hoods blind the wearer while hiding her from others’ gaze.

The overall effect is one of a cabaret presentation of the international headlines, less in narrative detail than emotional specificity. The texts of the songs–including a surprise bookend from Billie Holiday–have metaphoric relationships with the circumstances of the vignettes. These might be songs these characters would sing to speak their souls instead of writing the words themselves.

It all plays with such knowing style that the show avoids becoming depressive. It disturbs just enough to unsettle without provoking action. It gives us a way to see the world we know lies out there and to cope with it from a safe distance.

{Baron Samedi runs through May 11 at On the Boards, tickets and more info can be found here.}

Theatre

Love, Boats, Dystopia: Satori Brings a World to Life in Returning to Albert Joseph

It’s time, once again, to take a little trip to a dystopian world that is distressingly familiar and comfortingly strange. You know the literature: Brave New World, 1984, The Hunger Games, The Giver… Sleeper: places dominated by shadowy leaders whose image engenders fear, obedience, and rebellion. Add to the list Returning to Joseph, Satori Group’s world premiere production of a script by Spike Friedman (through May 25).

This touching meditation on love, education, and family through boat analogies and civil strife features strong performances from a pair of actors (a pair and a half, counting the prerecorded eponymous dictator). Despite a lull in the second half, the show is moving and more engaging that most one sees in a Seattle theatre season, but its greatest strength is in the details. Friedman writes with such finesse that, despite vast differences, the world of this play feels closer to our own than most plays set here and now.

The characters we discover in that world include Andrea (LoraBeth Barr) and Leo (Quinn Franzen) who meet at a rebel gathering that gets routed by loyalist forces. Andrea and Leo barely escape and Leo, who is more of a loyalist, saves their lives but suffers serious brain damage. This provides Andrea with an opportunity to rebuild his brain with rebel sympathies, much as the government brainwashes their prisoners (more effective than killing). In the process Andrea and Leo form a deep personal bond that is strained when she leads her new-made rebel home to share her achievement with her comrades.

The tale is shown in flashbacks as Andrea and Leo speak their story, or a version of their story, into a microphone in hopes of gaining access to a rebel-held shelter. They cannot see the people to whom they speak but they look up, as if at a camera, or toward a two-way mirror. We are keenly aware that we are observing, that we have power we won’t use, and that these actors/characters are vulnerable.

As they beg to be let in, to be given shelter, we in our steeply raked gallery of seats, begin to feel that the play wants something from us. We begin to look for a way to let them in, and then suddenly the tables are turned.

At intermission we are all asked to exit and instructed to leave nothing in the theatre. When we return it is to the area that had been the stage. The actors perform on the gallery that had been the house.

There is an idea at work here but the staging is awkward. The gallery is useful in terms of the script’s interest in audiences and performance, but feels wrong as the setting. It serves as a projection surface where we see video of Albert Joseph broken up on those railings, steps, and risers. This does make the leader more shadowy but seems an odd choice for a projection surface in the world of the play.

In the first half the play we watch Andrea and Leo’s relationship take shape. Barr and Quinn have great chemistry and instantly snap back and forth from their shared intimacy in the testimony scenes to the various points of growing trust in the flashbacks. The second half is less compelling, in part, because we are denied that chemistry. Instead we find Andrea alone with that projection for much of her time on stage.

The interrogation that makes up most of the second half is wickedly clever. It proceeds like a therapy session with the subject doing most of the work. The prerecorded therapist/interrogator simply provides prompts. In the world of Albert Joseph that prompting is so powerful that punishment comes in removal of the interrogator: The subject desires the torture.

The hitch is that most of the play’s dramatic action takes place in this second half and the changes don’t seem organically justified. There is little for us to discover, no need we might fulfill. All we can do is wait for Andrea to escape her engrained responses. Though she has enough perspective to see the evil in Albert Joseph’s control she remains swayed by it. When she finally and suddenly breaks she justifies the self-conscious staging of projection on gallery, calling out the performance of power and coming to question most of what she knows.

This revelation, though long in coming, leaves us with questions about our own power and place in society and the world. There’s no brow beating; they are subtle and incisive questions. Finally, Friedman is kind and hopeful enough to leave us not just unsettled but also reassured.

The world of this performance wouldn’t hold together without strong support from the technical team. Marnie Cumings builds on her growing reputation for subtle work in challenging settings. Evan Mosher’s sound design is understated and effective; even if the projector sounds feel symbolic they still do the job.

Costumes, by Doreen Sayegh and Greta Wilson, are a highlight. Both rustic and futuristic, they look like clothes one would want to wear here and now. This does nothing to diminish their efficacy as costumes. We immediately know how these two characters differ from one another by their shoes alone. It is this level of attention to detail that characterizes the entire production making it equally transporting and transforming for its audience.

{The Satori Group’s Returning to Albert Joseph plays at theLAB@Inscape through May 25, tickets can be found here.}

Theatre

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: Still Blowing Us Away After All These Years

Photo by Alabastro Photography.

Were Martha a real person and alive today she’d be 103 and George would still be six years her junior. These giants of the American stage have been battling it out since 1962 and if the current production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (through May 18 at Seattle Rep.) is any indication they have plenty of fight left in them and plenty more to say to us.

The Seattle Rep production avoids the pitfalls and delivers the goods, letting Edward Albee’s masterpiece work its magic. In a week or so it will be a must-see event but this week the gears aren’t quite meshing.

The machine those gears drive is a booze-fueled trip through the wee hours. Here the bonds of marriage support and suffocate. Intimacy is betrayed, vulnerability is exposed, and we see ourselves as individuals and a nation with heartrending clarity.

It is early September, which is New Year’s Eve in mid-century American academia. George (R. Hamilton Wright), a middle aged history professor, and his wife, Martha (Pamela Reed)—the longtime college president’s daughter—come home tired and tipsy. George is ready for bed, but Martha has invited a new hire, Nick (Aaron Blakely)—a biology professor—and his wife, Honey (Amy Hill), for a nightcap and more.

Nick and Honey seem like a conventional, unexceptional couple. They are polite and tidy. They seem a little bored and boring. George and Martha are none of those things.

Honey is sweet and demure. Nick is a clean cut all American, not defined by his profession. In fact it takes some doing for him to convince George and Martha that he is in the biology, rather the math department.

George wears his erudition on his sleeve. Martha is at least his equal, intellectually, but more important, she is an excellent sparring partner. Most of their conversation involves very serious sounding verbal duels.

It is obvious, almost from the outset, that George and Martha’s scrapping is an expression of love. They are passionate. They play with words and fantasies, shoving shivs at every opening, pausing (a bit too much in this production) to savor the fun as they get one another worked up.

It’s all games. It’s play, and therefore, it is very theatrical. Director, Braden Abraham, points this out a little too overtly creating stagey scenes before period-perfect god-awful articulated room dividers that evoke curtains on a proscenium.

The great actor and playwright, Tracy Letts (who played George in the 2012 Broadway production) has suggested that most couples envy George and Martha. They may seem brutal with one another, but after a couple decades of marriage they are still engaged and involved with one another. However no one could envy Nick and Honey.

This young couple, new to the faculty, stumble into George and Martha’s arena where they are coerced into the bloodsport. Their insertion into George and Martha’s private lives provides the meat of the play. Problems must be solved, secrets contained, and fantasies unmasked. George and Martha do these things in the only way they know how: Let the games begin.

Reed and Wright play the games well. Reed brays with the best of them and leaves herself enough room to build. Her climax is full of jagged edges that give Martha a surprising frailty. She shatters too soon.

Wright gives us George played with a touch of Groucho Marx and Woody Allen. This is not the most dignified George, but a more knowing clown and one we love easily.

Blakely holds his own with Nick, making him a force to be reckoned with. One doesn’t believe he’ll ever strike George but he could. Amy Hill’s Honey refuses to get lost in the background. She’s a strong enough presence that even when she says nothing we look to her for a non-verbal response. She never disappoints.

The characters in this play consume a dangerous amount of alcohol. SRT’s Keeping Up With Martha drink offer (must be pre-ordered at the box-office) is less ambitious and may help attentive audience members keep their cool through the onstage fireworks. The three drink flight features local booze.

My trusted drinking assistant declared the pre-show champagne cocktail inoffensive but boring. The first intermission Old Fashioned was better, with a pleasant surprise in the maple syrup (apropos of New England academia). The second intermission Gin Manhattan offended her (gin in a Manhattan!) but I found the gin softened the cough syrup quality of the sweet vermouth.

And yes, it is a three-act show, but there isn’t a slow moment. It is a tense three hours of laughter, anxiety, and wonder. In the end we join Nick, unreservedly murmuring “My God, I think I understand” but also, we continue to wonder

Fifty-two years on this play still feels topical. Academia has changed (a little), we drink a little less, and women are more liberated but the topics remain current. Genetic engineering, evangelicalism, the objective science, technology, and math studies opposed to the subjective liberal arts, all play important parts. All these are still part of our conversation today.

{Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf plays at Seattle Repertory Theatre through May 18. Tickets and more info can be found here.}

Theatre

Winners and Losers Is A Bare Knuckled Knockout

A table, a chair, a notebook, a drink, and a script that feels like an evolving work: These elements suggest Spalding Gray, or his scion, Mike Daisey. They set us up for monologues of intensely personal self-revelation delving into the finest grain of culture and sociology through riveting storytelling.

We get most of that at Winners and Losers (through Sunday at On The Boards), but here there are two chairs and two drinks, and they’re beers—not a glass of water. There’s also a pair of bells. These pairings are the effects of camaraderie and competition. This is no cooperative game; the contestants work together only long enough to see who wins. It is a discomfiting distillation of the sociological side of our capitalist culture. It’s also hilarious, heartfelt, and a hell of a lot of fun.

Vancouverites (BC) James Long (Theatre Replacement) and Marcus Youssef (Neworld Theatre) are longtime friends and theatre artists who have been performing this show since 2012. It is a testament to their maturity, professionalism, and the strength of their friendship that they are still at it. What begins as a couple of friends nattering wittily and discursively gets serious and, finally, brutal. There is no comfort here but it’s about as exciting and engaging as theatre gets.

Part of the fun of the show is the surprise of immediacy. The script is structured to create spaces of improvisation. The performance often relates to the audience in a similar frame to stand-up comedy. There’s a high awareness of our presence—the houselights remain up for most of the show. We want to join the conversation and are even explicitly welcomed to offer contributions.

Sometimes the improvisational structures remind one of magic act (or J.L. Moreno’s Theatre of 100% Spontaneity) in which audience involvement and timely references serve as proofs of the improv. A reference to the tunnel boring machine, Big Bertha, fell flat at a recent performance (maybe they’ll try car tabs for the rest of the run) but over all this show provides more spontaneity and authenticity than one will see anywhere outside of postmodern dance.

Another key to the success of making a conversation about competition, capitalism, and privilege non-threatening and wildly entertaining is that the subject sneaks up on us. It is shown before it’s told. The ding of a bell punctuates the Winners and Losers game, in which Long and Youssef debate and declare whether Mexico, Tom Cruise, or a variety of other subjects are winners and losers. This places the structure of sport around the internal monologue of judgment and prejudice that accompanies many of our social interactions. Ping Pong ensues with a monologue broken up across the point breaks. There’s even an intense wrestling match (no fight choreographer here).

This is raw performance and feels a little unsafe. Thankfully the houselights come down before things get really ugly on stage. Without that stage and the commitment to tour and remain engaged with one another this kind of debate could tear friends apart. There are good reasons we don’t often talk this openly about privilege.

The intimacy of OTB’s studio theatre is perfect for this show but the run is too short. This is an absolute must-see. Good news/bad news: it is being filmed for On The Boards TV and I will be interested to see how it plays, safely distanced on a screen. I suspect it will still be useful and good but as a live show it provides that rare elusive quality that makes all those mediocre shows worth seeing on the off chance that one might turn out to be more like this.

Theatre

“Ernest Shackleton Loves Me” Kicks Out Your No Good Baby-Daddy

A century ago a self-assured adventurer named Ernest Shackleton embarked on the last expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. The story of Shackleton’s rescue of his crew from their ill-fated attempt to cross the diameter of Antarctica provides the spine of the musical Ernest Shackleton Loves Me (through May 3rd by Balagan at Seattle Rep.).


Shackleton’s journey is fascinating for reasons ranging from the personal to the socio-political. This Balagan production focuses on the personal, but not the personal experiences of that adventure. Rather the show is interested in the personal challenges faced by Kat (Valerie Vigoda), the sleep-deprived mother of a newborn in present day Brooklyn. At best, equating her feats of endurance with those of the expedition does nothing for either story. At worst, it suggests a regressive attitude toward women.

Effectively a two-person show (Wade McCollum plays the other roles) the musical is light on details. We get enough background on Kat to know that she’s at the end of her rope. She has obstacles (she’s poor, the baby won’t sleep, and she’s so tired she’s hallucinating) but she has almost no conflict. We hear the sound of a crying baby whenever Joe Dipietro (a Tony winner who wrote the book) wants a shot of dramatic tension to remind us why this isn’t a one man show about Shackleton.

Here is where one might warn of spoilers were there much plot outside the Wikipedia entry. Shackleton’s improbable revelation is his love for this 21st Century Brooklyn single mom. He discovers Kat’s music through a nebulous cosmic time/space interface and depends on it to get his crew through their ship-bound over-wintering (strategic use of music, and even plays, to keep crews sane in polar exploration dates to a century before Shackleton).

Kat’s revelation is that she really can throw out her clichéd loser musician of a boyfriend, who has abandoned her and their newborn. The entirety of her conflict rests on the fact that she melts when he writes songs for her. This and sleep deprivation keep her from changing the locks on the apartment or immediately kicking him out when he returns from his failed tour.

Most disturbing is the fact that, were it only Shackleton’s chronicle standing between her and this parasitic man-child, she might succumb to the boyfriend’s musical travelogue metaphors of love. Kat is all ready to give in again when she stumbles on tangible evidence that her journey with Shackleton was more than just a hallucinatory trip through a Wikipedia entry. The implication: a woman without a man—even a polyamorous, man-child, prone to disappearing acts—has no will of her own and needs a romantic interest in her life to provide the will to get rid of the bum.

Plot be damned there are some engaging performances in this show and at least one good song. Unfortunately most of those performances belong to the male half of the cast.

Vigoda does have a lovely voice and plays a variety of instruments well but her acting never connects emotionally. She is most interesting when she is most focused on playing music rather than a character. Lyrics and music are credited to Vigoda and her husband and musical partner, Brendan Milburn, of the band Groovelily.

That male half of the cast, McCollum, is winningly charismatic in nearly all his roles. Whether performing the fatuous, moustache twirling Ponce De Leon or the heroic machismo of Shackleton in braggadocio overdrive, McCollum takes the show over the top in flights of abject silliness.

The show is at its best when it’s least realistic and least serious. DiPietro scores some points in comic bits of plot that establish a theme and deliver a punch line with glorious craftsmanship. The more serious moments and real world context do more harm than good, especially in terms of the show’s relationship with the audience.

That relationship is confused early on as Kat, faced with abandonment and sleeplessness, begins a video blog and the updates it with manic frequency. This allows her to speak to the audience and provide lots of exposition, but the device feels strained.

Kat is presented as an avant-garde opera composer. This justifies her playing instruments on stage (though most of the music is played offstage by Ryan O’Connell) and provides her connection to Shackleton. The trick of a musical played by an experimental composer character, whose works are seen by half a dozen and enjoyed by none, is that there is a disconnect between what she says and what she plays. The edgiest this music gets is an annoying reliance on excessive reverb meant as a comic bit.

Most of the songs sound like most songs in pop musicals (i.e. neither Sondheim nor Webber but somewhere in between, near Jonathon Larson). Most of the lyrics retread the theme of endurance and few songs move the plot forward. The standout number, Stop Rewind Play Record doesn’t do anything for the plot but it is musically interesting. Unfortunately, as with many songs in the show, the balance on this song’s amplification was such on opening night that we often lost Vigoda’s vocal.

The projections (possibly one of the aspects that make this show “unlike any other” according to press materials) are excellent and include much footage from the expedition. However these images draw focus from the onstage performers. The A/V team does nice work integrating McCollum’s projected performances.

Ernest Shackleton Loves Me has overt Broadway ambitions. This Balagan production is the latest in a long series of pre-Broadway development of this material and features a team of industry insiders with serious NYC credentials. One hopes they’ll develop it further and take some lessons from other shows that combine music, projections, and romantic stories of long journeys with greater success.

Dance

Singing Toward Consciousness Beyond The GPS

Arriving comfortably early for Wayfinders, the Holcombe Waller music performance currently playing at On The Boards (through April 12) the uninitiated might grow uneasy. The preshow soundtrack is a nauseatingly innocuous highlights parade of the worst of new age music. One can only hope that it is a set up for something better. Thankfully it is.

When the houselights dim the record scratches. After a few bars in the Baroque and some distortion Holcombe Waller and his ensemble delight while vaguely indicating food for thought in a fast-paced show that, dramatically, is mostly reveal with the slightest of conflict and resolution sequences. It is as entertaining and accessible a production as one is likely to see at On The Boards.

There is dialogue, movement, and video, along with lighting effects, and some powerful emotions. It’s almost musical theatre. Through a healthier variation on “2001: A Space Odyssey” with a flipped twist of the recent film, “Her”, Waller ruminates on our relationship with technology. His questions aren’t discomfitingly provocative or challenging, but there aren’t any easy conclusions either.

The music is on the folk end of pop. Instruments include flute, violin, viola, French horn, bass, and drums, all played on stage by a chorus of actor/musician/vocalists.

There’s a lot of distortion and electronic manipulation. One hears unexpected sounds while watching the ensemble play. The first few numbers are heavily Celtic-inflected and expand the exposition that Waller begins in his opening monologue. His speaking voice is amplified with distortion and echo that gets excessive and annoying before fading. Waller’s singing voice, on the other hand, approaches pop icon status and transports souls when he breaks into falsetto.

The lyrics are largely solid. There are as many weak metaphors as sharp; a few overstretched mis-usages balance exacting wordplay. He speaks of the “sub-conscience” and of “fleeting away” with such precise diction that the choice must be intentional. An innocent character speaks of digital devices growing in the sea, where they are collected on cargo ships where we first see them, arriving through the Golden Gate. Waller’s verbal prestidigitation even finds an aching heart beneath the cold exterior of the GPS navigation systems that play a central role in the work.

While the text can seem downright technophobic the production is anything but. Lights, music, choreography, text, and projections are all seamlessly integrated and simply executed, hiding none of the visuals and still creating magic. By integrating it into the plot, Waller excuses a camera rig on a dolly that others might simply use without explanation. It isn’t strictly necessary, but it speaks to the degree of care and attention he gives the work and it suits his theme.

The show’s relationship with the audience wanders a bit at first, but this is useful. It isn’t clear initially whether or not the audience is addressed as a character in the show. While a character eventually emerges this ambiguity serves to draw us into the story. We identify with the very human character whom our protagonist serves. Her bemusement in the climactic moments of the piece is disarmingly authentic.

That sudden shock of her response as our own response is all that justifies the abrupt ending of the show. With a stated running time of an intermissionless 80 minutes Thursday night’s performance ran a scant 50 minutes, catching everyone off guard. One might question whether there was more to see but that new age soundtrack returned driving the audience from the house, Waller’s songs from our heads, and driving home questions of consciousness in a digitally distracted world.