The cast of The French Project at Gainsbourg, Sept. 14-16.

Tonight through Wednesday, a collective of Seattle performers, writers, and musicians are launching an ambitious performance series called The French Project at Gainsbourg , the Francophile lounge Seattle Weekly music writer Hannah Levin opened up in Greenwood with her husband last year. The show starts at 8 p.m., but doors open at 7 p.m. and seating is limited ($10 at the door, 8550 Greenwood Ave. N.).

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The core cast of the show features Erin Jorgensen, Sara Edwards, Basil Harris, and Charles Smith performing a repertoire of Parisian tunes from everyone from Edith Piaf to Jacques Brel to the bar’s namesake, Serge Gainsbourg (plus, hopefully, Boris Vian, whose omission from the set-list would be tout à fait impensable! ).

Edwards and Jorgensen were half of a four piece performance group who wowed audiences at On the Boards ‘ Northwest New Works Festival this last spring with a deeply moving piece called Sunday Service , that explored the loss and persistence of religious faith through music and text. It was by far the deepest, most serious piece at the festival, and also suggests the musical talents of the group involved. The show also features two members of Seattle’s Awesome! : Basil Harris, one of the core performers of The French Project , and Rob Witmer will be rocking the accordion.

Poet, solo performance artist, and plumber Allen Johnson also joins the crew to channel the Parisian  poètemaudit par excellence Charles Baudelaire. And finally, Tania Kupczak will be screening a film shot by Seattle’s busiest cinematographer, Ben Kasulke.

Norman Bell in “Subprime!” at the Voxbox Theatre.

“The Boiler Room? Have you seen that movie?” Norman Bell asked over the phone, the sound of Seattle rush-hour traffic buzzing in the background as he was driven up to the Voxbox Theatre on Capitol Hill. “Yeah, it was kind of like that. They brought us in each morning to a big conference room, and this guy, the phone room supervisor, would burst into the room each morning and he’d give us this big rah-rah speech. He’d be throwing chairs down, and saying, ‘Who’s a crusher? Who’s a crusher?,’ and get us all psyched up. He was bringing in star loan officers who were making over a hundred grand a year, and saying, ‘This could be you some day.'”

This was Bell’s life back in 2005, when he worked at the Kirkland-based Merit Financial as a junior loan officer. Founded in 2001 by former Huskies cornerback Scott Greenlaw, Merit Financial rode high on the subprime wave and then crashed hard. Greenlaw had only two years’ experience in mortgage lending prior to founding the company, but by 2005 Merit had around 400 employees and was named one of the best companies to work for by Washington CEO, alongside Costco and Starbucks. It was also a frat-boy environment of reckless and inexperienced lenders by design. As Greenlaw told the Seattle Times in 2006, “I hired a lot of like-minded individuals—Washington State, UW graduates who’d been in fraternities and played sports. We formed a strong brotherhood.”

All of which was a very strange place for Norman Bell to wind up. A 1993 communications graduate from the UW and an actor trained at Freehold Studio, Bell was more of an arts person than a cold-caller, even garnering a small role opposite Christian Bale in 2004’s The Machinist. But after returning to Seattle in 2004 after several years living in Spain, he got sucked into Merit’s orbit. From January to November of 2005, he was a junior loan officer manning the phone banks, trying to hook cold-called clients and then pass them off to senior loan officers. Now, Bell has transformed the eleven eventful months he spent there into Subprime!: Inside the Heart of the Mortgage Meltdown, a one-man show written by and starring Bell, that opens Friday at the Voxbox (1205 E. Pike St.; tickets $15).

“I was basically a telemarketer,” he explained. “But they sort of spruced it up a little bit to make it seem like, ‘This is your first step towards loan officer glory.'”

“For a period of time there, I do feel like I drank the Kool-Aid,” he said over the phone. “It was just like…it was kind of a spell-binding place. When you walked in there, the energy was just a buzzy energy. And for some reason I forgot that I had this communications background, that that was where my talents normally lay, and I was like, ‘Yeah! I want to do this! I want to be a loan officer, too!’ And they made you feel like–and to a certain extent, I believe they believed it, too–that what they were doing was a good thing. It was all tied into this idea that the housing bubble wasn’t a bubble, it was just going to keep going up and up, and that your house was a cash machine, you could just tap into that equity to pay off your debts, do some remodeling, go on vacation, and treat yourself well.”

“To be clear: this company was doing shady stuff. I certainly didn’t know it at the time,” Bell said. “This was in 2005 at the height of the housing boom, so everything seemed really rosy there. I hadn’t made the leap to being loan officer yet, so I didn’t know what loan officers were doing. This is all sort of posthumously, from when I was doing research for the play, and I found out Merit was fined by the Better Business Bureau, the State Department of Financial Institutions a number of times for manipulating documents, forging signatures, harassing customers.”

Merit’s success stemmed from its hyper-competitive environment. Pay was by commission, in violation of state labor law, so turn-over was high but those who could sell flourished, making six-figure yearly incomes with, in some cases, no college education. The problems started in late 2005. Merit made its money by selling off the subprime mortgages to investors. By the time Bell left in November, leads were slowing dramatically and rates were rising. Everyone who’d refinanced had already done so. Greenlaw cluelessly decided that continued profits lay in ever more complex lending arrangements, but having promoted incompetents who were good salesmen over more experienced lending agents, he didn’t have a skilled workforce. The loans were rejected by investors who forced the company to buy them back. With no cashflow and increasing debt burdens, Merit spectacularly collapsed.

“The place was just begging to have something written about it,” Bell says of the decision to revisit his time there for the theatre. “I mean, Merit was not a typical subprime mortgage company. It was voted, in 2004, one of the top firms to work for in Washington State right alongside Starbucks and Microsoft. And then by 2006, it was the number one mortgage company on the mortgage company implode-o-meter. So it went from high heights to low depths.”

As the years went by and the problems in the subprime market spider-webbed out to threaten the global economy, Bell decided to return to his experiences there and began writing Subprime! about a year ago. After its initial two-week run at the Voxbox, it returns next month at Odd Duck Studio (1214 10th Ave., Oct. 16 & 17, tickets $15), as part of Live Theatre Week.

“As far as the characters there,” he said, “yeah, there’s all kinds of interesting characters—’interesting’ sometimes being a kind word—from the CEO of the company, who was a former college football star, to the phone room supervisor, who was just kind of a manic guy, to a lot of the people that I made those phone calls with. So, these are all fictional characters in the play, but some of them are, let’s say, ‘inspired’ by people I met there.”

“I’m not writing from a derogatory perspective, of, ‘Look at those guys, look at what they did,’ and that kind of thing,” Bell added in closing. “It’s more about how we all get caught up in this type of thing. The housing boom and bust was not just something that a few people infiltrated on the rest of us, this was something that thousands and millions of people were involved in. So I really became interested in the concept of ‘Bubble Mania,’ and what is that like when everything around you is telling you, ‘Yes, this is great.’ And then you discover later. It’s like we all woke up in a cell when it crashed, and we’re all like, ‘Oh, wait a second—what were we thinking?'”

Friday night at Theatre off Jackson, noted local visual artist Susie J. Lee is restaging her first performance piece for one night only (409 Seventh Ave. S., 8 p.m., $7.50-$15).

A collaboration with dancer/choreographer Ying Zhou, For these Unclosings is halfway between a dance and an art installation. Lee specializes in time-based work, video pieces that capture moments sliding by, or gallery installations that focus on simple, visceral experience. Perhaps most famously, she created a digital light-and-sound rainstorm in the main space of the Lawrimore Project a couple years ago.

For these Unclosings, which debuted with two weeks of performances at New City Theatre last month, takes those techniques to a new level. A custom computer-based projection system designed for Lee by Andy Wilson of Microsoft Research allows two other collaborators, visual artist Keeara Rhoades and filmmaker Reina Solunaya, to “draw” on Ying as she dances. It’s a by turns humorous and haunting effect, which Lee uses to explore the idea of how we process experience.

Seattle’s Degenerate Art Ensemble‘s next official production is Sonic Tales, Halloween weekend at the Moore, but this weekend at Canoe Social Club, you can catch a new collaborative work by founding choreographer/performer Haruko Nishimura. Performances are 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday (tix $15 adv., 21+), with a free, all-ages show Saturday at 2 p.m.

The event promises several pieces of dance and film showings, but the main piece is a new work by Nishimura based on the “Topsy Turvy Doll.” An antique children’s toy, it was a two-ended doll with a reversible dress so you could switch between the two characters represented. The inspiration for Nishimura’s piece comes from one of the more popular varieties, with Little Red Riding Hood on one end and her grandmother on the other.

I have no idea what Nishimura is doing with the dance, but it’s a promising idea and features two talented local dancers: Trinidad Martinez, whose Tres Tristes Tigres down at Freehold Theatre won praise earlier this summer, and Marissa Niederhauser, recently profiled here for her dance film at Bumbershoot. The music is provided by DAE members Jeffrey Huston and Joshua Kohl, and costume work (which promises to be brilliant) by Christine Tschirgi, who’s worked with everyone from the Rep to Circus Contraption.

Killing elephants is a deeply troubling thing, which probably explains why stories about their killing lend themselves so well to broader examinations (or condemnations) of the society that finds cause to perform the gruesome act. George Orwell may be the best known writer to have tackled such a story, but George Brant’s Elephant’s Graveyard (at the Balagan, 1117 E. Pike St., through Sept. 26; tix $12-$15) is a fine addition to the genre, and the performance is strong enough that most audience members find themselves fighting back tears by the end of the night.

Brant reconstructs the true-life story of “Mary,” an elephant in the Sparks Circus that was reputedly even bigger than Barnum & Bailey’s famous Jumbo. In September 1916, Mary killed her new, inexperienced trainer when, unable to control her, he began harming her. The small-town Tennessee people who witnessed the violent death demanded Mary be put down, and in a perverse twist on Thomas Edison—who executed an elephant at Coney Island in 1903 in an attempt to discredit his competitor Nicolae Tesla’s alternating current; the event was filmed—the people of the town of Erwin decided to execute Mary by public hanging using a railroad crane. The hanging failed twice, first because they left her chained to the track and essentially tried to pull her in half, and second when the chain around her neck broke, causing her to crash down, shattering her hip. Over 2,500 people watched.

The scope of Brant’s play veers away from the standard interpretation of Mary’s story (an indictment of circuses) and uses it to explore American society caught in the throes of modernization. Erwin is portrayed as a godforsaken mud-pit of a town, the townspeople itching for excitement and grandeur, while the circus is its own society of adorable outcasts desperate to protect one of their own.

The show is performed as direct audience address, with all the different characters telling their story directly and rarely interacting with one another. It’s a device that works well and lets Brant display a wide cross-section of the people involved. The circus folk offer a lot of comic potential, and Jake Groshong as the Russian strong-man and Chris “Sloop” Bell as the clown offer the comedy that keeps the show from becoming too heavy-handed. The emotional core, though is delivered by the trio of Ray Tagavilla, Allison Strickland, and Jose Amador.

Strickland, the “ballet girl” who performs with Mary, manages both the peek-a-boo eroticism of the character while delivering a deeply moving performance exploring her relationship to the elephant. Amador, who plays a native Erwin black man, adds depth and relevance to the situation by actively reminding the audience of the complexity of race in 1916 America. And finally, there’s Tagavilla: As Mary’s trainer, he portrays a man deeply committed to his animals, but for whose bosses the entire tragedy would have been averted. Tagavilla’s performance is complex and compelling, and he takes on the moral and ethical dilemmas that are central to the play head-on.

There’s not much to fault the Balagan’s production for, which has the audience in stitches at the open and in tears at the close. Brant’s script is fine, though I can’t help feeling he’s a little too sympathetic to the circus overall. The only place it loses its way is at the end, when Brant seems to have written himself into a trap. He has to give all his characters the chance to offer their own closing, which drags on (though overall it’s a short play at about 75 minutes).

I like wine. I do. While I’m not one of those people who suddenly starts hugging you and telling you you’re my best friend after two glasses of wine, I am one of those people who is more inclined to investigate an event if there is the promise of some good (read: not three-buck Chuck) wine.

You can imagine my glee when I discovered that Intiman Theatre hosts a Wine Wednesday event with every production. A play and some vino? Wine not?! The current play Joan Didion’s adaptation of her best-selling book The Year of Magical Thinking.

The pre-show wine tasting starts at 6:30 p.m., and is presented by Maryhill Winery, 2009 Washington Winery of the Year. The wines: Gewts, Sangiovese, Reserve Cab Franc, Reserve Malbec. Not only that, they’re serving light hors d’oeuvres from Center House Bistro in the courtyard. 

The way it works: Buy a ticket for the show (or call 206-269-1900) and tell them you want to add Wine Wednesday to it. That’ll add $15 to your bill, and a tasty buzz to your evening.