Matthew Echert

Photo by Jennifer Rice.

It isn't particularly often that the speaking-in-tongues, demon-obsessed, "I brake for the Rapture" subculture of true believers comes to be portrayed on stage. It’s even less often that those portrayals evoke genuine empathy. Since it seems relatively safe to assume that the ranks of the serious theatre-making and the serious theatre-going contain relatively few serious religious devotees, it would be all too easy to take the low road, mocking the eccentricities of the faithful while ignoring their humanity.

In his semi-autobiographical new play Rapture of the Deep, (Balagan Theatre; tickets $15-$18) Seattle playwright and composer Eric Lane Barnes chooses to walk a fine line, gently poking fun at some of the absurdities of organized religion while simultaneously exploring the very real and universal human yearnings that drive people deeper into it.

The story unfolds in two different time periods separated by three decades. In the course of playing make-believe church, eleven-year-old Jimmy (Dylan Zucati) hears a heavenly calling and discovers he has an aptitude for doing the Lord’s earthly work. Religion ceases to be make-believe and becomes a very real pursuit. (I can hear the skeptics among you snickering. Be nice.) Through either Providence or coincidence--it’s largely left to you to decide which--prepubescent Jimmy gains a reputation as a faith healer. Alas, his faith is not enough to save himself from an early demise.

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In the present, Jimmy’s sister Wanda (Kris Mainz) has never been able to move past her grief over her lost little brother, twisting these feelings up in her relationship with her own son Guy (Bobby Temple).

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To varying degrees, Uncle Jimmy’s ghost haunts everybody in the show. Not really in a literal, “avenge thy dear father’s death” kind of way. Not really in a theatrical, “the ghost isn’t really there but exists merely to dramatize the character’s own internal grappling with mortality” kind of way (à la Six Feet Under), either. It’s more after the fashion of Crossing Over With John Edward: Jimmy’s presence is an impalpable but perennially present force. Unlike Crossing Over, the ghost story that’s central to Rapture is neither maudlin nor phony; it’s honest, moving, and deeply personal.

Guy and his best friend Bethany (Lauren Kottwitz) hold a makeshift séance over a candle and a can of Coca-Cola, to the great consternation of Bethany’s born-again mother (Alyssa Keene), who takes it upon herself to bring Guy into the light and quite literally purge him of his demons.

The performances are mostly good, occasionally clumsy but unfailingly earnest. Lauren Kottwitz hits all the right notes as rebellious, sarcastic, but exceedingly charming Bethany. Alyssa Keene also shines with a nuanced performance in a difficult role, never letting her characterization slip into caricature. Under the direction of John Vreeke, all of the cast do an admirable job of directing focus and evoking scenery on the necessarily spartan set.

Rapture of the Deep works hard to earn its moments of catharsis, and though it drags a little bit early on, the payoff is well worth the setup. The script is at turns touching and funny, though not without a few rough edges, as any new work inevitably has. Several scenes include beautifully sung hymns performed by the entire cast. These are also by Barnes, who is the Assistant Artistic Director of Seattle Men’s Chorus. It’s perhaps in these moments that Rapture soars highest. I found in them a reminder of the beauty and humanity of pure faith despite the occasional ludicrousness of its worldly manifestations. Undoubtedly, others with different experiences of faith and religion had different reactions to it than I.

This is what makes Rapture a challenging, worthwhile production. It is a play that raises open-ended questions rather than making bold pronouncements, that strains to understand rather than seeking to impart. Its title refers to a term coined by Jacques-Yves Cousteau to describe the effects of nitrogen narcosis, a dangerous kind of delirium that sets in as divers descend deeper underwater. The deeper Rapture’s characters descend into loneliness and desperation, the more fantastical their visions of the world are susceptible to becoming.

Leaving the theatre I wasn’t sure exactly what I should be walking away from this performance with, and I think that’s appropriate. This is the kind of work that I want to see theatres like Balagan producing: It’s new, it’s local, and it’s risky.

Rapture of the Deep is the final production at Balagan’s Pike Street location. High rent and the physical restrictions of the space limit Balagan’s growth, so they’re moving on to an as-yet undisclosed location. The challenges of their current space should be obvious to anyone who sees shows there: the relatively small space limits the amount of seating available; the low ceiling gives lighting designers little to work with; concrete walls and a cramped layout hold scenic designers within a pretty small box. A better facility will hopefully alleviate some or all of these problems.

Still, the loss of Balagan is another blow to the Pike/Pine corridor, which lost Capitol Hill Arts Center in 2008, and it will be a blow to Capitol Hill if they ultimately move elsewhere in the city. They’re already planning at least three other shows this season according to Executive Director Jake Groshong, as well as a remount of their well-received and completely sold out (as of this writing) live-action adaptation of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Of course we still have Annex Theatre, Theater Schmeater, Northwest Film Forum, and Velocity Dance Center, (which recently moved into CHAC’s vacated building,) but this Capitol Hill denizen is hoping Balagan lands somewhere good and not too far away.

Steven Epp, Don Darryl Rivera, Allen Gilmore and Daniel Breaker in A Doctor in Spite of Himself at Intiman Theatre (Photo: Chris Bennion)

Over the past few years, we’ve all been subjected to a dizzying flurry of rhetoric related to health care reform: the individual mandate; the insurance exchange; fee-for-service; socialized medicine; the public option.

With all this fresh in mind, they tell us, Intiman Theatre presents a new adaptation of Molière’s 17th-century farce A Doctor in Spite of Himself (through October 8). Doctors, with their incomprehensible medical jargon and cures worse than the disease, were a favorite satirical target of the French comedic master.

So can an alcoholic lumberjack in a doctor’s coat help us to re-frame the health care system in more human terms? Can a singing bevy of blood-spattered physicians in funny hats inject a much-needed dose of levity into the rancorous ongoing debate? When everybody is having this much fun, do any of those things even matter? Not particularly, not really, and not in the least.

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If you’re at all familiar with Molière, the plot of A Doctor in Spite of Himself will present no great surprises. Many of the standard fixtures are here: a roguish, crafty scoundrel, a wealthy buffoon, a pair of star-crossed young lovers, comic subterfuge, and a wedding. Disguises are donned and schemes are hatched. Ribald bons mots are hurled. Witty riposte, stage slaps, and savage stick beatings abound in rejoinder. Much hilarity ensues.

It would be clichéd for me to trot out well-worn theater adjectives like madcap, whimsical, zany, and slapstick, but if I did, they would all apply to this highly enjoyable production. I'll refrain though. [Ed.: Crafty scoundrel.]

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Zaniness notwithstanding, when translated literally Molière can be difficult to follow in the same way most three-century-old texts can be. Caustic barbs aimed at French social stratification in the age of Louis XIV just don’t have the same bite amongst the Facebook nation.

Christopher Bayes and Steven Epp’s new adaptation forgoes these in exchange for a rapid-fire mélange of contemporary pop culture allusions and local color: Enumclaw, Bumbershoot, a Dead or Alive single, and a certain famous death scene from Platoon all sneak their way in. While obviously a departure from strict word-for-word translations of the original, this inventive adaptation maintains an enthusiastic fidelity to the mischievous comic spirit that rules Molière’s works.

Co-adaptor Epp and director/co-Adaptor Bayes, both formerly of Minneapolis’s highly regarded Theatre de la Jeune Lune, are masters of physical comedy. Doctor’s superb ensemble executes high wire acts of verbal and physical dexterity without missing a beat. The cast includes some top-shelf local talent: Chelsey Rives, Don Darryl Rivera, and Renata Friedman are all deservedly familiar faces on Seattle’s larger stages.

Multi-instrumentalists Greg C. Powers and Robertson Witmer provide live music that’s part circus noir, part klezmer, and all to great effect. Elizabeth Caitlin Ward’s clever costumes are vibrant mash-ups of period pieces with contemporary flourishes—think corset accessorized with digital wristwatch. Narelle Sissons’s set provides a fitting backdrop for a physical comedy this large and colorful.

There will of course be plenty more opportunities to see Molière’s plays on stage—he’s second perhaps only to Shakespeare when it comes to classic playwrights still seeing wide production—but opportunities to see them executed this well and on this grand a scale are few and far between.

Intiman offers a variety of ways for the budget-conscious to see its shows, including $10 tickets for the under-25 set. Think twice before bringing along the way-under-25 set though, as A Doctor in Spite of Himself is rife with double entendres, and mildly sexual and overtly scatological humor. Just the way Molière would have wanted it.

If classics-based Intiman has sometimes suffered from a perception of stuffiness, this production represents an exciting new course under artistic director Kate Whoriskey. If you’ve been away from Intiman for a while, it’s time to take another look.

This is accessible, broadly appealing, and just plain fun theatre. Even if the marketing copy's claim to political immediacy is a stretch, and even though Molière's pointed jokes don't scandalize now the way they might have in 1666, ten minutes after the curtain went up I wasn't thinking about any of those things. It's eighty minutes' worth of well-crafted, masterfully performed, outright joyful theatre, and when isn't there room for that?

Melissa D Brown and Shelley Virginia in "deCOMPOSITION" at the Erickson Theatre. Photo by Reed Nakayama.

deCOMPOSITION, (previewed here last Friday and running this Friday through Sunday at the Erickson Theatre; tickets $12-$20) is an original play framed by, and tangentially about, the scientific process of decomposition. At the outset, and for anybody who's seen a fair amount of experimental theatre, this might sound like a risky proposition, sort of a theatrical bridge to nowhere. What emerges instead is intelligent, intimate, and fresh.

deCOMPOSITION unfolds as three separate threads that entwine but rarely intersect: a childhood friendship gradually unravels as two women's adult lives begin to diverge; another woman whose grandfather has died struggles to understand loss; and a biology professor delivers a lecture on the life cycle of the king salmon.

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At its best, deCOMPOSITION examines loss and decay as ever-present forces of entropy that we experience in our relationships and everyday lives. Dissecting the word into its linguistic roots for the audience, the professor (Alaska native Ty Hewitt in a nearly pitch-perfect performance) explains that salmon begin to decompose even before their deaths.

This plays out metaphorically in the other two stories. Insecurities and resentment gradually create a rift between the two friends, while the grandfatherless young woman tries to make the absence in her life amount to something emotionally palpable by compiling memories, enumerating facts, and, unexpectedly, baking. All of this hints at the many ways that even as we live our lives things are crumbling down around us, often just as we begin to make sense of them.

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This is a show that encourages its audience to actively participate but stops short of anything that should make the introverts in the house squirm in their seats. As one of those introverts, I will admit to cringing somewhat when upon walking into the theater the audience was invited to sit in two rows of chairs set up directly on the stage rather than in the existing seating. The effect is a successful one--by bringing the audience into the minimalist set, this performance in the already intimate Erickson Theatre gains a certain approachability it may have lacked otherwise.

Director Jess K. Smith and her talented ensemble originally created and refined deCOMPOSITION at Columbia University with the guidance of renowned director Anne Bogart, and it shows. The staging is crisp and effective, obviously the work of a director and cast with a firm rapport and an eye for striking stage pictures. The performances are uniformly detailed and engaging, and the cast includes a couple of Seattle faces that regular theatergoers here should recognize: Sean Patrick Taylor (Seattle Shakespeare Co., Wooden O, Theater Schmeater,) and the wonderful Melissa D. Brown (Seattle Rep, Book It, Macha Monkey, et al.)

Several days after the fact, I'm still uncertain what to ultimately take away from this show, but that struggle itself is both meaningful and worthwhile. This is challenging, interesting theatre, and it's great to see this company with extensive Northwest ties bringing their work to Seattle. Though it falls short of what it aspires to at times, deCOMPOSITION is full of intriguing ideas presented in ways that are smart, deeply personal, and moving.

Oh, and there's cake.