Recent Stories with tag act theatre

Let us now praise Charles Leggett.

Back in February, he was a glowering, bullying giant of dashed dreams as Dave Moss in Glengarry Glen Ross.

This August he's a paranoid conspiracy- theorist Falstaff in Steven Dietz's Yankee Tavern at ACT (through August 29). Leggett's rotund Ray schlumpfs and circles about the stage like he's a heavyset, aging bee entranced by booze-laden petals, taking conspiracy theory to a rigorously abstract level, where the absence of conspiracy is in fact a conspiracy.

His brayed ravings--Dietz reaches inspired heights--encompass everything from the wedding industry and moon landings to assassinations and allergy medications. He talks to dead people upstairs in the rat-infested rooms of New York's Yankee Hotel, where he, an "itinerant homesteader" has staked his claim. He's a hopeless gasbag but a warm avuncular figure for Adam (Shawn Telford) and Janet (Jennifer Lee Taylor).

He's also a 9/11 skeptic. It's 2006, and still too soon, even for the people who love him, for anyone to be worrying over the bones of the World Trade Center dead, noting how this or that doesn't "add up." In the first half of the play, Dietz accomplishes the not-so-minor miracle of bringing you around to Ray's point of view--the program notes many of Ray's claims are technically factual. It's up to you whether this amounts to any one thing, or the inevitable result of chaos, post-disaster CYA, feuds for control of information for its own sake, and a willingness to "shape the narrative."... (more)

Brenda Joyner and Amy Thone in NCTC's "On the Nature of Dust." Photo: Chris Bennion

Though it's a comedy about the mother-daughter bond--albeit one that also provokes audible sniffling--On the Nature of Dust (through May 30 at ACT's Falls Theatre, tickets $10-$25) will never be confused with the chick-lit fare that features earnest joy luck clubs or no-shit-taking ya-ya sisterhoods. It's most hilarious moments have the feel of hidden family-photo-album candids. Still, it celebrates a central mystery (acknowledging, then breaking that bond) in a way that many--if not most--men may only guess at the depth of.

From the moment that the lights come up on Amy Thone, sprawled out at the breakfast table in a too-short denim skirt, the play is owned by her character, Shirley Bliss, a hard-living, man-chasing, unfit excuse for a mom. Sure, we can laugh about it in retrospect, but she's the kind of woman you give a wide berth to in the supermarket. She is the challenge playwright Stephanie Timm has set herself. You've heard of an antihero. Meet the anti-mom.

If Shirley gets a hard-won education in motherhood, just as her baby Clara (Brenda Joyner) is about to leave the nest, Thone, Timm, and director Kathleen Collins are careful not to sand her rough edges smooth. Her language and parenting advice--while uproarious--are recommended for those 16 and above. (Her explanation for why she smells the way she does exiting the bedroom may not have an upper or lower bound.) 

Etta Lilienthal's scenic design for Shirley's apartment smacks you upside the head with the social stratum suggested by a plush burgundy couch, a plastic wood-grain breakfast table, and floral-patterned vinyl chairs (the ones with the metal frame and trapezoidal backs), all on a carpet of AstroTurf. (The impossible-but-true AstroTurf really sends me.)

Brenda Joyner and Benjamin Harris in NCTC's "On the Nature of Dust." Photo: Chris Bennion

Borrowing from what is now absurdist tradition (and a penchant of her own), Timm has over-achieving, compulsively organized Clara turn into a chimpanzee following a church-utility-closet groping spree with Bernie Wells (Benjamin Harris).

Oddly, the chimpanzee scenes are not all that funny--at least in comparison to the rest of the show.

Once Clara starts devolving, the play is all Thone's--and Harris's. Harris is that lanky, gawky, blurting and grunting ur-teenager that typifies the actual variety (or used to, prior to Michael Cera). Harris is never smarter than his character, never peeks out behind Bernie's goofball incomprehension. Shirley, adrift without her daughter's mothering, at first tries to find a way to restore Clara, and gradually settles on trying to create the environment she needs.... (more)

Russell Hodgkinson, John Aylward, MJ Sieber, R. Hamilton Wright, Charles Leggett, the cast of Seattle Rep's "Glengarry Glen Ross." Photo by Derek Sparks

Six and a half feet tall, with long hair, rough-hewn features, and a penchant for black leather jackets, Wilson Milam manages at once to stand out and to disappear in plain sight. Have him pointed out to you in a crowd and you can't help but notice him towering over the rest; pass him on the street and you probably wouldn't look up. It's an effect that's well suited to his personality: friendly but somewhat taciturn, in an interview he would sometimes stop mid-sentence to ponder something, an odd flicker of a happy memory crossing his face, only to ultimately defer the question.

Milam's also one of the most successful theatre directors you've likely never heard of, and certainly one of the most successful theatre artists to emerge from Seattle in last few decades. His career began in collaboration with playwright and actor Tracy Letts in Chicago in the early Nineties, with Milam directing Letts' first two plays, years before the he wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County. From Chicago, Milam made his way to London where he's been based for more than a decade, making a name for himself as a director of new plays, perhaps most notoriously with the premiere Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a darkly comic bloodbath of infamous proportions that's being staged at ACT Theatre in October.

Last year, Milam made his Seattle debut as a director with a widely praised production of Conor McPherson's The Seafarer at the Rep (itself a bit of bloodbath of booze), and now, he's returned to direct one of the plays that's been a life-long dream of his: Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's 1982 masterpiece about an office of desperate real estate salesman, starring a who's who cast of Seattle's best actors, including R. Hamilton Wright, MJ Sieber, and Charles Leggett. The show opens tonight, Feb. 10, and runs through the 28th; tickets $15-$59.

I met with Milam a couple weeks ago to discuss the play and his career over coffee at Caffe Zingaro in Lower Queen Anne, near the theatre. Asked what part of town he grew up in, he chuckled and responded: "Bellevue. Back when QFC was still a pasture land, and there was no bridge. I still say the 'new' bridge."... (more)

Trying to describe the performances of Queen Shmooquan demands a literary acuity far beyond my limited powers. This last June, I saw Shmooquan at On the Boards, as part of the Northwest New Works Festival. She closed out a program of four, following up a doze-inducing semi-improvised dance number, and it was sort of like the heavens split open and a choir of angels began vomiting unicorns down on us all.

Entering on a bicycle and dressed like Prince, Shmooquan proceeded to perform her own downward spiral from aspiring actress to coke-addicted burn-out in a 20-minute performance replete with a degrading producer's couch audition, frequent mispronunciation of the word "vagina" (as in, The Bagina Monologues), and fake male genitalia made from a dildo and two maracas stuffed into a bra and hung between her legs.

In a word, it was awesome, and tonight and tomorrow (9:30 p.m., tickets $15), Queen Shmooquan is performing the evening-length work she turned that show into, the greatest Amerikin Hero ALIVE, at ACT... (more)

Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, which opened at ACT Theatre last weekend (through Nov. 9, tickets $10-$37.50), is all about how rock music expanded minds behind the Iron Curtain and helped liberate the masses from Communism. It's a swansong to the Sixties and buys into all the tired cliches about the power of music, particularly the sort that appeals to Baby Boomers.

Misha Berson loved it, but I didn't at all (I half wonder if we didn't see it on different nights), and not just because I don't like the themes. For instance, she wrote that, "Instead of the cumbersome slide projections in the Broadway staging of Rock 'n' Roll, ACT uses chalk, paper and spray paint to indicate the passing years. And Stoppard's specified sound clips of '60s rock (by Bob Dylan, the Doors, Pink Floyd, et al.) are smoothly inserted."

Personally, I think she's dead wrong on both counts there, which is just the beginning of the show's problems, but you're free to decide who to believe. All I can say is that when I was shown the above clip...

I need Bo Eason to tell me it's okay to watch football.

After seeing Eason's engrossing one-man show at ACT on Thursday, I don't know if I can do so guilt-free again. Watching the former NFL player act out the injury that helped end his career actually made me physically ill. No joke: Sweat pouring out of me, I excused myself down my row, and hustled to the bathroom to splash water on my face. I thought about the real scars on Eason's actor knees, about seeing him inject himself there on stage, as he did before games during his playing days.

And I thought about Curtis Williams, who in 2000 absorbed a fatal hit playing in a football game for the University of Washington. "He fell to his back and went into convulsions," teammate Anthony Kelley relates in Derek Johnson's The Dawgs of War , which I'd read earlier that week . "He was mouthing the words 'I can't breathe .' ... Then Curtis began spitting up and shaking, and his eyes rolled up in the back of his head." Williams died of his injuries 18 months... (more)

M.J. Sieber and Paul Morgan Stetler in NCTC's well-loved "The Adding Machine". Photo by Chris Bennion

Well! No sooner do I mention it than I get a press release from TPS announcing the short-listed names for the first (hopefully annual) Gregory Awards. And boy can I call it: New Century Theatre Company all over the place. Here's the run-down:

Outstanding actor: Hans Altwies ( The Seafarer, Seattle Rep ), Charles Leggett ( Merchant of Venice, Seattle Shakespeare ), M.J. Sieber (for Strawberry Workshop 's Elephant Man and Guttenberg: The Musical ), and Paul Morgan Stetler ( NCTC's The Adding Machine ).

Outstanding actress: Kimberly King ( ACT's Becky's New Car ), Hana Lass ( Intiman's Crime & Punishment or Seattle Shakespeare's The Tempest ), Amy Thone (NCTC's The Adding Machine ), and Billie Wildrick ( 5th Avenue's Sunday in the Park With George ).

Outstanding director: Kurt Beattie (ACT's Becky's New Car or Seattle Children's Pharaoh Serket and the Lost Stone of Fire ), Julie Beckman (Strawshop's Elephant Man ), John Langs (NCTC's The Adding Machine ), and Allison Narver (NCTC's Orange Flower Water ).

Person to watch: Vincent Delaney, Etta Lilienthal, Don Darryl Rivera, and Robertson Witmer.

Outstanding production: NCTC's The Adding Machine , Strawshop's Elephant Man , ACT's Eurydice , and Seattle Rep's The Seafarer .

Theatre of the year: Intiman, ACT, New Century Theatre Company, Strawberry Workshop.

Finally, it's worth noting that long-time Seattle theatre photographer Chris Bennion is being recognized for his years of work with the 12th annual Greg Falls Sustained Achievement Award. For three decades, Bennion's been making Seattle's actors look good whether they deserve it or not, and he's definitely deserving of the honor.

For my money, if there's justice in the world, Hana Lass will win outstanding actress. Amy Thone is good, but Lass delivered more times last season. Kimberly King is good, too, but not mind-bogglingly so. For my money, the real race in the best actor category is between Altwies and Stetler, both of whom were phenomenal in the roles they were nominated for. I do know a lot of people are partial to M.J. Sieber, though.

As for best production, the one that doesn't deserve to be there is Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice . Ruhl's a fine writer, but in both Eurydice and The Clean House a couple years earlier at ACT, the production couldn't overcome her rather stale, cardboard-cutout approach to intellectual theatre. The Adding Machine blew most people out of the water, though the script blows (at least the second half), which NCTC couldn't correct for. In terms of ambition, it might have an edge, but in terms of consistent strength, the competition is between Strawshop's Elephant Man and the Rep's The Seafarer .

As for "person to watch," I have mixed feelings. Etta Lilienthal is a cool choice. She was a designer both for the Maureen Whiting Company's The Myth of Us and for Keith Hitchcock's brilliant solo show, Muffin Face . So count her as the homage to the small and experimental companies. She's a good choice. Robertson Witmer is known primarily for his sound design work, on shows like Orange Flower Water and The Tempest . He's very good as a performer, too. I just saw him in The French Project , and I can't say I have anything to complain about, but unless I'm missing something it's an out-of-the-blue choice. I guess being in " Awesome " gets you a lot of cred (and should, to my mind, put you a little beyond up-and-comer status). Don Daryl Rivera seems a promising choice; he's a musician an actor who's been appearing regularly in the likes of Strawshop's Elephant Man . And then there's Vincent Delaney . I honestly can't remember having seen any of his plays over the last year, and have to figure out how I missed them. Oddly enough, there was an article on just this problem in The New York Times this morning.

As for outstanding local theatre company, the only one I really think deserves a lot of credit is ACT. NCTC has a banner year, but in part that's due to ACT's support of emerging arts organizations, which they've done better than the Intiman. Strawberry Workshop is the dark horse, since they lack either ACT or Intiman's funding, and have done brilliant work nonetheless, scoring actors most companies their size can't. So in terms of quality, Strawshop gets the award; in terms of adding to and benefiting the larger theatre community, ACT is in the lead.

And finally, there's best director. I feel harsh saying this, but honestly, I don't think either Narver or Langs deserve to win. NCTC had a great season, as everyone seems to agree, but both shows were bad scripts carried by good actors. Neither director seemed to have enough vision to solve those problems, and short of giving the directors credit for having the best casts in town, they didn't do enough to really justify winning. Becky's New Car wasn't especially brilliant, either, which leaves me with Elephant Man , which was.