Recent Stories with tag bart sher

Kate Whoriskey

Kate Whoriskey is younger than me, and that--if you're lucky--is all I'm going to say about that. The new artistic director of the Intiman Theatre, new Seattle resident, and new-ish mom (21 months) met me in her office for a "getting to know you" chat, which is the kind of thing she's doing besides starting up rehearsals for Lynn Nottage's Ruined (runs July 9-August 8) and discovering what the view is like from the captain's chair that Bart Sher recently vacated.

She's brainy (NYU, Harvard), brown-haired, Massachusetts-Irish, and prone to gales of laughter and sotto voce confidences, which is a little perplexing in the middle of an interview. She has a lot of goals. You may know her husband Daniel Breaker from either Broadway (Shrek's Donkey) or Spike Lee's film of Passing Strange. Her first Intiman staging was Ionesco's The Chairs (2000), then Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea and Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange.

She wanted to "do the Seattle thing" and go out for a latté, but I demurred, as there's little novelty left for me in trying to transcribe what someone said while a steam wand was blasting milk in the background. (Yes, she's new to town, and I should have followed her suggestion. Rude. Also, I would have enjoyed a cookie. Foolish.)

Anyway: INT. OFFICE.

The very next thing I noticed was choreographer Olivier Wevers' card on her table, which turned out to foreshadow the rest of our conversation--largely about the sense of tantalizing connections and collaborations that Whoriskey's arrival in town has set in motion, like a seed crystal dropped into solution. 

From left: Managing Director Brian Colburn, Artistic Director Bart Sher, Kate Whoriskey and Board President Kim A. Anderson. Photo: Team Photogenic.

"Where Bart and I meet are the classics--I want to continue doing classics and contemporary work," Whoriskey told me, in response to my "Whither Intiman" opening gambit. "I'd love to continue the American Cycle...and then in terms of things that might feel a little differently [...] I would love to work on an International Cycle, which would go along with the American Cycle."

Intiman's Ruined (which will go to co-producer the Geffen Playhouse this fall, then travel on to South Africa, to the Market Theatre) marks the official launch of the International Cycle, which Whoriskey hopes will add substantial diversity to the theatrical voices you can hear in Seattle theatre. It also continues her string of plays (Intimate Apparel, Fabulation) by Terry Teachout-fave Lynn Nottage. (Julia Cho is another young American dramatist who figures large in Whoriskey's directorial history, so be ready to hear more about her.)...

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Bart Sher (Photo: Team Photogenic)

Saturday night Bart Sher had the Tom Sawyer-esque experience, he said, of attending his own funeral. The occasion was "A Bash for Bart," a gala in celebration of his decade with Intiman--the title of which he confessed to some ambivalence about, as someone who'd had his skull fractured by a baseball bat as a child. The establishment of a Bartlett Sher Artistic Fund, funded by $2,500-per-couple plates at a Tom Douglas-hosted dinner, made it an august evening indeed.

Laurence Ballard was spirited up from Savannah, Georgia, to deliver an erudite envoi to Sher's 16-play stint: Namaste Man, The Skin of Our Teeth, Uncle Vanya, Prayer for my Enemy, Richard III, Three Sisters, Singing Forest, Our Town, Nora, Homebody/Kabul, Titus Andronicus, Arms and the Man, Nickel and Dimed, Cymbeline, The Dying Gaul, and Servant of Two Masters. (Misha Berson recaps the years here.)

"Woe," pronounced Ballard, to the actor who encounters Sher unprepared. And woe of a different sort to the actor who has prepared but has made stupid choices.

Broadway's Kelli O'Hara (from Sher's Light in the Piazza and South Pacific) sang, and literally kicked off her shoes. (Who knew Harry Connick, Jr., had done an arrangement of Piazza's "Fable"?) Ida Cole--the philanthropist who saved the Paramount and its Mighty Wurlitzer Organ for us--wished the Shers well, and reminisced about her former neighbors, saying they'd become family.

It was sweet--you got the feeling Bart would not sit still for cloying--and respectful, a paying of tribute to an artistic director who, these days, cannot be hired enough in New York, whether it's for theatre (Odets at Lincoln Center), musical theatre (Broadway's South Pacific), or opera (he passed the Met audition handily with Barber of Seville).

"Somewhat eclipsed by his recent successes in New York...," says the 2008 New York Times Magazine profile, "is the fact that he remains artistic director of the Intiman Theater in Seattle, a job he has held since 2000 and has done sparklingly enough to help the Intiman earn the 2006 Tony for Outstanding Regional Theater." (Predictably, they get Intiman's full name wrong: it's Intiman Theatre.)...

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