Recent Stories with tag kate whoriskey

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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Erik Lochtefeld with Richard Nguyen Sloniker and Matt Shimkus in a scene from the Intiman's much raved about "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," which closes tonight. Photo by Chris Bennion.

A couple big announcements on the theatre front today. First off, the Intiman just announced next year's season, the first under the guidance of incoming artistic director Kate Whoriskey. The big--and rather unsurprising--news is that Whoriskey will be re-staging Lynn Nottage's Ruined, the winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Whoriskey directed the premiere and worked for several years with Nottage to bring the play, which explores the plight of women in war-ravaged central Africa, to the stage.

The next installment of the Intiman's "American Cycle" features a new adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, by Naomi Iizuka. Also, Seattle playwright Sonya Schneider is debuting an original one-man-show called The Thin Space, based on interviews conducted by KUOW's Marcie Sillman. For full details on the rest of the season, visitthe Intiman's website.

The other news of the day, which is more exciting (and not just because I was on the selection panel for it), is that On the Boards has announced the line-up for the 2010 Northwest New Works Festival. Every year it's one of my favorite performance events in town, and this year will be no exception. Again, the mainstage is all dance, with new works by Amy O'Neal (Amyo/tinyrage), KT Niehoff (Lingo Dance), Mark Haim (choreographic artist-in-residence at the UW), and Marissa Rae Niederhauser (Josephine's Echopraxia), and more.

The studio showcase, which is always more eclectic, features new work by Mike Pham of Helsinki Syndrome, Erin Leddy of Portland's Hand2Mouth Theatre, the Satori Group (whose Artifacts of Consequence closes at the Little Theatre this weekend), and local burlesque superstar Lily Verlaine, among others. See here for the full line-up; the festival runs two weekends, June 4-13, 2010.

The SunBreak's arts desk has been unusually busy this week and not keeping up on what's going on around town. So here's my attempt at catch-up:

Photo of the P-I globe by SunBreak Flickr pool contributor Great Beyond.

First off, a note from the Intiman popped into the inbox on Tuesday: "I’m writing to let you know that Sheila [Daniels] has decided to leave Intiman in order to make her life as a fulltime artist and activist, rather than an artist/activist who has a concurrent fulltime job as an administrator. We’re all very sad about it, but it’s a decision everyone at Intiman supports. Kate [Whoriskey, the incoming artistic director] was really hoping that Sheila would be able to direct next year and had offered her our American Cycle play, but Sheila had to turn it down, unfortunately, for a variety of reasons."

Daniels, who directed the current production of Abe Lincoln in Illinois, has been a leading light in Seattle theatre since 1994. She did a lot of work with Theater Schmeater over the years, and in 2007, she produced the much-loved 90-minute, three-actor version of Crime and Punishment at the Capitol Hill Arts Center, which she brought to the Intiman earlier this year. Back in 2007, Daniels took a full-time position as assistant artistic director at Intiman, and her departure comes as Bartlett Sher is still transitioning the artistic director helm to Kate Whoriskey.

Second, Ballard's Live Girls! Theatre is apparently becoming homeless, and it's at least partly by choice. TPS Online reported on Monday that artistic director Meghan Arnette had decided not to renew the company's lease on their downstairs space on Market St. and would instead seek to produce their work at different venues around town.

"Having our own venue has been an amazing asset and we have used it to gain a national reputation for supporting women in theater," Arnette wrote in her press release, "while presenting a wide variety of exciting and challenging new works."

Moving around town may just be the tonic Live Girls! needs. I rarely get out to catch their shows in Ballard, where there's not much theatre, which is unfortunate because Live Girls! typically does an excellent job, as evidenced by their current production of Bone Portraits. Going mobile, though, should help the company expand their mission to create meaningful opportunities for women in theatre, and Arnette apparently mentioned a potential collaboration with the Seattle Girls' School.

And third, there's an interesting show organized by local playwright Paul Mullin up at North Seattle Community College. Mullin and five other playwrights--Dawson Nichols, Scot Augustson, Kelleen Conway Blanchard, Pam Carter, Bryan Willis--collaborated to create a "living newspaper," a form of agitprop theatre that started during the Bolshevik Revolution, called It's not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper About a Dying Newspaper (7:30 p.m., tickets $10).

The idea behind living newspaper theatre was to perform the news for audiences as a way of urging social action. In this case, the show is about the death of the Seattle P-I and the state of media. It's supposed to be quite good, and this weekend, after Friday and Saturday's shows, the producers have cobbled together an impressive panel of media folks old and new to discuss the issues raised, including The Stranger's Paul Constant and the Seattle Times's cartoonist Dave Horsey.

Interestingly, the Times's theatre critic Misha Berson has apparently backed out of her advertised appearance on the panel.