Recent Stories with tag paul budraitis

The Satori Group's "Making of a Monster," part of NW New Works at On the Boards. Photo by Tim Summers.

Last weekend I made the trek back to Seattle from New York and managed to catch both the studio showcase and mainstage shows at the NW New Works Festival at On the Boards. As I've said before, this really is one of the best events in town all year, and it was a fairly humbling experience to watch artists whose work I helped select (I was on the panel last fall) bring the pieces to fruition, to say nothing of the fact that we've covered the development of some of these pieces over the last year.

At least five of the works killed. Paul Budraitis presented 20 more minutes of Not. Stable. (At all.), which helped flesh out the piece along with the presentation at SPF 4 this last winter, and shows the direction the show will go as it approaches its evening length debut at OtB this coming winter. Mike Pham's I Love You, I Hate You was a deceptively funny performance that had the audience uncomfortably laughing at Pham's evocation of the downward spiral of internalized anger, public humiliation, and the cruel process of building oneself back up.

Lily Verlaine. Photo by Tim Summers.

On the mainstage, Amy O'Neal stripped down (literally and figuratively) with In the Fray, a new lo-fi solo work that saw her move away from the spectacles of Locust and explore something more personal; a woman wearing pasties has never looked more powerful and intimidating than O'Neal at the end, clutching a pink samurai sword. Mark Haim's This Land Is Your Land probably takes the cake for most commented on and most controversial, in the sense that reactions are fierce and divided. I loved it: for 20 minutes, a crew of dancers and non-dancers simply strut forward and backwards across the stage, with subtle changes at each passing. Haim's choreography is a bit like microscope slides: a relentlessly intent focus on a series of different details, inviting the audience to consider everything from the simple act of texting while walking to the ways in which different naked bodies move....

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Amy O'Neal's "In the Fray," part of the NW New Works Festival this weekend at OtB. Photo by Grabrielle Bienczycki.

This weekend is the opening of one of my favorite performance events all year: the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards. Over the next two weekends, sixteen artists or companies will be presenting 20-minute pieces that speak to the vibrancy and diversity of performance in Seattle and the greater Northwest region. It's a smorgasbord of cutting-edge arts, and while you're bound to hate some of it, you're also bound to have something blow your mind.

The festival is broken up into two spaces over two weekends. Here's the breakdown for the coming weekend; tickets to the festival are $14 for one showscase, $20 for two, $24 for three, and $30 for four.

Studio Showcase (Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. & Sun. 5 p.m.)

Daughters of Air. A new work by avant-garde musician and composer Ivory Smith, Daughters of Air reinterprets Hans Christian Anderson's classic fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" as a polyphonic vocal symphony. But beyond the musical component, Smith and her collaborators Kelli Frances Corrado and Joseph Gray, have created a beautiful piece of multimedia art that evokes the story's setting beneath the sea. Using re-purposed videogame controllers, the performers will be generating digitally projected imagery live during the performance.

Daughters of Air, part of the NW New Works Festival starting this weekend at On the Boards. Photo by Tim Summers

Paul Budraitis, Not. Stable. (At all.). Budraitis is one of the most interesting theatre artists in Seattle. His production of David Mamet's otherwise unforgiveably bad play Edmond this winter at the Balagan was one of the most accomplished pieces of fringe theatre I've seen in years. His singular accomplishment as a director was getting world-class performances from his actors, proving a point I've long maintained that Seattle theatre's greatest weakness is not its actors, but its directors. Not. Stable. (At all.), Budraitis's first solo performance piece, directed by Sean Ryan, was a stand-out at SPF 4 earlier this year. In it, through a series of schizophrenically varied characters, Budraitis explores anomie, paranoia, and solipsism, and as he continues developing the piece into an evening-length work (which will have its premiere at OtB in February 2011), he's presenting a new set of monologues at NW New Works, so the performance will not be duplicative of the SPF show. (Click here for TSB's previous coverage of Paul Budraitis.)

Mike Pham, I Love You, I Hate You. In this piece, Pham, one-half of the creative due behind Helsinki Syndrome, continues his evolution away from theatre towards visual and performance art. In a text-free movement and video-based solo performance, Pham uses the rise and publicly humiliating fall of a figure skater to explore ideas of the public and private self, acceptance and rejection, and the narcissism and self-loathing-inducing struggle to maintain an idea of self. Which is all a pretty wordy and vague description of piece in which Pham pirouettes himself into a painful downward spiral, brutalizes some body bags, and drowns in an identity-destroying sea of glitter....

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Catherine Cabeen's "Into the Void" will appear as part of On the Boards' 2010-2011 season. Photo by Julietta Cervantes.

Today, On the Boards announces their upcoming 2010-2011 season. Full stop. I'd add in some sort of excited, oh-my-god-you-guys-check-this-out! sort of deal, but there's not really a point: for those of you who already go to OtB, my excited gushing isn't why you're interested, and if you don't go to OtB (yet) you have no idea what you're missing and we'll all just have to find some way to change your mind over the coming year.

To begin with the basic factoids: season subscriptions go on-sale today at OtB's website; through June 30, you can take advantage of the early-bird special, which further discounts what are already the best deals in town. It's $130 for the Inter/National Series subscription, $100 for the Northwest Series, and $225 for the whole thing--twelve performances in all.

The Inter/National Series (the non-Northwest artists) is a bit more theatre-heavy this year, with companies from France, Poland, and Mexico. L'Effet de Serge, which originally debuted in 2007, was an audience favorite at the last Under the Radar Festival. From what I gather, it's essentially a solo show by Gaëtan Vourc’h of Vivarium Studio (Paris), who plays a charmingly eccentric man who makes Rube Goldberg-esque lo-fi special effects, presented to an onstage collection of friends culled locally. Or something. I don't really know, but if by chance you're headed to Montreal next month, you can catch it at Festival Transamerique and let me know....

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Erin Jorgensen. Photo by Basil Harris.

It's been a long, crazy, five-week ride with SPF 4, but the Solo Performance Festival is drawing to a close this weekend (at Theatre off Jackson; tickets $15). A line-up of three shows plays April 1 through 3, with pieces by Ben DeLaCreme, Jennifer Jasper, and Ernie Von Schmaltz. Then on Sunday, the festival closes up with a best-of-fest presentation of Lisa Koch's The Place of My Abode.

But tonight, March 31, there's a double-bill that, for my money, is a can't-miss.

First up is local musician and performer Erin Jorgensen, with Worse Places. This is the third piece I've caught Jorgensen in (including Sunday Service last year at the Northwest New Works Festival, and on-and-off-again French Project), and it's always an odd treat. A tattooed redhead with a bluesy voice, in Worse Places Jorgensen situates herself behind her marimba (her instrument of choice) and delivers a series of monologues, ranging from a nightmare about a mane-less lion to accidentally feeding baby birds to crows, with an awkward date thrown in. Whereas too many solo performers use obscure, poetic language, Jorgensen's minimalist narratives are blissfully concrete and minimal on the flourishes--Gordon Lish-style editing for a monologist. And of course she's a pretty marvelous marimba player, whether creating a lush soundscape for a text or accompanying herself on a song.

And then there's Paul Budraitis' Not. Stable. At all., back for one last showing at SPF. I've already written about Budraitis' performance at greater length, but it's tough not to recommend the piece again. Budraitis nails one of the most technically difficult parts of solo performance: the hairpin turns switching from character to character, carrying the audience from an aggressive attack on their personal space to a comic but creepy bit about a totalitarian police state to playing a genial con artist extracting information from you. Not. Stable. At all. is a Don Delillo-esque exploration of agency panic and paranoia in contemporary society, and it's been one of the stand-outs in the festival, as far removed from the stereotype of solo performance as a step above stand-up as you can get.

Directed by Sean Ryan, Budraitis will also be presenting the piece at this year's Northwest New Works Festival in June, so even if you can't make it tonight, you've got another chance.

Paul Budraitis' "Not. Stable. At all." Photo by Ian Johnston.

Wednesday last I was down at Theatre off Jackson for another evening of Solo Performance Festival 4, the month-long festival of local and visiting talent that continues this week with Gin Hammond's Returning the Bones, Suzanne Morrison's Your Own Personal Alcatraz, and Jeff Frieders' Kitty in the City. I went for a triple bill of Mike Harris, Paul Budraitis, and Norman Bell, and I have to admit that I didn't stick around for the roughly 40 minutes Bell presented of his evening-length work Subprime!.

Not that you should read that as a criticism. I've seen it and liked it, Bell having transformed his abortive employment at the East Side's Merit Financial—which became one of the first subprime lenders to collapse under the dead weight of its bundled securities—into a story that offers a very human insight into the people who helped cause this mess.

As for Paul Budraitis, just last month he raised the stakes for the Balagan Theatre as the director of David Mamet's Edmond. In terms of the performances he got from his actors as well as the staging, which made the poverty of fringe theatre a strength, it was a knock-out show that did just about everything it could have to make Mamet's over-wrought play soar, and compared well to the Rep's who's-who production of Glengarry Glen Ross. But to my knowledge, Budraitis has always been more of a director than a performer (or so he suggested in our interview), so I was extremely interested to see what he could do as a solo performer, and he didn't disappoint. My guest even declared Budraitis her new "theatre crush" for his work as an actor and a director, and coming from someone subjected to more theatre than any non-theatre person should be, that's saying something.

In Not. Stable. At all., Budraitis digs deep into the fear and paranoia that isolate us in the modern world, a subject that—less competently handled—could be a huge flop. But Budraitis the performer exhibits the same subtlety and control he did as a director. Budraitis is a a big guy, tall and broad and fairly imposing, which works well when he's projecting aggression, even bum-rushing the front row of the audience. But through subtle tweaks to his posture, the tension in his shoulders or the pursing of his lips, he switches quickly into comic or even vulnerable mode....

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Tamara Ober's charming "Pipa," from SPF 4

Last Friday, I caught one of the opening weekend performances at Solo Performance Festival 4, which runs at Theatre off Jackson through April 3. The pairing of dancer Tamara Ober and monologist Ki Gottberg is the sort of radical contrast you get at a festival like this, which can either produce a surprising synergy or—as in this case—a disappointing contrast.

But before I get to the two solo works I saw last week, I have to call out some of the exciting shows on this week's docket. Tonight I'm going back for a pair of artists previously featured on The SunBreak: Paul Budraitis with Not. Stable. At all., and Norman Bell with Subprime!, along with recent Cornish grad Mike Harris' Traveling Panties. And tomorrow, one of the most exciting works at SPF 4 opens: Gin Hammond's Returning the Bones. Hammond, a graduate of Harvard and trained at the Moscow Art Theatre, has produced a powerful show about racial and national identity that's supposed to be amazing, and I'm still trying to find time to go see it. Point is, SPF 4 has a lot to offer, so be sure to check out the full schedule and go see some of this stuff.

Movement artist Tamara Ober, a long-time member of Minnesota's Zenon Dance, has created a charmingly odd little performance piece with Pipa. Using monologue and physical humor in addition to dance, Ober constructs a compellingly clumsy character in a way only a trained dancer could. At the opening, she's on the floor, and immediately sits up into a microphone, creating a big thump that reverberates through the sound system....

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David Mamet's "Edmond" at the Balagan Theatre, directed by Paul Budraitis. Photo by Andrea Huysing.

"I wound up in Seattle because I was going to Indiana University, and I was about to graduate so I was looking into my options," Paul Budraitis said. "I was pretty much set on going to Chicago, and then a few things happened that kind of made me reconsider. And I wound up talking to somebody that was heading to Seattle, a grad student, and she sort of sold me on the place, saying at least it was worth checking out."

About a week before the opening of David Mamet's Edmond at the Balagan (through Feb. 6, tickets $12-$15), which Budraitis directed, he and I met up at Caffe Vita to chat about his history and work. Tall and solidly built, Budraitis has a calm voice but gives off a vibe of quiet intensity that was only heightened by his deferral to wait in line to get a coffee for himself, mysteriously offering only that it did "something" to him and it was probably better that he didn't have any before heading to rehearsal. This all left me imagining him a pent-up ball of over-caffeinated aggression, à la Henry Rollins, though that owes as much to a video I once saw of his solo performance as anything to do with the man himself.

Budraitis, whose family emigrated from Lithuania, moved to Seattle in 1995 and spent the next five years working in fringe theatre. His time at Annex Theatre was particularly formative, because it was where he first learned Vsevolod Meyehold's biomechanics method, which continues to inform his theatrical approach. But in 2000, he left to go to grad school in Lithuania, where he trained under the legendary director Jonas Vaitkus, who, along with Oskaras Koršunovas and Eimuntas Nekrošius, helped put Lithuania on the global theatrical map with a radical aesthetic approach developed in the crucible of Cold War repression....

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Ali el-Gasseir, Sam Hagen, and Ryan Fields in Balagan Theatre's production of David Mamet's Edmond (Photo: Andrea Huysing)

"An everyman descends into the maelstrom of big city degradation," says one synopsis of David Mamet's 1982 play Edmond, later turned into a 2006 movie starring William Macy.

The director of Balagan Theatre's production (Thursday-Saturdays, through February 6; tickets: $12-$15), Paul Budraitis, downplays the element of biography--it was Mamet's first big play after moving to New York from Chicago, which was apparently an unpleasant shock: "It's a society that's lost its flywheel, and it's spinning itself apart," Mamet said in a 1982 interview. "That's my vision of New York. It's a kind of vision of hell."

Instead, Budraitis focuses on how the pressures of change can separate us from each other. "Edmond walks his lonely path so we don't have to," he writes in his director's notes. Mamet himself called Edmond, "a myth about modern life," "a play about an unintegrated personality," and "a play about someone searching for the truth, for God, for release."

It's also simply flawed, a stressed-out explosion of misanthropy and rage that a youthful Mamet tried to repackage in context of life's bigger questions. It's grotesque, violent, and profane...and, at Balagan, purely theatrical. It's a beautifully formal achievement, an intricate villanelle on bigotry, lust, and madness.

There, that description should help you decide if Edmond is in your future.
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