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TagsKate 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.)...
I usually know what not to expect at a Balagan Theatre performance. Regardless of the source material, I know not to expect a straight reading of a play in its classic form, like I might experience at Seattle Shakespeare or the Rep.
If the play is Romeo and Juliet, I know I'm going to get super-sexy-Romeo-and-Juliet or astronaut-Romeo-and-Juliet-in-space, or, most likely, super-sexy-astronaut-Romeo-and-Juliet-in-the-Wild-West. That's the kind of thing they do.
So when I headed to Balagan's Capitol Hill theatre (below Boom Noodle) on Saturday, it was with that in mind, but what was delivered was a pretty straight production of Oedipus (Sun-Thurs, through June 5th, tickets $15 online).
Keep in mind that there's actually no such thing as Oedipus--Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex and Oedipus Colonus and the cast and crew of this production edited, workshopped, and otherwise distilled this Oedipus from those texts. But they did such a good job, under the direction of Ryan Higgins and Jake Groshong, that what they're currently performing seems like the classic Oedipus, if such a thing existed. Maybe a little sexier. Definitely not what I expected, though.
The stage Balagan has designed for this show is spartan. There's a little pedestal in the center where some neat light effects highlight a few narrative scenes, and the pedestal generally serves as the focal point for any intense actions along the lines of fighting or seducing....
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....
To hear Shakespeare tell it, the English won at Agincourt because God willed it and Harry gave 'em hell ('em being the snobby French).
Historians and military analysts back up just one or two parts of that: Henry V fought in the battle, and French nobles, arrayed in their finest armor, barely deigned to fight English commoners. But England fielded something like 5,000 longbows that day, and their faster shooting and long-distance accuracy meant the French never got close enough to do much damage. (The miracle of beating five-to-one odds has since been called into question.)
What is not argued is that the corpses of so many French knights littered the muddy, ploughed field, that it became almost impossible to advance, and the English would henceforth think of themselves as "plucky."
All this of course is missing from Seattle Shakespeare Company's Henry V (through May 9). Director Russ Banham chose to update the story to 1962, and the cast wears natty suits, drinks highballs, and breaks out bomber jackets and khakis for war. Sadly, clothes do not always make the man, and his actors, aside from a few stand-outs, give middling performances.
It's not his first swing-and-a-miss, in terms of choosing a setting that not only fails to add to the story, but actively works against its telling. The SSC site says I saw a "political satire on the chicanery of war," and Banham is quoted as saying, "The way I see it, Henry V is not really a history play." These are not widespread views; though it has long been understood that Shakespeare wrote critically of those in power, the story of Henry V does not lend itself completely--if at all--to satire....
Clifford Odets always makes me think of the opening of the Coen Bros.' Barton Fink, John Turturro listening offstage to impassioned lines like:
Not this time, Lil! I'm awake now, awake for the first time in years. Uncle Dave said it: Daylight is a dream if you've lived with your eyes closed. Well my eyes are open now! I see that choir, and I know they're dressed in rags! But we're part of that choir, both of us--yeah, and you, Maury, and Uncle Dave too!"
And then comes the call of the fishmongers.
It's an affectionate shot to the ribs, but what you learn watching Intiman's Paradise Lost (through April 25, tickets here) is that Odets was--as any great playwright is--overflowing with voices, not just firebrands urging revolutionary singalongs. Yes, he was also a bubbling fountain of what Arthur Miller called "unashamed word-joy" but a good deal of the joy (and words) came from what he heard around him. How people speak in Paradise Lost is often how they spoke--"Have a piece of fruit," "Do yourself a personal favor," "We're like that for each other"--with no adornment; it's in the soliloquies (arias, really) that the language takes wing and the words sing.
Dramatically, not much separates Paradise Lost from a Chekhov play. An upper middle-class family, the Gordons, is coasting slowly to the end of their charmed, aristocratic life, unable to adapt to the social upheaval all around them. As the play begins, in 1933, the cracks produced by the Depression are just starting to show in the solid walls of their home. (That's my metaphor--the set by Tom Buderwitz actually features a trompe l'oeil scrim of brick and siding that, with L.B. Morse's lighting, exposes a disturbing insubstantiality to the Gordon home.)...
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a "first novel" of a play. It sets out some of the themes that Shakespeare would deal with throughout his career (the life-changing comings and goings of love; and women, in disguise, seeing men as they are), along with a young playwright's difficulty getting his characters from plot point A to plot point B. For Shakespeare fans, it's like an early B-side from that band you love.
Seattle Shakespeare's production of Two Gentlemen (through April 11; tickets here) plays like a cover of that B-side by a hipper band. Director Marcus Goodwin has set the play on a Gold Coast that borrows from the glitz-and-surf of Los Angeles and Miami, and infuses the Shakespeare with knowing takes on today's endlessly mediated realities. It's sly fun, and the actors are game, but the play does wander a bit, before careening to its contrived end.
A projection screen at the back of the stage gets good use in club scenes, and with its wipes and fades and mosaics does a better job infecting the goings-on with a modern feel than even the cargo shorts and cell phones. Robertson Witmer's sound design ingeniously transfers the pop songs on iPods and earbuds or cans out to the audience in real-time. And the sushi restaurant date night gets embarrassed giggles of self-recognition.
Valentine (Connor Toms) and his best bro, Proteus (Daniel Brockley), have just the right look for this One Tree Hill adventure in Shakespeare: Toms is dark-haired and intense, Brockley, rangy and opportunistic. Valentine heads off to "college" (the Duke's court), but Proteus stays behind to win the heart of Julia (Hana Lass, doing a formidably haughty schoolgirl number)--until his father sends him off to get an education, too....
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