Tag Archives: Aaron Blakely

Theatre

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: Still Blowing Us Away After All These Years

Photo by Alabastro Photography.

Were Martha a real person and alive today she’d be 103 and George would still be six years her junior. These giants of the American stage have been battling it out since 1962 and if the current production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (through May 18 at Seattle Rep.) is any indication they have plenty of fight left in them and plenty more to say to us.

The Seattle Rep production avoids the pitfalls and delivers the goods, letting Edward Albee’s masterpiece work its magic. In a week or so it will be a must-see event but this week the gears aren’t quite meshing.

The machine those gears drive is a booze-fueled trip through the wee hours. Here the bonds of marriage support and suffocate. Intimacy is betrayed, vulnerability is exposed, and we see ourselves as individuals and a nation with heartrending clarity.

It is early September, which is New Year’s Eve in mid-century American academia. George (R. Hamilton Wright), a middle aged history professor, and his wife, Martha (Pamela Reed)—the longtime college president’s daughter—come home tired and tipsy. George is ready for bed, but Martha has invited a new hire, Nick (Aaron Blakely)—a biology professor—and his wife, Honey (Amy Hill), for a nightcap and more.

Nick and Honey seem like a conventional, unexceptional couple. They are polite and tidy. They seem a little bored and boring. George and Martha are none of those things.

Honey is sweet and demure. Nick is a clean cut all American, not defined by his profession. In fact it takes some doing for him to convince George and Martha that he is in the biology, rather the math department.

George wears his erudition on his sleeve. Martha is at least his equal, intellectually, but more important, she is an excellent sparring partner. Most of their conversation involves very serious sounding verbal duels.

It is obvious, almost from the outset, that George and Martha’s scrapping is an expression of love. They are passionate. They play with words and fantasies, shoving shivs at every opening, pausing (a bit too much in this production) to savor the fun as they get one another worked up.

It’s all games. It’s play, and therefore, it is very theatrical. Director, Braden Abraham, points this out a little too overtly creating stagey scenes before period-perfect god-awful articulated room dividers that evoke curtains on a proscenium.

The great actor and playwright, Tracy Letts (who played George in the 2012 Broadway production) has suggested that most couples envy George and Martha. They may seem brutal with one another, but after a couple decades of marriage they are still engaged and involved with one another. However no one could envy Nick and Honey.

This young couple, new to the faculty, stumble into George and Martha’s arena where they are coerced into the bloodsport. Their insertion into George and Martha’s private lives provides the meat of the play. Problems must be solved, secrets contained, and fantasies unmasked. George and Martha do these things in the only way they know how: Let the games begin.

Reed and Wright play the games well. Reed brays with the best of them and leaves herself enough room to build. Her climax is full of jagged edges that give Martha a surprising frailty. She shatters too soon.

Wright gives us George played with a touch of Groucho Marx and Woody Allen. This is not the most dignified George, but a more knowing clown and one we love easily.

Blakely holds his own with Nick, making him a force to be reckoned with. One doesn’t believe he’ll ever strike George but he could. Amy Hill’s Honey refuses to get lost in the background. She’s a strong enough presence that even when she says nothing we look to her for a non-verbal response. She never disappoints.

The characters in this play consume a dangerous amount of alcohol. SRT’s Keeping Up With Martha drink offer (must be pre-ordered at the box-office) is less ambitious and may help attentive audience members keep their cool through the onstage fireworks. The three drink flight features local booze.

My trusted drinking assistant declared the pre-show champagne cocktail inoffensive but boring. The first intermission Old Fashioned was better, with a pleasant surprise in the maple syrup (apropos of New England academia). The second intermission Gin Manhattan offended her (gin in a Manhattan!) but I found the gin softened the cough syrup quality of the sweet vermouth.

And yes, it is a three-act show, but there isn’t a slow moment. It is a tense three hours of laughter, anxiety, and wonder. In the end we join Nick, unreservedly murmuring “My God, I think I understand” but also, we continue to wonder

Fifty-two years on this play still feels topical. Academia has changed (a little), we drink a little less, and women are more liberated but the topics remain current. Genetic engineering, evangelicalism, the objective science, technology, and math studies opposed to the subjective liberal arts, all play important parts. All these are still part of our conversation today.

{Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf plays at Seattle Repertory Theatre through May 18. Tickets and more info can be found here.}

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Heartbreak and Hilarity at ACT’s Middletown

The cast of Middletown. Photo by LaRae Lobdell 

Do you remember that strange play you did in high school, the one that seemed oddly simple? It had almost no set and some of the characters seemed to know they were in a play. Maybe it felt kind of hokey. A boy and a girl met, fell in love, got married and then she died, and there was this stage manager who kept talking to the audience. That play was Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and it’s worth recalling before heading off to ACT’s production of Middletown by Will Eno (through September 29).

This is not to say that familiarity with Our Town is necessary. One can go to Middletown without having seen any play before. As with Wilder’s, this town is simple and straightforward, and a couple of the characters do speak directly to the audience. Likewise, this Middletown is about the wonder and beauty of simply being alive, but in the post-Beckett world of Will Eno, language unravels and human connection is as uncertain as it is precious.

 

Photo by Chris Bennion

Fate and time ultimately undo Wilder’s happy world of Grover’s Corners, but even before death enters the play, darkness lurks in the presence of the alcoholic choir director, Simon Stimson. This character looms large in Middletown not only in the person of a mechanic (Ray Tagavilla) with addiction problems, but even in the lovers who keep us hopeful and engaged with the story. Middletown is a hollow place where despair and brutality lie just beneath the surface. Nonetheless, most of its residents seem as happy as those of Grover’s Corners. This disconnection is integral to the dry humor that keeps the audience laughing when it isn’t on the verge of tears.

Eno updates Wilder’s stage manager with an opening monologue by a public speaker (R. Hamilton Wright). Where many plays begin with a plea for donations before the show, this public speaker gathers our attention to no end; he just goes on gathering. Every time he approaches a conclusion, he subverts it. This is par for the course in the land of Will Eno.

The story of Middletown is one of life: birth, death and the struggle in between. The actions, the language and even voices seem to lead nowhere, constantly circling back on themselves or coming up short in a dead end. Jennifer Zeyl’s set also suggests a cul-de-sac as created by a preschooler, in spare lines and primary colors. A vent on each of the two houses stands out as a remarkable detail that keeps the set in the real world, but everything else has the feel of plastic. It’s a world in which Gumby would feel at home.

Nonetheless, we get swept up in this world and a central romance between a man and a woman who combine the shy innocence of Wilder’s lovers with Simon Stimson’s pain and loneliness. John (Eric Riedmann) is in between jobs he hates. His new next-door neighbor, Mary (Alexandra Tavares), is pregnant, after more than a year of trying, and largely alone while her husband travels for work.

Photo by Chris Bennion

Their story gets broken up by interludes between the townsfolk. Most prominent among these are the Mechanic, The Cop (Matthew Floyd Miller), and The Librarian (Marianne Owen). More fleeting figures comment on the play and the themes of the beauty and futility of life. Some of these monologues drag, but they give way in the second half to the heightened circumstances of the hospital.

85 years after Our Town, the hospital is where we conduct our essential dramas of birth and death. Mary goes there to give birth alone, and John is taken there after an attempted suicide. In between the acts is a pre-intermission meta-theatrical scene in which an audience of Middletowners attending the play responds to it during intermission.

ACT’s production is excellent. The acting sometimes gets mired in the thicket of Eno’s language, losing the audience’s attention, but this show does more in its first five minutes than most do in two hours. The cast is flawless, often making surprising verbal choices and strong physical ones. Riedmann conveys John’s insecurity with elbows  invariably tucked into his stomach. Renata Friedman brings a thrusting angularity to characters at either end of the autism spectrum. Aaron Blakely’s astronaut goofily tells us he’s in outer space rather than being in outer space.

Design is excellent, from the innocuous pop guitar (a la Grey’s Anatomy) that would grate in any other circumstances to the cop’s mustache. Even the timing of the initial house light fade helped tie together an evening that is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

“Photograph 51″ Finds New Drama in Race to Double Helix

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Brian Earp and Kirsten Potter in Photograph 51 at Seattle Repertory Theatre (Photo: Alan Alabastro)

(l-r) MJ Sieber and Ben Harris in Photograph 51 at Seattle Repertory Theatre (Photo: Alan Alabastro)

(l-r) Bradford Farwell and Ben Harris in Photograph 51 at Seattle Repertory Theatre (Photo: Alan Alabastro)

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With Photograph 51 (running through March 10; tickets), Seattle Repertory Theatre has done an excellent job staging Anna Ziegler’s script, which too often leaves too little to the imagination. Director Braden Abraham leads a talented cast and design team in this story of the race to uncover the structure of DNA.

A tale of competing teams of scientists with challenging personalities, facing changing social norms, the action centers on Rosalind Franklin (Kirsten Potter), who takes a research position to take photos of molecular structures through X-ray crystallography. She works alongside Maurice Wilkins (Bradford Farwell) and in competition with James Watson (Benjamin Harris) and Francis Crick (MJ Sieber), the latter two now best-known for their discovery of DNA’s double helix. In 1962 Wilkins, Watson, and Crick jointly won the Nobel Prize for their work, four years after Franklin’s death, which had made her ineligible for such recognition.

The most striking feature of the script is Ziegler’s use of the cast as a chorus of narrators to set, drive, and comment on the action in hindsight. Much of their commentary touches on the idea that Photograph 51 is one of many versions of the tale. While core elements of the plot do offer a welcome revision to the commonly understood story, the comments come to feel disingenuous as we get caught up in this particular narrative.

In keeping with the style of the script Scott Bradley’s set flirts with cleverness and embraces a high degree of self-awareness. Just as the chorus breaks down theatrical illusion the set keeps actors visible on the open wings when not playing in a scene. There they observe the action from gorgeous mid-century furniture. Sconces and hanging lamps are fitted with a tangle of spindly dowels suggesting a matted mess of nucleic acids. Lab tables are wheeled about a central platform into a variety of arrangements to suggest different locations. A vast screen over this playing space is underused but unobtrusive.

You don’t need to bone up on your biology in order to understand Photograph 51. The jargon is minimal and the objectives are clear. We know Watson and Crick win the race, what matters is how they do it and what happens to those around them. While Ziegler’s straightforward handling of the scientific language and ideas is laudable, she is similarly explicit with the characters and plot. The neatness of it all gives the play a whiff of the mawkish with coincidences that feel excessively manipulated. In one key instance Franklin allows a degree of emotional life into her world, and immediately collapses in pain. Moments later, the audience hears the bad news.

Not only does this play ask too little of its audience, it doesn’t allow us the chance to take an active part in understanding the plot or its implications. In the most egregious instance, a narrator informs us that we are witnessing the moment when everything in the story is possible. Franklin then has a line and the narrator concludes that the preceding line made the denouement inevitable. Had Ziegler trusted her audience to draw these conclusions on its own, Photograph 51 would be far more satisfying.

The bald-faced statements that drag the script down do give the play an aesthetic integrity, as the characters are mostly drawn in broad strokes as well. Thankfully the cast fleshes out their characters sufficiently to keep them sympathetic and interesting. Wilkins is written as a well-meaning misogynist, a product of his times, whose humanism is a foil to Franklin’s puritan intellectual rigor. Farwell is all stumbling awkwardness in the role. Harris plays the insistently obnoxious Watson in Moritz-Stiefel hair with an enthusiasm that is almost charming. Crick comes off as relatively sympathetic in Sieber’s performance despite the character’s weak moral compass.

Brian Earp and Aaron Blakely are the standouts of the cast as the research assistants, Don Caspar and Ray Gosling. Ziegler writes them as minor characters in the pursuit of DNA but Gosling was a significant presence in the research. Earp keeps Gosling both appealing and very human as he referees the personal battles between his colleagues. The historical Caspar wasn’t involved in any of the events of the plot but the script gives him a key, if vague position in Franklin’s personal story. Blakely brings life to the stage in this most emotionally present character in the show.

Potter’s performance is perhaps even more notable as she finds humanity in the stultifying confines of a character who, as Ziegler spells out in no uncertain terms, gives precedence to her head over her heart. Potter plays Franklin’s passion for ideas with a fervor that engages the audience till the very end. By that time you may be wondering at the obstacles that kept Franklin from her recognition — along with those that kept this play from being better than the pretty good show it is.