Tag Archives: Darragh Kennan

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

See the World Through K.’s Eyes at New Century’s Creepy, Erotic “Trial”

Darragh Kennan and Alexandra Tavares in NCTC’s The Trial (Photo: Chris Bennion)

Once in a while Seattle theatre surprises my jaded, fed-up sensibilities with a production so wonderful and necessary that I can hardly find any fault in it. Unsurprisingly, the newest production to make the list comes from New Century Theatre Company, a theatre company I take as seriously as my southern brethren take communion. The Trial (at INScape through April 28; tickets) is an immersive, magical production with a slew of talented artists on stage and pulling strings; a production that everyone will be talking about come next week, if they’re not already.

In a new adaptation from Kenneth Albers, Kafka’s play technically opens with Joseph K. (Darragh Kennan) seemingly under arrest with no knowledge of what crime he’s committed, who’s accused him, or why he’s being interrogated in his own home. However, the production starts well before that with cast seating audience members in small groups, asking them to line up in boxes, and leading them to seats via a circuitous path, all the while repeating “Don’t touch the red curtain” (that is impossible not to touch because it’s lining the narrow alley way).

There are many other touches to this pre-show ritual including an overhead speaker that talks to you in a pseudo calming voice about what you can and can’t do. But even in that there are contradictions, purposeful and precise, to affirm that you are about to see something very different. Take note: You are being watched. Blow your nose before the curtain pulls back.

Kennan’s Joseph K. is a desperate everyman, without agency or wisdom, striving to learn something he can’t quite grasp. Amy Thone as the ball-breaking, aging attorney Sophie Kleist simultaneously aggravates and delights — especially as she figure-eights around K. in her motorized wheel chair.  And Alexandra Tavares’ Titorelli is so funny, wry, and a little dirty that I long to hear her say “jyes” one more time.

These performances are standouts, but there was no weak link in the cast, or the design. Robertson Witmer’s sound is haunting and terrifying (full disclosure: we chat on Twitter). Witmer’s sound is accompanied by an incredibly creative lighting design by Geoff Korf who utilized flashlights and practicals for ghostly and eerie atmosphere.

Under the direction of John Langs (and thanks to that impeccable adaptation by Albers), The Trial delivers a play of contradictions, metaphor, hyper-realism, and cleavage — lots and lots of cleavage. Unlike other shows where the cleavage would just be an added, “sex sells,” and hardly a plot point worth note, the choice in this production actually works. In Joseph K.’s head we can only view women two ways: 1.) sexy creatures he’d (we’d) like to bone but likely won’t even talk to outside of work, and 2.) matronly women who take charge of his (our) situation for him so he doesn’t have to take responsibility for himself.

The story can be interpreted in a number of ways and while I could invoke several historical figures and moments I thought of during the production (Rasputin is on the list), the joy of The Trial is in seeking your own meaning. There are countless metaphors, allusions, and of course contradictions. Many of these make no sense. Many of them make perfect sense. All of them are a tad pretentious. And all are a little bit brilliant. So make of them what you will.

Let me put it another way. Imagine The Trial is a door. No one is stopping you from going through that door except little nagging feelings of doubt because you’ve been been burnt before going through other doors, bad doors, waste-of-time doors. Ignore those sonsofbitches and open this damn door.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Pinter As a Sketch Artist (Part 1)

Entire Pinter Festival cast (Left to Right, Back row first): Peter Crook, Benjamin Harris, Darragh Kennan, Charles Leggett, Cheyenne Casebier, (Front Row) Frank Corrado, Randy Moore, Mariel Neto, Jeffrey Fracé, Anne Allgood, and Julie Briskman (Photo: LaRae Lobdell)

Easy Laughs With Minimal Menace: Sketch Night returns to ACT August 23rd

For much of this evening of largely light fare the highlights of Sex, Trouble, and Taxi #274 give us Pinter as light comic in a style not far removed from Monty Python. The low points feel like tepid high-school fare played by actors who exceed the material. The acting is high-caliber all around. What’s more, both cast an audience have a good time with easy laughs in the casual setting of the Bullitt Cabaret theatre. Stick around for the final act of the night and you’ll witness Pinter in miniature: simultaneously horrifying and hilarious.

The opening act of this set of sketches efficiently directed by Jane Kaplan features David Pichette, who recently appeared as Jacques in Seattle Shakes’s As You Like It. Here he squares off with that production’s Touchstone, Darragh Kennan. The sketch milks comic mileage out of the ludicrous jargon of manufacturing with vaguely risqué-sounding concoctions of mechanism named and repeated. The context of the jargon could be the undoing of Pichette’s character but he plays this manufacturer with histrionics that suggest Grover of The Muppets, making for a pleasant almost thoughtless piece of comedy.

One of a series of admirably efficient set changes leads to a discussion of village shopping habits played by Suzy Hunt and Julie Briskman in That’s All. Pinter’s keen ear for the inanities of small talk is almost straightforward here as Hunt’s character obsesses over who shops where when and the near scandal of broken habits. Hunt makes some surprising but spot-on choices in this diatribe while Brinkman keeps the life in a litany of head-nodding responses.

In That’s Your Trouble Charles Leggett and Darragh Kennan reverse the power dynamic of their fine performances in The Dumb Waiter. Here Kennan has the upper hand and all the presumption of knowledge. The dialogue in this piece has more substance and less import than that of their longer and better-known two-hander. Leggett and Kennan play the scene in a self-conscious, almost mechanized physical style emphasizing the pugilistic rhythm of the encounter. That’s Your Trouble comes off as a verbal transposition of a back alley dust-up where the outcome was never in doubt.

In Special Offer Mariel Neto faces hard economic times and an advertisement that suggests an opportunity for her to view a man with the same objectivity that many of Pinter’s male characters view women. The suggestion is enough to make some in the audience cheer in their laughter and applause.

The weakest piece in the evening, The Applicant, lets Kennan mug while Brendan Patrick Hogan’s sound design dispenses with any notion of realism favoring more musical effects that provide the modicum of interest in this piece. One can’t help wondering if underplaying and emphasizing Brinkman’s character’s verbal onslaught would have made a more compelling piece, but the silliness is more in keeping with the evening as a whole.

The ironically titled Dialogue for Three features Neto delivering a scorchingly sensuous monologue in the midst of inconsequential natterings of Leggett and Kennan. Her character’s guilelessness is striking in contrast to her earlier appearance in the sketches while Leggett’s non-response seats this set of monologues in the heart of Pinterland.

The scene change between the last two acts of the evening is a great performance in itself and wins applause for Leggett and company. The piece that follows fades away over a series of possible false endings but provides the most sustained and fully realized example of Pinter’s work.

In Victoria Station Pichette returns with similar impotent exasperation to his first appearance but instead of facing Kennan’s cool confidence he is undone by stupidity so obstinate it verges on the sinister. Tiny fractures appear in the dialogue between Pichette’s dispatcher and Leggett’s cabbie in which Pichette’s comic rage falters in fear. There are moments in which Leggett’s stupidity seems knowing. Even violence can have no impact on the cabbie’s trap. For the dispatcher there is no escape; for the audience it is as challenging and engaging as this first round of sketches gets.

Sex, Trouble, and Taxi #274 has a final performance on Thursday, August 23. The rest of The Pinter Festival including The Dumb Waiter and Celebration, Old Times and No Man’s Land wraps up on Saturday, August 25.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

ACT’s Pinter Festival Arouses Our Pinterest

ACT has kicked off its festival celebrating the work of the late Nobel laureate, Harold Pinter (through August 26th; tickets: $30), with a pairing of classic and late short works that offer striking contrasts. Add fine casts and polished sets and there’s little to hold back these shows from being at least pleasant if not revelatory.

The evening begins with The Dumb Waiter, a popular play for survey seminars and scene study for the strength of its form and for its brevity; it is also one of Pinter’s earliest works. ACT has entrusted this two-hander to Darragh Kennan, as Gus, and Charles Leggett, as Ben, a pair of British hit men staking out a job in a vacant restaurant kitchen. These frequent players from Seattle theatre’s upper echelons add polish to their reputations in this production. Though Kennan felt a bit wobbly at times on Thursday night, they held the show together through several technical glitches and kept the audience laughing.

This being Pinter, the comedy isn’t unadulterated. Watching Pinter is a bit like being asked to take cartoons seriously; they’re still funny, but those very human characters—whether cat and mouse or roadrunner and coyote—are doing truly horrible things to one another. This production delivers those goods and for those unfamiliar with Pinter, The Dumb Waiter makes a fine introduction. For the rest of us it can feel a bit hackneyed. The piece is so iconic, despite a paucity of Pinter’s characteristic pauses, that the shock is gone from the final moments.

While Robert Dahlstrom’s set is wonderfully detailed and feels largely accurate the dumbwaiter itself is problematic and not only for its technical glitches. In this production the dumbwaiter appears to be constructed of HVAC ducting. This creates an opportunity for some wonderfully terrifying (if rather canned-feeling) sounds but looks ersatz at best. With another week of performances under their belts the acting and technical support will no doubt be as tight as the second half of the evening.

Celebration cast pictured (Left to Right, Back Row First): Peter Crook, Benjamin Harris, Darragh Kennan, Charles Leggett, Cheyenne Casebier, (Front Row) Frank Corrado, Randy Moore, Mariel Neto, Jeffrey Fracé, Anne Allgood, and Julie Briskman (Photo: LaRae Lobdell)

Where The Dumb Waiter, which debuted in 1957, creaks a bit with age, the 2000 play Celebration is impressive in its contemporary vulgarity. The haute cuisine setting and fixation with image, material gain, and power feel timeless yet specific to this moment in which the culinary has become the highest art. (The integral role of a cell phone interruption also sets the piece in our recent history though this will limit the piece in the long run. Already the lack of texting and the cell phone’s prominent, if fleeting, place make the play feel out of date.)

The script has the feeling of a sunset piece, reflective and valedictorian, shot through with intimations of emotional violence. Brothers (Frank Corrado and Randy Moore) who married sisters (Julie Briskman and Anne Allgood) occupy one restaurant table in celebration of an anniversary while a banker and his wife (Jeffrey Fracé and Mariel Neto) occupy another table nearby. Everyone smiles and is most polite in their affect while one after another makes blithely horrifying revelations and declarations.

Director John Langs manages the challenging staging with ingenuity as restaurant staff fill the stage in a tangled choreography, and just prevents Darragh Kennan from stealing the show. Here Kennan plays a waiter who repeatedly interjects with increasingly improbable and inane stories that almost make sense and bring to mind Woody Allen’s “Lost Generation” sketch.

Despite this competition Frank Corrado’s Lambert holds the center of the show like a mild version of the character played by Michael Gambon (who played Lambert in a TV version of Celebration) in The Thief, The Cook, His Wife, Her Lover. It’s almost as if Pinter has divided himself, with Lambert leading the elites in their portrait of casually destructive power while the waiter plays the not-quite-wise fool who doesn’t quite get the last word.

All told there isn’t a weak spot in this cast including Mariel Neto who has come a long way from her recent seamier appearance on the Seattle stage. She more than holds her own here among the otherwise all Equity cast.

We will see more of these actors before the festival is over on August 26th. Old Times opens August 15th, followed on the 17th by No Man’s Land, and a brief run of Pinter’s sketches. The Dumb Waiter and Celebration are an auspicious start.