Tag Archives: erin kraft

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

“Undo” at Annex Theatre on Things You Can’t Take Back

Mark Waldstein as Abe and Sydney Andrews as Rachel. Photo Ian Johnston
Mark Waldstein as Abe and Sydney Andrews as Rachel in Undo at Annex (Photo: Ian Johnston)

There’s a lot to love about the simplicity and wit of Holly Arsenault’s Undo (at Annex Theatre through Feb 16; tickets). In an alternate world — where in order to divorce someone in the eyes of God, you must first go back through your wedding ceremony in reverse — Undo creates an incredibly believable universe that would make weddings a lot more entertaining, you know, if you were into schadenfreude.

Written by Holly Arsenault, Undo looks at Rachel and Joe’s unraveling as they attempt to answer the questions of their un-wedding — should I get stoned (yes), will we be penalized by God for using a different florist (maybe), am I wearing the same underwear I was three years ago (thank god, no). Filled with utter sadness at times coupled with dry and dark humor, the unspecial day features secrets, confessions, and a truly awkward (bordering on disturbing) sex scene in wedding clothes.

Rachel and Joe’s family is full of genuine awkward splendor: a jovial father figure who was recently widowed (Mark Waldstein), a by-the-book teenager wearing an incredibly short dress from the previous wedding (Samantha Leeds), the maid-of-honor sister in a ridiculous hat (Jillian Vashro) with her Irish lesbian lover (Amy Hill), the estranged aunt who lives in France (Marty Mukhalian), and of course, an overbearing Jewish mother (Barbara Lindsay). And you know a drunk bro and gal for good measure (Nick Edwards and Zoey Cane Belyea).

Under the direction of Erin Kraft, the production is at its best in showing the small, quiet moments between families. Particularly of note is Mark Waldstein as the sage, non-judgmental father of Joe (Ashton Hyman), who radiates calm as everyone else starts falling apart. Sydney Andrews’ Rachel is quiet and seemingly battling the entire time with a fight or flight response while barely raising her voice, rendering a truly stunning performance. And Samantha Leeds as the little sister Naomi is positively heart-wrenching, keeping everything in order so her sister can make peace with God.

If there were a downside to the production, it is that father and son (Waldstein and Hyman) come out looking downright saintly in comparison to mother and daughter (Lindsay and Andrews), who both hold dark secrets that destroy marriages. While the men get to be forgiving and loving, the flaws of the women are presented as damnable. Though there is heart in their flaws, the contrast of it being men and women seemed to highlight an underlying message I doubt Arsenault intended.

This flaw aside, Undo is an evening of blissful anguish watching two people sever ties to each other completely — a funny, dark look at how relationships end and all that goes into undoing what’s done.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Get Intimate With “Ballard House Duet” at Washington Ensemble

Rebecca Olson, left, and Hana Lass, right, of Ballard House Duet

Have I seen a better acted show this year than Ballard House Duet (through December 17; tickets)?

I don’t think so. It is ferociously bold and unvarnished and about real people, giving the audience very little distance to shelter in.

This Custom-Made Play is presented by Washington Ensemble Theatre, and their intimate space has been reconfigured to let the audience watch from either side of a Ballard house’s living room as two women try the bonds of sisterhood.

This is to good-enough Seattle theatre as HBO or Showtime productions are to network TV.

It helps that playwright Paul Mullin had the chance to write the script with his two leads in mind, Rebecca Olson and Hana Lass. They are incandescent, girlish, scheming, despondent, vengeful, charming, giddy, and careworn. Because of the play’s structural demands, they often need to switch moods in the space of a beat. They even carry off the almost sadistic task of conversing with an invisible interlocutor, at length.

The two are very talented, but even so, their success with their “younger selves” speaks to considerable skill on the part of director Erin Kraft, who has also managed, with the tricky bilateral blocking required with the audience on both sides, to counterweight the spoken goings-on with a multitude of natural interactions.

If you know Mullin’s The Ten Thousand Things or Louis Slotin Sonata, Ballard House Duet represents a right back at Albuquerque: a visceral kitchen-sink drama in a Chayefskian vein. There’s nothing gimmicky to it — no overtly post-modern ironics or effects. Instead there’s a Braunschweiger sandwich, and a modern tragedy that has occurred in fragments.

You meet the sisters after their aunt has been taken to the hospital: Holly (Lass) has been trying to clean up a Hoarders-style mess, while Heidi (Olson) breezes in a week late, with a camera crew in tow, hoping that she can get some good pack-rat footage for her talk show, which seems largely to be about her. I could say they get off on the wrong foot, but it becomes clear that these two tend to wrong-foot their relations.

The plays runs forward and backward in their lives, trying to find that moment the cleavage took place, and something shattered. There’s Holly’s adoption, the death of their mother, Holly’s religiosity, Heidi’s careerist narcissism, an icky “uncle,” a boyfriend toyed with — the list goes on and on. It’s clear the two sisters love each other, in their way; they can be playful and gently mocking or loyal and compassionate. But as they grow older, they increasingly are locked into a pattern of grievance.

A few elements don’t come off so smoothly: An early recollection that their hoarder aunt refused to open Valpak-style coupons (because she didn’t want the coupons to be split up) gongs portentously. Mullin also overuses the allegorical utility of Heidi’s TV show. It begins to stretch credulity that Holly would agree to appear on it, and that any living producer would agree to the idea of that segment.

A late-in-play revelation doesn’t provide the emotional reversal it might, coming and going so quickly, for one, plus Holly lapses into DramaSpeak(TM) about “crossing lines,” when Lass is more than capable of giving you the betrayal emotionally.

But by then, you’re hooked. You just want to watch Olson and Lass keep sparking with this truth, the incompatibility of this accidental, familial love with the adults they are, and how they keep returning to try it again — resentful and singing their sisters’ songs.