Tag Archives: Evan Mosher

Theatre

Love, Boats, Dystopia: Satori Brings a World to Life in Returning to Albert Joseph

It’s time, once again, to take a little trip to a dystopian world that is distressingly familiar and comfortingly strange. You know the literature: Brave New World, 1984, The Hunger Games, The Giver… Sleeper: places dominated by shadowy leaders whose image engenders fear, obedience, and rebellion. Add to the list Returning to Joseph, Satori Group’s world premiere production of a script by Spike Friedman (through May 25).

This touching meditation on love, education, and family through boat analogies and civil strife features strong performances from a pair of actors (a pair and a half, counting the prerecorded eponymous dictator). Despite a lull in the second half, the show is moving and more engaging that most one sees in a Seattle theatre season, but its greatest strength is in the details. Friedman writes with such finesse that, despite vast differences, the world of this play feels closer to our own than most plays set here and now.

The characters we discover in that world include Andrea (LoraBeth Barr) and Leo (Quinn Franzen) who meet at a rebel gathering that gets routed by loyalist forces. Andrea and Leo barely escape and Leo, who is more of a loyalist, saves their lives but suffers serious brain damage. This provides Andrea with an opportunity to rebuild his brain with rebel sympathies, much as the government brainwashes their prisoners (more effective than killing). In the process Andrea and Leo form a deep personal bond that is strained when she leads her new-made rebel home to share her achievement with her comrades.

The tale is shown in flashbacks as Andrea and Leo speak their story, or a version of their story, into a microphone in hopes of gaining access to a rebel-held shelter. They cannot see the people to whom they speak but they look up, as if at a camera, or toward a two-way mirror. We are keenly aware that we are observing, that we have power we won’t use, and that these actors/characters are vulnerable.

As they beg to be let in, to be given shelter, we in our steeply raked gallery of seats, begin to feel that the play wants something from us. We begin to look for a way to let them in, and then suddenly the tables are turned.

At intermission we are all asked to exit and instructed to leave nothing in the theatre. When we return it is to the area that had been the stage. The actors perform on the gallery that had been the house.

There is an idea at work here but the staging is awkward. The gallery is useful in terms of the script’s interest in audiences and performance, but feels wrong as the setting. It serves as a projection surface where we see video of Albert Joseph broken up on those railings, steps, and risers. This does make the leader more shadowy but seems an odd choice for a projection surface in the world of the play.

In the first half the play we watch Andrea and Leo’s relationship take shape. Barr and Quinn have great chemistry and instantly snap back and forth from their shared intimacy in the testimony scenes to the various points of growing trust in the flashbacks. The second half is less compelling, in part, because we are denied that chemistry. Instead we find Andrea alone with that projection for much of her time on stage.

The interrogation that makes up most of the second half is wickedly clever. It proceeds like a therapy session with the subject doing most of the work. The prerecorded therapist/interrogator simply provides prompts. In the world of Albert Joseph that prompting is so powerful that punishment comes in removal of the interrogator: The subject desires the torture.

The hitch is that most of the play’s dramatic action takes place in this second half and the changes don’t seem organically justified. There is little for us to discover, no need we might fulfill. All we can do is wait for Andrea to escape her engrained responses. Though she has enough perspective to see the evil in Albert Joseph’s control she remains swayed by it. When she finally and suddenly breaks she justifies the self-conscious staging of projection on gallery, calling out the performance of power and coming to question most of what she knows.

This revelation, though long in coming, leaves us with questions about our own power and place in society and the world. There’s no brow beating; they are subtle and incisive questions. Finally, Friedman is kind and hopeful enough to leave us not just unsettled but also reassured.

The world of this performance wouldn’t hold together without strong support from the technical team. Marnie Cumings builds on her growing reputation for subtle work in challenging settings. Evan Mosher’s sound design is understated and effective; even if the projector sounds feel symbolic they still do the job.

Costumes, by Doreen Sayegh and Greta Wilson, are a highlight. Both rustic and futuristic, they look like clothes one would want to wear here and now. This does nothing to diminish their efficacy as costumes. We immediately know how these two characters differ from one another by their shoes alone. It is this level of attention to detail that characterizes the entire production making it equally transporting and transforming for its audience.

{The Satori Group’s Returning to Albert Joseph plays at theLAB@Inscape through May 25, tickets can be found here.}

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Tough Guys and Oxtail Chili at Café Nordo’s “Smoked!”

2 Comments

It’s time, once again, for another evening of fine dining and pleasant performance from Café Nordo. This peripatetic food theatre company integrates menu and plot and this time around they frame their agitprop performance in the world of the spaghetti Western with Smoked! (through June 16; tickets). It’s a fitting genre for Terry Podgorski’s often-ripe dialogue; thankfully, the cuisine one encounters is a far cry from the frontier.

For this Old West story, Café Nordo sets up shop in Pioneer Square at The Kitchen, Delicatus’s event space. There’s a Zane Grey feel to the space with lots of rough, unfinished wood, bat wing doors from the foyer, and a bulky bar backed by a long line of identical anonymous bottles of caramel-colored drink. A Palouse-like image is visible above those bottles. In one of the finer touches in this event the rolling hills shift from late afternoon to early evening over the course of the show.

As with all Café Nordo performances Smoked! features a plot that preaches to the choir against the evils of agribusiness. This doesn’t reveal anything new about spaghetti Westerns or agribusiness, but it’s a good time. We come to care about the characters and their fates more than the issues with which they wrestle.

Those characters include Clara (Café Nordo regular Opal Peachey), the saloon keeper who tries to keep her town together and her friends from harm. Peachey is joined by fellow alumni Maximillian Davis and Evan Masher. In the roles of Eli and Travis they give us the sort of vulnerable, simple men who populate this genre to contrast with the Clint Eastwood characters.

That gunslinger for good in is played here by Seattle’s go-to tough-guy actor, Ray Tagavilla. This nameless stranger looking for a drink and a hot bath quickly becomes embroiled with the town boss’s stooges The Advocate and “Mad Dog” Maddie (Ryan Higgins and Kate Hess). These villains are two sides of madness, one cold, controlled, and calculating, the other violent and unstable. The cast of capable actors rounds out with the obligatory sheriff and bar maids and, the most important character, the food itself.

Transitioning from the play to the food is the biggest dramaturgical challenge in Café Nordo shows. Director Erin Brindley and writer Podgorski are getting better at meeting that challenge but they have yet to master it. Where other shows might have a blackout between scenes, at Café Nordo, the audience gets a series of intermissions. During each break, the cast presents a course and its optional cocktail accompaniment (one may alternatively or additionally purchase drinks from a menu). Since the actors serve in character, the show must establish the audience’s role in the plot and a reason for the characters to serve us.

In Smoked! the audience has come to town to see a hanging that our protagonists are determined to stop. They don’t seem to mind our presence or purpose all that much but they don’t have a reason to serve us either. For the first course we are fed because it’s Maddie’s whim and she has a loaded gun. The later reasons are only a little more natural.

Overall the food outshines the acting and text. The third course, a sunflower seed risotto with garlic scape pesto, is the weak link in the cuisine and even that is pretty good. The loose biscuit of sunflower seeds (not risotto, but what else would one call it?) overwhelms the other flavors without obliterating them. The accompanying whiskey sour balances this nicely.

The final two courses and the final two scenes make up for any weaknesses in the rest of the evening. The oxtail chili is more like an oxtail soup that’s more meat than broth. It’s flavorfully spicy and awfully good. The fried corn pudding melts into it. The vegetarian chili is spicier than the meat with prominent celery. Relief from the heat comes in a dark, serious cocktail of rye, Fernet, and orange bitters.

When the shooting’s done (as it must be) tiny skillets appear on the tables as dishes for rhubarb pandowdy. When combined with fennel whipped cream it makes for a dessert that’s mildly sweet accompanied by a mildly bitter fortified tea. It’s a course that’s over too soon no matter how slowly one savors it.

Anastasia Workman provides the show with her reliably fine compositions that meet the genre while maintaining her personality. However the underscoring is a real highlight, notably in the early scenes, and some later flute work. Most of this features Dayton Allemann who is also responsible for the excellent video work.

K.D. Schill’s costuming is hit and miss. Some pieces look lived in and appropriately distressed but most of the costumes look fresh off the shelf including cartridge belts that have never held bullets. Some skirt hems fall awkwardly and there’s a bolero jacket and corset combination that doesn’t really work as worn.

Podgorski’s dialogue is often stiff and overwrought, which could be used to great effect in this setting but Smoked! aims more toward serious theatre than simply a genre spoof. Still he continues to show signs of growth as a writer with some genuinely funny and original scenes and a complete and well-structured plot. Between those laughs, the action of the later scenes, and the fine meal Café Nordo chalks up another accomplishment in their esoteric field.