Tag Archives: jennifer zeyl

Theatre

Intiman’s Angels: Required Viewing Without Rapture

1 Comment
Prior Walter (Adam Stanley) has a divine encounter in Intiman’s Angels In America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches

If you’ve never seen Angels in America you need to see Intiman’s current production (at Cornish Playhouse through September 21st). If you’ve only seen the HBO film version, you need to see this production. If you’ve seen the show before you can sit this one out but you likely won’t because you’ll know that Angels in America is one of the great plays of the 20th Century. It has taken its place alongside Death of a Salesman, August: Osage County, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (I’d also make an argument for adding The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks to this list, but I might be in a minority). These are plays that define our national identity in terms that gain breadth from their specificity.

And yes, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the play is long, but also like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf it is vital and necessary that you stay for the whole performance. Plan on arriving late to work the next day if need be. The whole work is more than 7 hours of theatre. Part 1: Millennium Approaches is 3.5 hours long, including intermissions—yes, plural intermissions (Part 2: Perestroika opens September 3rd and runs in rep).

The play has a lot to say and it says it efficiently. Plot and event churn away. Famously there are even scenes that play simultaneously (an effect that isn’t entirely successful in this production). That’s how efficient it is, and yet it still takes 3.5 hours. Even if this production leaves room for improvement it’s worth it.

The play speaks of the American condition with joy, love, comedy, anxiety, and ambition all that makes America what it is. When the play debuted in the early 1990s it seemed remarkable that it did this through a story full of homosexuals and Mormons. Lately homosexuals and Mormons seem to dominate the American cultural landscape. Was playwright Tony Kushner prescient? Was it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Who’s to say—but does the play age well? The answer to that question is an emphatic yes (thus far).

What once was topical and current is now historical. Though we still fight mysterious and seemingly unstoppable viruses that rise out of Africa and wreak death and destruction in the face of fear and ignorance, the palpable fear of the AIDS epidemic now feels like the fear of the red scare Kushner references in the person of Ethel Rosenberg. It’s historical but present, if only because we never really outgrow our history. Director Andrew Russell leads his cast through the heavy meal of Kushner’s text with keen understanding and useful interpretive shades.

Intiman’s production is good but not the transcendent show it should be. The acting is mostly solid, with a cast that hails from the usual drama club of Seattle suspects. Charles Leggett delivers possibly his finest performance to date, disappearing into his role as the venal lawyer and Republican operative, Roy Cohn. Quinn Franzen is also excellent and nearly unrecognizable in the central role of Louis. Franzen’s accent fades over the course of some scenes but he lives fully inside this tightly wound bundle of intellect and anxiety. In fact he shares the one scene this production really nails. The other half of that scene is the ever-reliable Intiman stalwart, Timothy McCuen Piggee, who doubles as both—well, this is where it gets complicated.

Angels has a level of complexity that suggests something between a fugue and a 19th century melodrama. Be warned that Part 1 ends in a tangle of split ends and splicing comes late in the game of Part 2.

At the center we find a pair of couples. The most central of these are long-time boyfriends: the Jewish intellectual, Louis (Franzen), and the WASP-y Prior (Adam Standley). From the Mormon side we have the Valium-popping housewife, Harper (Alex Highsmith) and her rising star Republican (natch) lawyer husband, Joe (Ty Boice). For inciting incidents we have two diagnoses of AIDS: one for Prior and the other for the real historical figure, Roy Cohn (Leggett). Roy is Joe’s mentor and champion. Joe is Louis’s coworker.

Piggee plays Prior’s ex-boyfriend, Belize, but he also doubles as Harper’s hallucination, Mr. Lies. Roy has his own hallucination in the person of Ethel Rosenberg (Anne Allgood). There is a score of character, all told, and much doubling. Also there is an angel (Marya Sea Kaminski).

There is some great work here. In addition to the fine acting Jennifer Zeyl’s set tweaks the play’s traditional tabula rasa, evoking Greek tragedy, and both civic and eternal judgment with heavy steps, columns, and plinths. She jettison’s New York City specificity favoring thematic unity. Mark Mitchell’s costumes are perfectly researched for character, circumstance and tradition from Harper’s Mormon underwear to the big suits that hang off Roy’s shrinking frame and Ethel’s perfectly manicured ensemble.

Harper (Highsmith), Prior (Standley), Joe (Boice), and Louis (Franzen)

Unfortunately the biggest moment fails. The lead-up to the angel’s entrance is powerful. Matt Starritt’s sound design sneaks up on us and then promises great things to come. Robert Aguilar’s lights open the door to astonishment. What we get is a Christmas tree topper. One can see the argument for the choice but it is neither sufficiently ironic nor adequately awe inspiring to produce anything more than disappointment, despite Kaminski’s best efforts.

It should be noted that Kaminski brings a big spark to every other scene she touches, whether playing a South Bronx derelict, a sympathetic nurse, or the friend and realtor of Joe’s mother back in Salt Lake. Few others show such consistency through their many roles. Anne Allgood shines as Ethel but drags in most of her other roles. Highsmith’s Martin Heller requires some endurance and graciousness from the audience, and even Piggee’s Mr. Lies lacks the verve of a compelling fantasy. Leggett is as good playing Prior’s Restoration era ancestor as he is in his primary role, and though Ty Boice struggles with his accent his medieval ancestor of Prior has great charisma.

For all this production’s achievements it shares the perennial Seattle theatre problem of a dragging pace. One can hear the gaps between lines that leave the dialogue feeling staccato and plodding until we get to the three-quarter mark of this first half of the play. In this scene Belize meets with Louis, who is wracked with guilt at leaving Prior when he can’t cope with the illness anymore. Louis covers his guilt, fear, and self-loathing by spewing intellectual folderol that quickly careers into blatant racism that finally drives Belize away. Franzen nails the New York pace while Piggee stays in the scene, engaged, listening, and responding through Belize’s repulsion and disconnection. This is an intensely emotionally driven scene that unearths the love and fear these men feel for Prior. Their different responses delineate the spectrum of humanity, our frailty, self-interest, compassion, and heroism. Here the cast, director and playwright find the same groove and the show fully lives up to its reputation.

Theatre

Secrets, lies, love, death, and family dysfunction are ready for their close up in Royal Blood

Nicole Merat and Amy Love in Royal Blood, photo by Chris Bennion

Royal Blood, the latest play from local playwright Sonya Schneider, made its world premiere last weekend at West of Lenin. While not quite perfect, it’s a family drama that I have been unable to stop thinking about once I left the theater Sunday evening. It’s engrossing. It’s about the lies we tell our families, and ourselves, in order to get by.

In the small, Fremont theater, intimacy is conveyed between the audience and performers by an assortment of lawn chairs, benches. The set, designed by Stranger Genius Jennifer Zeyl, faithfully recreates the backyard of a California house, falling apart as much as the family who inhabits it (or maybe I’m projecting).

Todd Jefferson Moore plays Cliff, the patriarch who is slowly dying of cancer, raising his mentally disabled daughter Deborah (a wonderful performance from Amy Love), and having to come to terms with the suicide of his son. That his son’s lover, Adam, is Japanese and Cliff hasn’t quite gotten over World War II (where he served) complicates things, so he uses his racism as a defense to shield his homophobia. Yet through Schneider’s writing and Moore’s performance, you can feel a lot of empathy for him as he tries to hold his family together, knowing he doesn’t have much time left. It’s probably the strongest performance of the play because you can sense that he’s only a few bad cards away from a complete breakdown, or explosion, as it may be.

Mari Nelson plays Dorothy, the oldest daughter who is a Europe-based journalist. She was once nominated for a Pulitzer Price, and now she sees every step and every story as a means of advancing her career, which has priority over her family. She’s supposed to be the adult of the family. Cliff even tries to outsource telling Deb about her brother’s suicide to her. He told Deb that her brother is just away on a cruise, which he won for being the 101st caller. Dorothy is the only one in the family realistic (or cynical) enough to believe her mother’s claim that she’s a distant blood relative of Princess Diana. Her character slowly unravels, though, as you watch how she interacts with her sister, her father, and her daughter, Cassiopeia (who shows up unannounced after she runs away from her father’s home to her grandfather’s; she’s played by Nicole Merat). She’s not a bad person, per se, but a complex one who is trying to balance the family she never asked for with the life she desperately wants for herself. She doesn’t want or need anyone else in it, but her family very much needs her.

Deb, for her part, thinks that Dorothy is visiting to help her bury her dog, Lady Di, not her brother. She’s painfully naïve but it’s her lack of any cynicism that makes her the most sympathetic character in this play. Everyone wants to protect her from being hurt, even if they have different ideas of how that should be done.

The family communicates with each other through secrets, lies, half-truths, outright evasions, and the occasional dose of hard truths. It’s not gentle or subtle, but it’s how they can get the truth to one another.

The ending, no spoilers, felt like a let down and like it was the only way out of the box Sonya Schneider built for her characters. Yet the challenge of the piece is to not just understand the motivations of each person on stage (and off, like the dead brother and mother) but to show genuine empathy.

(Royal Blood plays at West of Lenin on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, through Friday, April 4. Tickets can be acquired 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

Antony And Cleopatra And An Asp Too Late at Seattle Shakespeare Co.

Amy Thone in Seattle Shakespeare Company’s 2012 production of “Antony and Cleopatra” (Photo: John Ulman)

The center does not hold in the Seattle Shakespeare Company production of Antony and Cleopatra (through November 18th; tickets) at The Playhouse at Seattle Center (the Intiman space). That center, in this case, is the husband-and-wife novelty act of Hans Altwies and Amy Thone, playing the ill-fated title roles of this tragedy. We spend most of the play wishing their characters would hurry up and die.

The production is admirably consistent yet woefully misconceived. Director John Langs has added confusion to poor character choices with some half-hearted stabs at socio-political commentary in costuming and choreography.

An opening dance sequence needlessly establishes the decadence of the Egyptian court with movement that layers the mysticism of Dervish whirling with orgiastic writhing. This makes for a discomfiting association between current spiritual practice and the hedonism of the ancient court. To the production’s credit, other design elements suggest that this conflation is accidental and Langs is pursuing something more simplistic.

Pete Rush’s costumes imply an Egyptian/Roman conflict as surrogate for our current East/West confrontation. At one end of the scale is the soothsayer’s caftan, emblematic of the East as organic and emotional. At the other end the West is all control and intellect as suggested by the 19th-century officers’ garb and 21st-century riot-cop battle gear of the Roman army.

Between them lies the Hollywood-slick rebel-chic of Pompey’s troops. Evidently they have escaped The Matrix films in order to rule the Mediterranean waves, though there isn’t a swatch of the nautical about them. As a whole it feels silly and more ambitious than smart.

As for the acting, the company delivers the verse with an ease that sometimes loses its pulse in the naturalism of their delivery. They are less successful with their characterization. Thone does nothing to mitigate Cleopatra’s cloying capriciousness with any sort of humanity or regal qualities that suggest she is anything more than physically attractive. Altwies’s Antony feels less like a charismatic military leader than an inept politician driven by nothing more than an inflated sense of self-worth.

With lead performances like these, the supporting cast gets a great opportunity to shine, which they do to varying degrees. Charles Leggett’s Enobarbus is serviceable but his death scene achieves no catharsis given Antony’s failure to deserve it.

Darragh Kennan makes for a clownish yet unsympathetic Octavius Caesar. He appears profoundly uncomfortable in his own skin and uncompromising with all. While Kennan is amusing as ever, his Octavius is insufficiently complex to provide an enlightening foil for Antony.

Dan Kremer’s Lepidus and Sydney Andrews’s Octavia are among the few to wholeheartedly win our sympathy. In the midst of the bluster and bravado of the drunk scene on Pompey’s galley (the show’s artistic high point), Lepidus’s vulnerability and honesty shine convincingly.

Andrews inspires both sympathy and pity in the bit role of Octavia. We feel sympathy for her grounded characterization of this political pawn and pity for the attempts to play her pregnancy for laughs. Meanwhile Kennan’s menacing Caesar is all deceitful subtext in welcoming Octavia back to Rome when Antony abandons her, missing another opportunity to give truthful complexity to his character.

Costuming suggest that these questionable choices are director-driven as individual pieces exacerbate the actors’ inclinations. Kennan wears his 19th-century military garb buttoned up and pressed. Leggett does Che Guevera in drab fatigues and a red beret. Antony and Cleopatra’s battle gear exposes the sham of their characterizations. Cleopatra goes to war in an intrusively ludicrous outfit while Antony looks childlike in coveralls and gilded life jacket armor.

The positive side of the design is mostly in the set, and the talented designer, Jennifer Zeyl, produces some clever and effective ideas here. A central sandbox keeps Egypt present in all the locations of the sprawling narrative just as Egypt and Cleopatra are (nearly) ever present in Antony’s heart and mind. In many scenes, the ways this pit divides or draws together characters provides the production’s only nuance.

The floating platform of the final scenes is creative and interesting—if challenging for some sightlines—but the noise that accompanies its entrance and adjustments is distracting. The simple set dressing of the galley scene is far more effective.

In the battle scenes, the choreography mostly takes up time and space. It tells us that a battle is happening without furthering the plot or our understanding of the characters, or conveying the emotional experience of the bloodshed. The single moment that stands apart from this is a stillness in which an individual soldier is shot multiple times in a spotlight. Clearly Langs and choreographer Mollye Maxner recognize their success here as they repeat the moment. Now if only Langs had recognized and excised the weak parts of the production, we’ve have much more fulfilling evening.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

A Stylish Romeo & Juliet, All Grown Up, at Intiman’s Summer Festival

[This review is based on the final preview performance of the production, which Stefan was invited to review by Intiman’s PR–ed.]

“Not another production of Romeo and Juliet!” This is the dominant response from a random sampling of potential theatre-goers. But Intiman’s production (in repertory through August 26; tickets: $30) belies the notion that this is just another Romeo and Juliet. It is strongest on the design side, but there are some real standout performances here as well. All together it makes for a surprisingly fresh production.

Fawn Ledesma and Quinn Franzen as the title characters in Romeo and Juliet at Intiman’s Summer Festival (Photo: Chris Bennion)

The well-known story of star-crossed lovers gets excellent treatment by a fine cast, but three or four performances among the actors deserve special attention.

Michael Place is as entertaining a Mercutio as one could hope for with a thoroughly engrossing Queen Mab speech. Shawn Law does a remarkable job selling and differentiating the dangerous Tybalt and hopeless, and rather sketchy, Paris.

But the real standouts include Timothy McCuen Piggee as Lord Capulet, Allen Fitzpatrick as Friar Lawrence (and others), and Quinn Franzen as Romeo. With Piggee and Fitzpatrick we sit up and take notice the moment they open their mouths. Their mastery of the language is riveting and they command every moment of their respective stage times.

Franzen is not far behind these two and his scenes with Fitzpatrick are highlights of the show (full disclosure: I’ve known Franzen for a few years and trained alongside him at Shakespeare & Co.). Where he really shines, however, are in his soliloquies. It is the difference between Romeo’s solilioquies and those of Juliet that mark the crux of this production.

Franzen’s soliloquies are intimate conversations with the audience. He speaks to us and we nearly answer. He joins us in the house and we feel like he’s one of us and that we belong to him. In contrast when Juliet (Fawn Ledesma) speaks her soliloquies she feels distant and self-absorbed, and this works tremendously well by establishing a difference in maturity between the lovers.

Audiences will be amused by the playfulness that highlights Juliet’s childishness and naïveté, which occasionally seems out of place, as when she plays a cat with cat’s cradle through a soliloquy. That childishness drains away however as she marries, suffers her vicissitudes, and suddenly grows up.

Piggee paralyzes the audience with the intensity of Lord Capulet’s decree that Juliet should marry Paris or be cut off from her family. It is all the more shocking to see Juliet rise out of her childishness and weeping to stand up to this assault but her next soliloquy proves that the change is permanent. As she prepares to fake her death Juliet speaks and finally connects with the audience. The production, which has belonged to Franzen’s Romeo, becomes Juliet’s coming-of-age story.

As for those strong design elements, Deb Trout’s costumes and Jennifer Zeyl’s set are nicely unified in their evocation of a slightly Latin version of modern urbanity, but the costumes are the take-away. Whites and beiges dominate both, with white t-shirts, shorts, sneakers, and white cotton dresses dominating the wardrobe. Concrete slabs, barbed-wire topped chain link fences, and the old-style solid security gates give the action more than just the expected levels and reveals.

Looking more closely we notice that the wall is studded with those tall, narrow prayer candles one finds in every bodega. The chain-link fence is woven through with photos of the feuding families’ victims. These memorials, famously resonant of 9/11, stand opposite one another stage left and right—but wait, there’s more! Those same images appear in the costumes, painted on in ornate frames all over shirts and dresses. They are the emotional scars these people carry with them new images are pinned on with each death, and Romeo and Juliet are almost alone in carrying none.

Between the white costumes of the mourning families and the black costumes of the friars with their dove icons and red skull caps this show is so stylish it wants a gift shop full of clothes inspired by the show and fleshed out with pieces from Hedda Gabler. The Intiman’s new life in this summer season is off to a great start, but should theatre prove less than sufficiently lucrative they might consider recasting themselves as a fashion house.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Misadventures and More at Annex Theatre’s Patty

Marianna de Fazio as Patty and Kelsey Yuhara as her super-powered friend Jen in Annex's The Strange Misadventures of Patty...

With a title like The Strange Misadventures of Patty, Patty’s Dad, Patty’s Friend Jen, and a Whole Bunch of Other People, Annex Theatre’s new production (through August 27; tickets: $5-$15) tips you off right away that it’s going to force some whimsy upon you. It’s not the worst thing to have pressed upon you, it’s just that there’s a compelling real-life drama at the heart of the play that all the kicky antics serve mainly to distract from.

In Allison Moore‘s play, directed by Amy Poisson, corporate economist Patty (Marianna de Fazio) is abruptly woken from her good-life autopilot by her estranged, alcoholic father’s stroke, and confronted by the complex series of negotiations rising from his new vulnerability and dependency. We don’t see her past experiences, just her bewildered, frustrated father (Jon Lee) mangling his way through explanations, justifications, and proud-papa-isms.

Lee and de Fazio are very good together; there’s almost a Method fierceness in Lee’s portrayal of an aphasic old man, previously stunned by his alcoholism. A reprobate’s cackle infiltrates his fond reminiscences of Patty’s childhood, but he can grow frighteningly angry as well.

This is kitchen-sink drama territory (lit by Jessica Trundy), with the brute reality of forms that need to be signed, care providers to be hired, and therapeutic modalities to be weighed. But these trials in the-world-as-it-is also supports the dramatic movement of the play, which is about a father and daughter struggling to learn how to speak with each other again. In Jennifer Zeyl’s thoughtful puzzle-box set, Patty’s dad’s apartment is recessed so that it can roll forward, making explicit his intrusion into her life. (Conversely, when it recedes, he’s out of mind.)

It can be heavy stuff, so the cartoon, ass-slapping comedy of Patty’s sexist workplace, if not all that funny, at least lightens the load briefly. That’s part of a subplot that might be titled “Patty Learns to Be Assertive and Express Her Anger,” which takes place mainly in a coffee shop. Jason Pead (who also plays Patty’s antediluvian boss) is the definitive barista-in-a-band. De Fazio makes a great straightwoman for Pead–she can hold her own with an awkward, arms-length cuddle with Lee, then shift gears for updated That Girl-style social comedy.

What never clicked for me, though, was the “zaniness” of Patty’s cancer-researcher roommate Jen (Kelsey Yuhara), who also has a variety of superpowers that she gives up using for the majority of the play to prove a point to her boyfriend Jack (Alec Wilson) that her accomplishments are her own. Costume designer Christine Meyer outfits Yuhara in Scott Pilgrim-worthy attire (and later outdoes herself with de Fazio’s ensemble), but there’s little reason for this character’s existence, dramatically, except as a foil for the presumed seriousness of economics-minded Patty. (Here’s the counterpoint position. It’s a matter of record that I stare blankly at the manufactured wacky and zany.)

The capably zany Juliet Waller Pruzan has choreographed a few numbers for the piece–some coming off better than others. The otherwise talented ensemble are not seasoned Broadway hoofers, and Waller Pruzan’s calls for quick, light heel taps looked a little labored on opening night. The scene at a dance club (that’s Robertson Witmer’s sound design), having a dramatic goal as well as a dance break, was kinder to the actors.

At the end, my companion said, “I give it a ‘meh.'” Nuances are important: I took that as a “I didn’t love it, but all right if you’re paying.” If you have some tolerance for Annex’s risk-taking on newer works, and even a guilty delight in the goofy, I think you might really enjoy the work. If, like me, you’re content to watch the outstanding performances of de Fazio and Lee, you may find that play within a play is enough for your $15.