The SunBreak » shakespeare

“Love’s Labour’s Lost” is a Win for Seattle Shakespeare Company

StefanDW — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:16:36 +0000

Seattle Shakespeare Company is making a strong argument for your choice of Love’s Labour’s Lost (through April 6) as your favorite of Shakespeare’s comedies. There isn’t a weak link in the production -- in fact, two immense strengths raise it from Seattle Shakespeare Company’s reliable competence to something approaching greatness.

An Off the Boards Discussion of Annie Dorsen’s “A Piece of Work”

StefanDW — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:09:45 +0000

SDW: I didn't much enjoy the show -- at least not emotionally. Intellectually I loved it and in no small part because I felt like it failed kind of spectacularly as theatre. This is all the more interesting to me because it feels very close to success. A bit more humanization one way or another could have brought it together.

At On the Boards, A Piece of Work Challenges Noble Reason, Finite Faculty

StefanDW — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 20:01:55 +0000

Great works of theatre often take a thing we know and change small pieces of it in order to help us see it and our world anew. A Piece of Work takes the opposite approach, reordering the context and fabric of the piece to raise questions about larger structures including our understanding of the performer/audience relationship.

Love Songs and Negotiations from She She Pop and Their Fathers

Michael van Baker — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 22:50:34 +0000

On the Boards' Lane Czaplinski sums up how many (if not most) of us would first react to She She Pop's Testament (last performance Sunday night at OtB): "The thought of my dad on stage in a highfalutin Lear terrifies me. What would he say and do?"

The Sessions Gets Under the Skin of Sexual Surrogacy, Slightly

Andrew Hamlin — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 21:51:20 +0000

We know this is a Hollywood movie because "boldly" means we get to see every inch of Helen Hunt, while we never see John Hawkes below the very top of the groin, hence preserving a time-honored double standard involving the penis as the final taboo.

At Spectrum, Donald Byrd Gives “Needless Talents” Human Faces

Michael van Baker — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 23:57:10 +0000

To bring this back down to earth, consider choreographer Donald Byrd's statement that, with The Theater of Needless Talents, he wanted to get into how particular humans keep finding ways to commit atrocities against humanity. Rather than totalizing Nazi power, buying into the Reich's myth, his work, iconoclastic as ever, breaks it into pieces.