Tag Archives: shakespeare

Kidd Pivot’s The Tempest Replica & the Art of Physical Storytelling

Kidd Pivot’s The Tempest Replica (Photo: Jorg Baumann)

The Tempest is thought to be the last play to have been written in its entirety by Shakespeare. First performed five years before his death 396 years ago, it is a story that looks back on a life’s work seeking to right wrongs, establish a legacy, and forgive nemeses. Crystal Pite and her company, Kidd Pivot, present a haploid exploration of The Tempest in a sold-out run of The Tempest Replica at On The Boards (through October 25).

The dance company plays out the story, shatters it, and replays it. These correlated dance verses offer an artistic approach to questions more often left to scholars that effectively relates the story to the streets beyond the theatre.

I really identified with, as any director does, the character of Prospero, his conflict between trying to reconcile his ambition and his magic and his art with his family and his humanity. —Crystal Pite in conversation with Peter Boal

A synopsis of the plot and selected passages from the play are projected on a wall of On The Boards’s lobby before the house opens. They note that the central character and deposed Duke, Prospero, has learned magical arts and employs them and the enslaved natives of his adopted home to spin a scheme that reeks vengeance on his usurpers and expands his estate by marrying his daughter to a rival ruler’s son.

Prominent themes touch on the nature of art, the consequences of colonialism, and notions of justice. These qualities, along with the spectacular elements, have made The Tempest popular grist for artistic adaptation in all media. The key role of visions and illusion have made it especially popular in film (Taymor, Greenaway, Wilcox, et al.) so it is appropriate that projections are prominent in The Tempest Replica.

The first half of the performance tells the story of The Tempest with Prospero in dark clothes creating the story. He brings to life neutral masked dancers encased in matte white like a collection of puppets. With Prospero’s careful attention the characters develop from inanimate sculptures to nearly life-like automata that retain just enough stiffness to remind us that they aren’t quite real.

I think there’s something about an anonymous body that excites me, just because I think when you are a viewer, you are always drawn to watch the face  of a performer—which is really beautiful and compelling and interesting, and I love watching faces just as much as the next person but, if you take the face away, you’re able to really watch the body. —Crystal Pite in conversation with Peter Boal

In the second half key scenes are replayed in street clothes that reduce the relationships’ psychological distance, bringing the story more into our own lives. Meanwhile the dance takes flight with larger, more acrobatic and vigorous movement. The psychology of the piece grows more nuanced, further reducing the distance while retaining the emotional extremes. This also provides opportunities for solos among the dancers. The solos plumb the depths of Ferdinand’s fear, Caliban’s rage at his enslavement, Antonio’s similar but less justified rapacity, and Miranda’s heartrending empathy.

The dance is finely executed with a broad vocabulary and acts of stunning agility that are delivered with extraordinary understatement. The audience learns the vocabulary as Prospero teaches it to the minions of the story, which aids in communicating the more fluid and extrapolated storytelling of the second half.

Those interested in production approaches to The Tempest would do well to examine The Tempest Replica and the clever ways Pite and company approach the dramaturgical challenges using the bare minimum of language. In fact language enters frequently with projections of words that come as shocks of the intellectual. Scrims do much of the work as projection surfaces but there are wonderful moments of surprise in which a skirt of a crumpled sheet of paper is smoothed allowing words to appear.

There are also inspired moments of physical storytelling as with the long, Nosferatu-fingers of the chief villain, Antonio. These both set him apart from his pawn, Sebastian, and convey his royal ambitions as fingers become a crown.

Shadows facilitate doubling as characters view themselves in live or recorded shadow projections. A shadow decapitation undercuts its own horror by its delightful execution. Shadow puppetry also makes light work of the cumbersome but vital exposition scene of the opening act. The backstory is played here in shadow-puppet styled video that transfers well to the monochromatic rendering of the dancers.

Kidd Pivot takes a few liberties with the text, removing the sympathetic courtier Gonzalo as well as the clowns Trinculo and Stephano. Ferdinand’s logs, often used to euphemistic effect in productions of the play, are exchanged for a Sisyphean stone. These cuts diminish the colonial and theological aspects of the story, but with so many avenues open to interpretation selection is key to success. The Tempest Replica unquestionably succeeds in creating a valuable addition to the body of artistic interpretations of The Tempest.

Upstart Crow, You Had Me at “All-Female Titus”

Photo by John Ulman

When I heard about upstart crow collective’s entirely female Titus Andronicus (at Seattle’s U’s Lee Center through October 7; tickets), my stomach gleefully lurched, and I purchased away with a bloody, macabre song in my heart. All women? Are you serious? This hardly ever happens! (I may have squealed.)

Shakespeare often underserves contemporary female actors, with lackluster roles or only two women in a twenty-person cast. Seeing talented female actors playing bit parts as handmaids, fairies, or even the larger, yet rarely deep characters gets old and generally inspires rants about failures of creativity. Tthere are exceptions, of course, but only exceptions–not rules.)

(Why, in 2012, with everything else in play, are we putting on Shakespeare the way he gender-assigned it? It makes no sense, so I have to try to play the “Because” game to explain it. Romeo’s best friend can’t be a chick because…dudes aren’t friends with girls? An entirely genderbent play has to stay the way it was originally designated because…if we have a woman outside the designated cross-dressing it loses all meaning? Fools are strictly males because…they make dick jokes? Did I get any of them right? I digress.)

Having read Titus Andronicus long ago in some darkened high school lit class, I vaguely remembered it involved a lot of blood, rape, dismemberment, and eating people. Since I’ve been worried about the zombie apocalypse, it didn’t seem like too much of a stretch in my 2012 doom-countdown clock that an all-female Titus might be one of the four Horsemen, but in Goth garb, tattoos, and piercings. (Oh yes, it’s hot.)

Let me just throw out some names that cinched the deal for me: Rhonda J. Soikowski, Peggy Gannon, and Tracy Hyland. Amy Thone is Titus. Oh. Wait. Go back. Amy Thone is Titus. Holy crap.

So, aside from clearly pandering to me and my uncontrollable need to watch talented women perform Shakespearean characters outside of the usual fluff of Nurse and Peaseblossom, the production is actually quite good, though bumpy in a few places. Set in the round (with a rather lovely design by Carol Wolfe Clay), I was struck by the altars lining the walls. There were white urns smeared with blood behind me, and a large bloody table with a dropcloth in front. I was surrounded on both sides by overhanging black staircases.

Under the direction of Rosa Joshi, the immediate contrast between Soikowski’s Bassianus and Kelly Kitchen’s Saturninus sets up the premise of a kingdom torn between two different brothers for the throne–one warm and smiling and one severe. Further, the loving gestures shown in the small and quick moments between Bassianus and his love Lavinia (Brenda Joyner) make you acutely aware as cute and happy as they are, it cannot end well. Meanwhile, the beautifully nasty portrayal of the two brothers from the Goth side of things (Gannon and Sarah Harlett) will ruin your faith in humanity especially during the battery of Lavinia.

Nike Imoru shines as the evil-at-heart Aaron, manipulating any and all to gain power. Strangely enough, I did not question this fact even when he looked on his baby. No softness came through, per se, but the subtle shift into being evil for evil’s sake and suddenly having progeny to provide purpose was quite captivating.

Thone balanced Titus’ love of his children, desire to be left to aging with grace, and the possibility of insanity with clear contrasts driving the play forcefully home. The decision to sever his hand juxtaposed with his inability to comfort a tongue-less, handless, and utterly destroyed Lavinia is perhaps the best example of Thone’s skill.

I had hoped this production would be spotless, but not all is shiny. At times the production became spotty and unclear in its tone. When the deceased cast comes back to set the table for the cannibalistic dinner, I felt like I was watching another play. Though it was darkly humorous and had me giggling, the play shifted from dark deeds by dark men to sweet revenge with a camp twist. And though I liked this short transition for its macabre glee, the turn from intense and serious violence to farce was a little jarring.

Complicating the issue was how the production dealt with blood. They chose to show the puppet strings of theatrical blood effects. We see the syringe that shoots blood from a knife; we see blood poured on a chest in a ritualized manner after the character dies. It made the would-be mess tidy, but also stylized and confused. While some moments came off wonderfully lusty in the pouring of blood, others were almost comical. Further, a few of the asides seemed to be lit as if the characters were B-movie villains delivering their monologues about orchestrating the invasion of earth. Not just lit that way, I should say, but also delivered in some instances as if they were expected to end them with a “Muahahahaha.”

Added together, these choices made me wonder: Is it camp? Tongue-in-cheek? Completely serious? I couldn’t be sure. Of course, the play does lend itself to over-the-top dramatics by the end. Having endured so much death, blood, and abuse, is there anything to do but laugh? But in this instance, it did not necessarily feel earned, instead broadcasting the ridiculousness of the circumstances and cheapening an otherwise emotionally captivating production.

Aside from that, there was an overriding question I couldn’t help but ask: When are they women playing men, and when are they performing as women in a male part? I enjoyed exploring this question through the variety of performance and honestly want to see it again, if no other reason than to document the play for its queer and gender theory lens. There were actors who performed as women throughout (Kitchens, Tracy Hyland). There were actors performing men without the seams of femininity at all (Gannon, Imoru, Soikowski, and Harlett). And then there was Thone, who seemed to shift between mother and father, both male and female.

Rather than taking me out of the performance, I felt that the question added to how we approach the text and story. When is Titus the man actually a mother? How is Aaron’s self-proclaimed evil side squelched with a softer touch when a son is born to him? And the larger question of why these choices are categorized in clearly imperfect gendered binaries. Why does it hurt more that this Titus doesn’t know how to comfort his daughter? I don’t know. But it does.

Getting Under the Skin With Freehold’s Free-Ranging King Lear

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(From left to right) Tony Pasqualini, Kayla Walker, Andre Nelson, Robert Keene, Joshua Holguin, Sarah Harlett (holding puppet) in Freehold's King Lear (Photo: Dan Morris)

(From left to right), Annette Toutonghi, Christine Brown, Tony Pasqualini, Luisa de Paula and Sarah Harlett (holding the puppet) in Freehold's King Lear (Photo: Dan Morris)

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Special to The SunBreak by Danielle Girard

“Underneath my shirt is my skin, underneath my skin is my heart, underneath my heart is…” Fill in the blank.

Freehold Theatre’s Artistic Director Robin Lynn Smith has a vision: using Shakespeare to help underserved populations and non-traditional audiences finish that sentence and fill in the blank. Or at least begin exploring what may lie in the silence of the unanswered question.

Since 2003, Smith has directed Freehold’s Engaged Theatre program which tours Shakespeare productions to prisons, projects, and juvenile detention centers. This July, Smith and her team of actors—many of whom have participated in previous tours—will perform King Lear for both the general Seattle public as well as communities in non-traditional sites across the greater Puget Sound area from July 1 to 15

What exactly inspires these artists to return each year and perform for such unique audiences? For Smith, it’s about the power of communion between the performers and these enthusiastic audience members. “We are privileged to perform for our extraordinary audiences and have been amazed by what we continue to learn about art, humanity, identity, existence, diversity, compassion, and community,” she says.

She explains that the men and women of these centers attend performances by choice and often actively engage with the show. They laugh, talk back, and advise characters. The inmates expect an honest and committed performance, so actors have to give it all they’ve got. Smith emphasizes that it is an exciting risk for performers: “You have to go out there and say trust us. And if we lie, they’re not going to stay. They’re not going to be polite and sit with their junior mints. So we have to say, we’re here with you.”

This year the tour will perform for the general public as well as for a number of underserved populations including Joint Base/Lewis McChord, Washington Corrections Center for Women, Monroe Correctional Center for Men, Harborview Medical Center and Echo Glen Children’s Center, a juvenile detention center.

At each non-traditional site, Freehold has one hour and fifty minutes to perform Lear without a traditional stage or lights. So how then do they evoke the world of the play? Smith says live music is crucial in creating Lear’s world and atmosphere. (This year’s live musical accompaniment was composed by Gino Yevdjevich of the local Seattle gypsy punk band Kultur Shock.)

She adds that employing big physical imagery also helps illuminate Shakespeare’s words, none of which are paraphrased or rewritten, for the audience. Oh: Did we mention that many of the lead characters are played by life-size puppets?

Actor Jose J. Gonzales, who plays Edmund in this production of Lear, traveled with other cast members in January to perform scenes from the play in a workshop at the Washington Corrections Center for Women and the Monroe Correctional Center for Men. “I love the whole process and how it culminates in going out to these communities,” says Gonzales. “For me it’s more meaningful than traditional theatre.”

Performances are often followed by the opportunity for performers and audience members to engage in in theatre and writing exercises together. Gonzales recalls a young inmate from the Monroe workshop in January who–when given the prompt, “Underneath my shirt is my skin, underneath my skin is my heart, underneath my heart is …” and asked to continue writing for 15 minutes–eventually jotted, “One day I look up at the sky it’s blue, and the next day I look up and it’s cloudy. Why is that?”

Gonzales admits, “There’s something about that sentiment that just tore me up. You can see his struggling with the question of ‘Why is this existence like it is? Why am I here? How did this happen?’”

This can sound a lot like the questions and themes Shakespeare explores in King Lear. Maybe Lear says it best himself:

…we came crying hither:
Though know’st, the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry…
When we are born, we cry that we are come.

Smith drove home this parallel when explaining why she chose to tour King Lear this year. “I am inspired by the human struggle to know ourselves, and the attempt to look fiercely at the truth of our existence–framed by limits of isolation, separateness, bewilderment, blindness; and the limits of our time here: aging and death. And it’s a great story.”

She also mentioned that Shakespeare’s themes of forgiveness, redemption, and revenge often strike a chord with their non-traditional audiences, in addition to the extreme situations each character faces.

“It’s crazy how fiction can—and the characters more to the point—who are beautiful, amazing, flawed, noble, messed up, and scared (all of those things that we all are as human beings) can be something that someone can really take on or identify with,” says Smith.

The King Lear tour kicks off with a Seattle preview on July 2, travels to non-traditional sites, and then returns to the city for final performances July 12 to 15. The show itself is free. As Smith explains, “We made it by donation everywhere we go. And that’s very much on purpose. We’re saying, come participate with us. To me that’s part of the vision of this work—it’s really inviting anybody and everybody that wants to come in, to come in, and that includes the Seattle audience.”

The cast includes: Eric Ray Anderson, Christine Brown, Erwin Galan, Jose J. Gonzales, Sarah Harlett, Joshua Holguin, Reginald Andre Jackson, Robert Keene, Shanelle Leonard, Kevin McKeon, Andre Nelson, Anthony Pasqualini, Luisa de Paula, Jesse Sherfey-Hinds, Annette Toutonghi, and Kayla Walker.

Free Public performances of King Lear

July 2, 6:30 p.m., Seward Park, Amphitheatre
5898 Lake Washington Blvd. S., Seattle

July 12, 13, 14, at 8 p.m.; July 15, 4 p.m.; Seattle University Lee Center for the Arts
901 12th Avenue, Seattle

Tickets are free but reservations are requested.

As You Like It is a Swell Romance

Nathan Graham Smith as Orlando and Hana Lass as Rosalind (Photo: Seattle Shakespeare Company)

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s more iconic pieces. You have Shakespearean motifs, such as the philosophical fixation of Love’s Labours Lost, and the Robin Hood theme and out-of-the-blue reform ending of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It also presages the girl-woos-boy-while-disguised-as-a-boy model used (to better effect) in Twelfth Night, and The Tempest’s usurpers undone in the wilderness with Greek gods as wedding officiants.

Seattle Shakespeare Company’s gentle, endearing production of As You Like It (through June 24; tickets: $22-$38) keeps the familiar fresh while avoiding its pitfalls.

The more unique images from the play are a wrestling match and a lunatic lover penning terrible poems to his lady and pinning them on trees. It also features one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches delivered by the morosely philosophical Jacques (a solid David Pichette). A murmur of recognition passes through the audience in the Center House Theatre as he launches into the Seven Ages of Man speech: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players…”

The players in this production are capable, especially in the lead and supporting roles, though a few minor players could focus more on their tongues and less on their hands. Those leads include Keith Dahlgren as the sympathetic-yet-noble deposed Duke. The Duke’s daughter, Rosalind (Hana Lass) remains at court as best friend to the usurper’s daughter, Celia (Rebecca Olson). There she falls in love at first sight with Orlando (Nathan Graham Smith).

That first sight comes in the wrestling match, which Orlando’s older brother had hoped would kill his sibling. Orlando wins the match but learns of his brothers’ further plots against him and flees to the woods. Simultaneously the usurping Duke banishes Rosalind who flees, accompanied by Celia and disguised as a man for safety’s sake, to exile in the same woods as her father and Orlando.

The fire in this production comes courtesy Lass, who carries the central romantic relationship. Under her care Rosalind’s scheme to test Orlando in trials of wooing feels as natural as possible for such a contrivance. Lass and Olson play the early scenes lightly, which heightens the pathos of their fortunes’ turn despite the darkness of their circumstances at the very start of the play. An opening tableau may be an attempt to establish the color of those circumstances but it is too fleeting and inexpressive to add much more than a left frame to the narrative.

Darragh Kennan has crossed the International Fountain from his many recent appearances at Seattle Rep to give us a deadpan Touchstone driven by the internal energy of a yipping terrier. (He puts all that energy to bear–to little effect–in his final witticism, the argument of the seventh cause. But the speech may be beyond help as changes in education have robbed it of context. He comes off far better in the modern additions and asides that pepper his performance. By the time that last speech comes around we are willing to let him prattle while we indulgently, if not knowingly, laugh.)

Jon Luytens draws notice in the smaller roles of Le Beau and Amiens with the clarity of his language and easy charisma. He also does nice work on vocals, guitar, and ukulele in the several songs sprinkled through the production.

Those songs, by Sarah McGuinn, force Shakespeare’s lyrics into soft-alt-pop settings with live on-stage instruments bolstered by backing recordings. The fit is a little imperfect but easy on the ears and pleasantly current. The music is at its best in the interpolation of Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love and a dance near the end of the show. Crystal Dawn Munkers’s choreography is spectacular in the strength of the characterization and storytelling. It is easy to believe we’ll see a lot more work from her as both choreographer and director as well.

Craig B. Wollam’s sets and Doris Black’s costumes convey us on the play’s emotional journey. We begin in the ice-bound formalism of a palace winter; forest banishment comes in Louis XIV style. The costumes reach ahead toward the regency period as the play progresses through the warming spring and blossoming summer of lovers and rightful rulers gathering in the woods. The literal blossoming in that forest is almost too cute. Chain-link fencing brings a nicely contemporary MMA touch to the wrestling scene, which barely avoids descent into pro-wrestling parody.

Director George Mount’s judicious cutting removes some of the looser tangents and details, including the Greek goddess, and the pace keeps our attention throughout. With mostly articulate and knowing acting, and unfussy staging, it makes for a light and fun evening of romance.

Finally, a Midsummer Night’s Dream with Teeth

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Todd Jefferson Moore as Nick Bottom and Amy Thone as Titania (Photo: John Ulman)

Christine Marie Brown as Lysandra and Allison Strickland as Hermia (Photo: John Ulman)

Christine Marie Brown as Lysandra, Trick Danneker as Demetrius, and Allison Strickland as Hermia (Photo: John Ulman)

Gordon Carpenter as Snout, Todd Jefferson Moore as Nick Bottom, Riley Neldam as Francis Flute, and Kevin McKeon as Peter Quince (Photo: John Ulman)

Chris Ensweiler as Puck and Reginald André Jackson as Oberon (Photo: John Ulman)

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You don’t need me to tell you how good Seattle Shakespeare Co.’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream (through November 13 at the Intiman; tickets) is. Broadway World calls it “HOT!” The Seattle Times rummages through its thesaurus for “phantasmagorical.” “Excellent and humorous,” says TeenTix. “Merely good,” qualifies The Stranger.

A recurring theme in most reviews is that there’s nothing mustily Elizabethan about this Sheila-Daniels-directed work; without making a “concept” out of it, Daniels has updated Midsummer‘s personality. The magical forest seems to hold refugees from Burning Man. The runaway lovers are looking for a place that will marry two women. Daniels lets the audience do the rest, form what connections it may, rather than offer a justification. That alone–devising a way to stage Shakespeare without baggage–makes the show stand out, even though it doesn’t have the acting firepower of SSC’s Hamlet.

This subtlety (to show, rather than tell) is backed up by set designs from Andrea Bryn Bush and costumes from Jennifer Zeyl–though Bush struggles to fill the Intiman stage on, I think, the SSC budget, you see enough to know what she’s after: knotted and gnarled trees, shadowy nooks and crannies. Zeyl’s “cloak” for Oberon is a masterstroke, a cross between a net and actual camouflage netting that turns Oberon into something misshapen, undefined, that your eyes can’t quite pick out. Ben Zamora’s lighting is a study in unsettling murk, and Robertson Witmer fills the air with strange voices and music.

The problem with Midsummer, in a way, is that you eventually have to leave the forest, and head back to squaresville (i.e., Athens). Again, very much like your time at Burning Man. Here, squaresville gains in stature, though, because that’s where Lysandra (Christine Marie Brown) and Hermia (Allison Strickland) would like to be married. It’s true that Daniels’ textual sex-change operation (Lysander to Lysandra) changes the play’s dynamics–Shakespeare was musing about the course of love, its fixations and inconstancy–but it pays off so well this way, you hear the play with fresh ears.

While the two are capable actors, I didn’t see that much chemistry between Strickland and Brown. Of the four young lovers, it’s Terri Weagant’s Helena who steals the show. I am a long-time Weagant booster–she’s hilarious, I love the way her voice cracks in self-doubt and disbelief at each new horror life has to offer, and her white-wine take (no caressing each syllable for an “Ah, Shakespeare!” epiphany). When Demetrius (the lanky, snappish Trick Danneker), ensorcelled, proclaims his love, you can tell Helena just can’t process this fresh horseshit.

Theseus (stern-yet-amiable Mike Dooly) and Hippolyta (a mostly line-less but assured Qadriyyah Shabazz) are the canoodling ruling-but-not-that-royal couple, but it’s the gang of “rude mechanicals” who tumble onto stage every so often that seem to have everything figured out. They don’t, of course, but this gang of amateur thespians is blessedly unaware of their limitations. Chief among them is Todd Jefferson Moore, in every way. His Nick Bottom is transcendent, but not immanent. Nothing remains within, all is spoken. It’s poetry.

Bottom’s ass-romance with Titania is the best thing about Amy Thone’s performance. Moore is literally chewing the scenery, but Thone has no trouble staying with him–her physicality is as expressive as anything she says. But you can see that Thone doesn’t have much investment in the fairy queen’s “humbling,” when Oberon (a compellingly offbeat Reginald Andre Jackson) *YOINKS* the child she was looking after away. What’s it all mean? I couldn’t see that anyone understood it. Jackson’s Oberon had a much tighter relationship with Puck (Chris Ensweiler), a yelping, echolalic, feral spirit who startled the crap out of the people he appeared in front of in the audience.

Ensweiler’s portrayal may be one of the best Pucks I’ve seen, and Puck is a much-trodden path. But usually you don’t think Puck would actually bite you, and here you do. Just as, generally, you don’t think a Shakespeare play will feel rough and wild (though it may act like it). When the fairies come out of the trees in this Midsummer, you shrink back a little, because they are not your friends.

Shakespeare in the Park at Volunteer July 9 & 10

A scene from Greenstage's 2010 "Macbeth"

The Seattle Outdoor Theater Festival begins the weekend after the 4th of July, when summer traditionally arrives in Seattle. Theatre groups GreenStage, Theater Schmeater, Wooden O Productions, Open Circle Theater, Last Leaf Productions, Young Shakespeare Workshop, Balagan Theatre, and Wing-It Productions are all participating.

It’s not just Volunteer Park, of course. Play producers will be visiting parks all around Seattle: Lower Woodland, Seward, Judkins, Lincoln, Discovery, Magnuson, Camp Long, and beyond the city limits as well: Fall City, Burien’s Dottie Harper, Lynnwood’s Lynndale, and Redmond’s City Hall.

It’s something of a variety show atmosphere–you can see some of Seattle’s leading Shakespearean actors, you can see some “fun for the whole family” fare, and you can see whatever zaniness Wing-It has cooked up. For hardcore Shakespeare, you want SSC’s Wooden O and Greenstage; Last Leaf is more family-oriented. To laugh out loud, there’s Theater Schmeater and Wing-It.

Filed under “could be great”: King Arthur and the Knights of the Playground, written by Jaime Cruz, Maggie Lee, Juliet Waller Pruzan, Joanna Horowitz, Paul Mullin, and Matt Smith, and featuring the talents of Balagan’s remarkable troupe.

Regulars know the drill, but here are some tips for any n00bs out there: Three hours in the hot sun on a summer day will leave you dried out and crispy. Most people plan it like a picnic, with a blanket, food and water, sun hats, extra sunscreen, maybe some pillows to recline on. Generally, if you’re at all interested in the play, you want to sit as close as possible, because sound doesn’t travel well out of doors, and Volunteer is under a jet flight path, the frequency of which you never truly appreciate until you’re trying to decipher Shakespearean English.

And now, the opening weekend schedule:

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Noon

As You Like It: Last Leaf Productions

2 p.m.

Macbeth: Seattle Shakespeare Company’s Wooden O

In the Enchanted Forest: Open Circle Theater

4 p.m.

The Merchant of Venice: Last Leaf Productions

5 p.m.

Arrh! A Dinosaur Ate My Spaceship: Theater Schmeater

7 p.m.

The Tempest: GreenStage

The Lost Folio: Wing-It Productions

 

Sunday, July 10, 2011

11 a.m.

TBA: Young Shakespeare Workshop

2 p.m.

Antony and Cleopatra: GreenStage

In the Enchanted Forest: Open Circle Theater

4 p.m.

King Arthur and the Knights of the Playground: Balagan Theatre

5 p.m.

Arrh! A Dinosaur Ate My Spaceship: Theater Schmeater

7 p.m.

The Comedy of Errors: Seattle Shakespeare Company’s Wooden O

The Lost Folio: Wing-It Productions