Tag Archives: Timothy McCuen Piggee

Theatre

Intiman’s Angels: Required Viewing Without Rapture

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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.

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

Hedda Gabler Shows Her Slip at Intiman’s Summer Festival

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There are some unique pleasures to Intiman’s repertory summer that are as good an excuse as any to catch every show in the season. Among these is the opportunity to see the same actors playing vastly different roles. Similarly the set gets put to widely varying uses. Whether casting an actor or rearranging the set not every arrangement is a perfect fit. With this production of Henrik Ibsen’s 19th-century classic, Hedda Gabler (in repertory through August 25, tickets: $30 ), the imperfections make much of the interest.

Marya Sea Kaminski playing with firearms as the title character in Intiman’s Hedda Gabler

The play concerns the attractive and vivacious Hedda (Marya Sea Kaminski), daughter of a prominent military figure and accustomed to a society life. After years at the center of the social world in her small Norwegian town she shocks everyone by marrying the bookish and mild-mannered Jorgen Tesman (Ryan Fields).

The play begins the morning after their return from a honeymoon trip of several months—much of which Tesman spent doing doctoral research. As they embark on their new life Hedda struggles with the specter of boredom and the other consequences of her marriage in the face of encountering old flames.

The old flames include the urbane and sophisticated Judge Brack (the excellent Timothy McCuen Piggee) and the reformed volatile intellectual Eilert Lovborg (Michael Place). Amid these conflicting relationships and under the threatening vision of Tesman’s beloved Aunt Julie (a strong Shellie Sulkin), Hedda spins a series of deleterious and selfish manipulations that end in final tragedy.

As is often the case Ibsen is concerned with the state of women in his society and this production focuses on the notion of Hedda as a prisoner. The strength of the play is that Hedda is imprisoned by her choices first and foremost while the circumstances of her time simply raise the stakes.

The wear and tear of the passing years is also mitigated by the translation. Director Andrew Russell has assembled a script, evidently based on various public domain translations, that removes the overt statements that can make Ibsen feel dated. This text is heated by barely veiled innuendo and tantalizing ambiguity that most of the cast plays smartly with choices that feel in the moment and nearly improvised. In these conditions the simple decision to pour a brandy can elicit a laugh from the audience.

Michael Place, foppishly intellectual in glasses, long hair and draped shirt, finds the perfect balance between the intellectual and sensual in a role that can easily veer into the cerebral. We have no trouble understanding either Hedda’s attraction to his Lovborg or her interest in his destruction.

Ryan Fields provides a sympathetic Tesman, aware that, in Hedda, he has won ill-gotten gains that he can have but not enjoy. What is a tragedy for Hedda is more of a sad relief for him and one can easily imagine a fascinating play built from his post-Hedda epilogue.

While each actor will carry something of their other roles in each of their appearances this is all the more true of the set. As created by Jennifer Zeyl, the Tesman home feels as if it has been dropped into the space, like toy furnishings in a dollhouse of a different scale. A platform topped by dark hardwood flooring launches out of the proscenium apron marking the single room of Ibsen’s script. At rise this space is cut off from the rest of the stage by scrims that create Hedda’s parlor prison while giving the audience a view beyond those walls. Hedda still seems bound within those walls even when she leaves the parlor.

Erik Andor’s costumes serve the characters rather than any specific period and they’re all gorgeous. However Hedda’s third and final dress almost falls out of the ensemble with its unsettling, short, and soft drape resembling something from an ’80s cocktail party.

Matt Staritt’s sound design is perfection. Notes played on the piano are picked up, repeated and sustained after the piano player leaves the keyboard, shifting from the piano to fill the audience. The subtlest introduction of tones enhances the moments in which Hedda’s manipulations take form.

Russell’s boldest choice in the direction is in setting off those moments in which Hedda’s manipulations and mania begin to coalesce in physical gestures that are nearly natural, but distinctly psychological and abstract. With the support of those sound cues and small shifts in lighting these spasms of twisting limbs grow more frequent and presentational as Hedda’s subconscious comes further to the fore. Finally it leads her in a kind of possessed compulsion to her most destructive acts.

While these choices are initially distracting to many audiences their slow build and Kaminski’s committed performance ease us into acceptance of their histrionic conclusions. Without this visible stitching the cloth of the production would feel too fragile under the strain of its emotional tumult.