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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

Book-It’s “Financial Lives of the Poets” Stays on the Shelf

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According to a much-reported announcement last May The Financial Lives of the Poets, a 2009 novel by Spokanite, Jess Walter is in development for a film starring Jack Black. Book-It Rep. gives us a stage adaptation (at UW’s Jones Playhouse through June 30) that is more literary and cinematic than theatrical, resulting in a tolerably entertaining, yet disappointing production. This is due in part to the source material, which comes off here as run-of-the-mill popular modern literature that asks as little of its audience as it delivers. Fine acting and aggressive direction are further hampered by an adaptation that undercuts the theatrical form at every turn.

The story feels like something developed by a focus group for network TV, following the Great Recessionary struggles of Matt (Evan Whitfield), an unemployed financial journalist who resorts to dealing marijuana in an attempt to avoid foreclosure and his family’s eviction.

Myra Platt’s adaptation keeps the book in the room through a heavy reliance on narration. The production limits the risk of monotony by breaking up that narration among the various roles. Often this results in comedy as when a character describes himself with an incongruous self-awareness. This is most often the case with Matt’s father, a delightful Todd Jefferson Moore, whose sharp observations belie his otherwise jovial senility.

Another comical moment owed to the form comes with the narration of such theatrical highlights as moments of realization or emotional shift. One of theatre’s key strengths is in its communication of such moments by enactment rather than indication. This play undermines that strength several times as when Matt describes simultaneously enacts and describes the act of watching his wife’s paramour realize he’s been found out. The surprise of this theatrical failure is funny both for the indication of vulnerability on the part of the paramour as well as the play’s willful failure.

Unfortunately not all of the aesthetic distance that the presentational style creates benefits the production. More often it keeps us at an emotional distance that prevents the characters from achieving any depth. The enacted roles stand in as representatives for the characters whose lives remain locked in the book, like animated illustrations for a novel.

Less excusable are the cinematic qualities of the piece. This is the kind of play that tries to deliver jump cuts and freeze frames. Most notable are a few rewind and fast-forward sequences in which the cast performs quick, short movements to indicate the compression of time. The jokey self-consciousness is eye-rollingly sophomoric.

In the acting department Spike Huntington as the pot farmer, Monte, and Cobey Mandarino, in a variety of roles, steal the show. Mandarino’s first appearance as Richard, Matt’s financial advisor, revives the flagging energy of the production’s first quarter. Trick Danneker as the dealer, Jamie; Richard Nguyen Slonicker as the lawyer, Dave; and Jennifer Sue Johnson as Matt’s wife, Lisa; deliver solid, fully realized performances. Whitfield is eminently likable as Matt in a work that is more stamina than subtlety.

Platt’s direction drives this production at a breakneck pace that feels like an attempt to gloss over a weak script through sheer speed. At its finest moments the production combines clockwork precision with in-the-moment presence but these moments are fleeting and few, including rap sequences by the toking 7-11 denizens who inspire Matt’s gambit.

Sources suggest that Book-It’s adaptation of The Financial Lives of the Poets is among their better achievements as a text. If this is true then we might consider this company’s work differently from other theatre but rather something between theatre and storytelling. Nonetheless, no matter the form — whether dance, film, theatre, music, literature, storytelling or a static work — art tends to achieve either a degree of absorption in or a purposeful emotional distance from its audience. The Financial Lives of the Poets does neither, but it’s a nice piece of entertainment.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

ACT’s Ramayana is a Most Epic of Epics

ACT- Rama and Sita
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Ramayana for ACT Theatre by LaRae Lobdell of PhotoSister.com

Rafael Untalan as Rama, Khanh Doan as Sita in ACT's production of Ramayana (Photo: Chris Bennion)

Cast of Ramayana performing the Wedding Dance (Photo: Chris Bennion)

Brandon O'Neill as Hanuman in ACT's production of Ramayana (Photo: LaRae Lobdell)

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Ramayana for ACT Theatre by LaRae Lobdell of PhotoSister.com thumbnail

The word epic gets tossed around a good deal and not only by theatre theorists interested in Bertolt Brecht but also by young people who find the word “awesome” insufficiently demonstrative. The Ramayana is one of the stories for which the word was fashioned. ACT’s current production (here given the Indian pronunciation: rom-EYE-ah-nah) lives up to the billing with a lightning-fast, three-hour production that leaves us joyful, contemplative, and newly in love with theatre (at ACT through Nov. 11; tickets).

Ramayana is akin to the Iliad in that it is a collection of stories surrounding the abduction of a princess, Sita (Khanh Doan), and the efforts of her husband, Rama (Rafael Untalan), to free her from the demon, Ravana (John Farrage). Within that story are didactic and engaging tales of royal succession, divine intervention, romance, rivalry, jealousy, duty, justice, and more. It touches on nearly every facet of life. With this level of ambition the nearly-three-hour running time feels minimal but the abridgements are handled deftly. Often a few, generally wry, words suggest what is undoubtedly a lengthy litany in the original text.

If there is a flaw in this production it is that actors are sometimes lost from view on the floor. The problem is the mark of a very fully enacted and absorbing production. Physical actions reach up atop a second story and often collapse in prostration but unless the prone actor is at least as far upstage as center we lose sight of him in the silhouettes of those in front of us—this coming from someone who is well over six feet tall.

In a lesser production this would be a minor quibble (who worries about missing a bit of action?) but there is nothing extraneous in Ramayana, every prop and gesture incites our interest. When Ray Tagavilla as Rama’s brother, Bharata, bows before him, he also removes Rama’s shoes and places them on a throne as a symbol of the servitude of his regency. Missing that bit of action can create a hole in a narrative that—rich as it is—can be nearly as spare as CliffsNotes given the eventful plot.

The genius of this production finds its emblem in the portrayal of Jatayu, the eagle, who attempts to rescue Sita as Ravana abducts her. Jatayu enters as the shadow of a simple rod puppet (designed by Greg Carter). The puppet is cardboard-thin and elaborately painted and perforated as in wayang kulit, the traditional Indonesian shadow puppetry form in which the Ramayana is often performed.

After crossing the scene this depiction graduates from a direct reference to a new evocation. Jatayu returns in the form of a woman with a gauze shawl, shadowed by gauze draped over three poles that suggest a bird’s body with wings. This gives us a simple and modern depiction of the enormous physical bird and its very human emotional conditions. Similarly the adaptation as a whole both references the traditions of the Ramayana and updates the visual and fabulistic elements to serve ACT’s audience with both the colloquial and the spiritual, low and high arts. All told it is a transcendent achievement.

Despite the story’s vast scale physically, philosophically, and emotionally, the production easily sells us on emotions that could seem laughable to American audiences. Tagavilla is brilliantly cast in his most prominent role as Bharata, who unwillingly winds up serving as regent during Rama’s exile. He makes the immensity of Bharata’s torment at his impossible position both palpable and natural.

Farrage has a similar achievement. Though, as Ravana, he sustains an aggravated voice for most of the show he largely avoids seeming cartoonishly villainous. Anne Allgood’s entrance as Ravana’s sister, Soorpanaka, has all that cartoonish villainy, yet laughing at her tragic obsessiveness frees the audience to feel a childlike delight. That we gasp in horror at her subsequent treatment returns our equilibrium and keeps the show grounded.

Soorpanaka’s disfigurement is not the only time the audience audibly gasps at the simple magic onstage. Sita and Rama disappear, a giant destroys battalions before Rama’s arrows lay him down, characters are consumed in fire, and all of it furloughs our disbelief. Matthew Smucker’s sets and Brendan Patrick Hogan’s sound design elevate simplicity into enchantment by engaging our imagination. The set mostly consists of bamboo and gauze. The sound design often both cues from and reinforces live instruments and voices, expanding the scale of the tangible.

But rather than laud the contributions to this production with an epic of criticism, let it suffice to say that from the adept adaptation to Hanuman’s hijinks, ACT’s Ramayana is a tremendous success and worth repeated attendance.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Why Inherit the Wind? Why Here? Why Now?

Reginald Andre Jackson (as Henry Drummond), Rob Burgess (as Tom Davenport), and Todd Jefferson Moore (as Matthew Harrison Brady) in Inherit the Wind at Strawberry Theatre Workshop (Photo: Erik Stuhaug)

“He who stirreth up trouble in his own house shall inherit the wind.” –Proverbs 11:29

Strawberry Theatre Workshop has had good luck reaching back through time to present plays that capture society at dramatic junctures. But their latest production, 1955’s Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, resists their activist intentions. It’s entertaining enough, but too creaky at the knees for real force.

Where their recent Laramie Project came to bruised, bleeding life onstage, this Inherit the Wind (through October 8 at Erickson Theatre Off Broadway; tickets: $30, $15 students/seniors, Thurs. half-price) only occasionally feels charged by a long-festering conflict. Though the play contains a famous line about journalism afflicting the comfortable, this production goes down remarkably easily in the company of fellow liberals.

Putatively “about” the Scopes Monkey Trial, when a Tennessee school teacher was found guilty of teaching evolution, Lawrence and Lee’s play had some McCarthy-era fish to fry: Demagogues who stir the pot don’t come off well.

Yet, the play is set in the “not so long ago,” and director and scenic designer Greg Carter runs with the notion that it’s not simply a history piece. Though the central, raised courtroom is rough wood, its sky is a blue-glow projection on a large screen (Ben Zamora’s light design). It’s a mythic, myopic past, where people wear braces and dress in white linen suits, but also appear not to notice that atheist, ACLU-representing lawyer Henry Drummond (Reginald Andre Jackson) is black, or that Judge Coffee (Alycia Delmore) is a woman.

(You could also argue that Carter is making a statement about solidarity, perceived identity, and social roles with his casting; that it’s not all that clear is a weakness, I think.)

It’s a little the reverse, then, of Laramie, in that the result is that you are not allowed to forget these are actors, and the past is the past, and today is today. Or not:

“How old do I think the earth is? You know what, I don’t have any idea,” said the Texas governor when asked about his position on the issue by a woman and her son. “I know it’s pretty old so it goes back a long long way. I’m not sure anybody actually knows completely and absolutely how long, how old the earth is.”

Perry regarded evolution as “a theory that’s out there” and one that’s “got some gaps in it.”

Matt Staritt’s sound design features old-time music to go with the old-time religion; Melanie Burgess’s costumes mark out class distinctions; overalls are used as a “common man” uniform.

Nick Garrison (EK Hornbeck) and Emily Chisholm (Rachel Brown) in Inherit the Wind at Strawberry Theatre Workshop (Photo: Erik Stuhaug)

The crux of the play is the prize-fight atmosphere (echoed by the boxing-ring-like courtroom) surrounding two old bulls, the champions of distinct affinity groups. In this corner you have Jackson’s Drummond, shipped to town by Baltimore publisher EK Hornbeck (a tart-tongued, brash Nick Garrison, whose “out”-spoken Hornbeck would likely also have met Matthew Shepard’s fate), and in the other Matthew Harrison Brady (Todd Jefferson Moore), defender of the common rube and self-admitted Biblical scholar.

Jackson’s Drummond sounds like Jimmy Stewart, has a crush on Brady’s wife (Delmore), and flies into towering rages at being forced to act like a lawyer, and argue the case’s legal merits. (Drummond’s plan is to cow the fundamentalists with scientific witnesses, but that’s not really at issue–the case rests on the ability of the state of Tennessee to proscribe what’s taught in a classroom.)  Moore’s Brady is charming and courtly, a sort of Bill Buckley, Jr. (except for his support of suffrage), in love with the sound of his speech-making.

In the play, the two are old friends whose paths have diverged–in life, William Jennings Bryan, on whom Brady is partly based, disliked Darwinism because of his moral disgust at the social Darwinism of his day. At a time when people were justifying theories of racial superiority with Origin of the Species in hand, Bryan, the program notes inform you, believed in the Bible’s “law of love.” (Carter has the two actors also play the two schoolboys who, at the outset, argue over evolution.)

Less involving is a subplot involving school teacher Bertie Cates (Patrick Lennon) being engaged to Rachel Brown (Emily Chisholm), the daughter of fire-breathing preacher Jeremiah Brown (Evan Whitfield). It’s a restatement of the “inherit the wind” theme–Reverend Brown literally stirs up trouble in his own house–but there’s not a lot of depth to these straight-from-the-heart characters. (Rob Burgess has a wonderful Jimmy-James oiliness as the mayor, who intends the town to profit from the sideshow, no matter who wins.)

The question remains, Why? Why Inherit the Wind? It’s of course a treat to watch Strawshop’s talented cast, but while this political season features plenty of these self-same conflicts between beliefs in what’s fundamental (Has the truth been revealed or is it yet to be discovered?), no one needs two hours of analogy to figure out that the past is not even past. This is not a play that reconfigures everything you thought you knew about fundamentalism vs. evolution.

The let-down here, I think, is that, in a play about a clash of ideas, there’s little to be gained wrestling with a dead question. That’s not to say that the conflict is resolved today, only that no one has trouble choosing sides. Who in a Capitol Hill audience, besides Mark Driscoll, is really going to do anything but applaud the triumph of a progressive atheist?

Our At-large arts editor, Jeremy Barker, rightly convicts theatre of more often than not salving liberal consciences rather than pricking them–other people’s biases are generally the problem, if you’re counting. When Carter casts Jackson as Drummond (for whichever reason), I think he just misses the chance to heighten the original drama. After all, if the audience doesn’t feel Brady’s already created an amazing legacy, why should they care if an old man believes his Bible?

But if Matthew Harrison Brady is black, for example, if in another time he could have marched with Martin Luther King, could have the civil rights bona fides of Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, then the liberal heart is divided, not placated.

White Seattle is nervous about race, and religion. It seems a shame for an activist theatre to let us wriggle off the hook on both accounts.