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Theatre

Myopia and Moral Neutrality in WET’s The Edge of Our Bodies

The 2011 one-woman play The Edge of Our Bodies made its regional premiere last weekend at Washington Ensemble Theatre.

Samie Spring Detzer plays Bernadette, the protagonist/anti-hero of her own story about a sixteen year old prep school student who skips class and takes a train to New York to find her to boyfriend and let him know she’s pregnant. She wants to surprise him with the news but he’s not at home, nor at the coffee shop where he works. As this is told from her point of view, Bernadette proves to be an unreliable narrator to her own story, or at least an inconsistent one.

At the beginning of the play, Bernadette is on the train and she strikes up conversations with strangers and begins lying a few questions in. Not that she necessarily owes strangers a full accounting of her life, but it also makes the audience wonder about her credibility as a narrator going forward. She’s an actress in school and says she wants to be a short story author throughout its 90 minutes. She narrates the story like she’s reading it directly from her moleskin diary.

The writing from Adam Rapp’s script is particularly good when Bernadette is narrating her story, but if we’re going to believe that she has promise as a storywriter, she’ll have to find better metaphors than describing a man’s face as being like lunchmeat.

Bernadette comes from enormous privilege and sometimes you feel like much of her education involves being conversant at cocktail parties, by name-checking Jean Genet and Jonathan Safran-Foer. At another point, she credits her boyfriend for turning her on to the Beatles, even though both living members are old enough to be her grandfather. Her precociousness is grating but I found my enjoyment of The Edge of Our Bodies increased because of my moral neutrality to the central character.

To say that I was morally neutral towards Bernadette doesn’t mean I didn’t care. This is a character who is multi-layered and complex, but not something that can be summed up as “likable.” Her young age leads to some naiveté and decisions most people wouldn’t make. With the story being her first-person account, it’s deliberately unclear just how accurate her accounts of her interactions are, particularly with her boyfriend’s father, a bartender/actress she meets, and a stranger she meets in a bar that she goes to a hotel room with.

The most obvious thing that stands out here is the terrific performance from Samie Spring Detzer, who found a vehicle with director Devin Bannon that conveys her skill and range as actor, and the prose from Rapp’s script. I imagine it was a very difficult performance to nail, but Detzer brings a lot of nuance and conflicting ideas to Bernadette and she handles it masterfully.

There’s one particular moment in the play that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s after Bernadette leaves the hotel room of the stranger she met in a bar. She notes her loneliness and says that at that moment there isn’t anyone worrying about her. It isn’t (too) self-pitying but revealing vulnerability that she works hard to keep invisible, including from herself.

When I saw The Edge of Our Bodies, it was on a Monday night. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I left the theater. It’s been a couple of days now, but I don’t expect that to change in the near future. It’s the type of play a writer could easily immerse themselves in.

{The Edge of Our Bodies plays at Washington Ensemble Theatre Thursdays through Mondays at 7:30pm, through April 14. Tickets can be obtained here.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Photo by Washington Ensemble Theatre

Directed by noted Seattle actor Michael Place, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, by Rajiv Joseph at Washington Ensemble Theatre (through October 7; tickets), poses existential questions with a poetry and fluidity that makes it at once heartbreaking and brutal. Though these questions are handled with delicacy, the revelations are nothing new, so while I was not subjected to any ah-ha’s myself, the fact that a tiger is broken up over his place in the world after death did give me pause (paws?) and shed a small amount of light on dusty crevices of Nietzsche.

The play opens on two American soldiers guarding a Bengal tiger at the zoo in Baghdad, and the audience is thrown into the mundanity of war while the tiger (played by the beautifully skilled Mike Dooly) waxes poetic about being a tiger and the pangs of dealing with more obnoxious creatures like lions, or the politics of escaping the zoo into a city that is very much not a jungle.

The soldiers, a manic trying to impress everyone but showing his adeptness to no one, Kev (Ryan Higgins), and the much more hard-nosed seen-it-all, even though he’s barely twenty two, Tom (Jonathan Crimeni), quickly devolve into a predictably idiotic encounter with the tiger that ends with Tom losing a hand and the tiger dying a less than noble death inside his cage.

From there, we see a city not just burnt to nothing by war, but also endlessly haunted by the creatures harmed by it (animal and human), feeling the effects of constant, pointless firefights while never seeing the action on stage. No. The stage is used to question the endlessness of war and whether or not any God is watching or acting for its creations.

The play is lucky to have such skilled actors and such a skilled director. Higgins and Crimeni are tragically horrible, while still being likable. Mike Dooly, as the morose tiger, aches with the knowledge that God has abandoned the city and himself. And Erwin Galan as the interpreter, Musa, is lovely as a victim of two regimes, neither of which treated him well.

The set, designed by Tommer Peterson, is beautifully constructed and utilized expertly by Place, gradually peeling back layers of a crumbling city as the play moves forward and alliances shift.

All that aside, there’s one overly distracting element about Bengal Tiger that left me unsatisfied even after some truly amazing performances, and that’s the use of female characters, or lack thereof. Call me a bitchy woman if you must, but come on. The women (Keiko Green and Leah Pfenning) in this play have no substantial contribution beyond virgin/whore/caregiver/shrieking freak-out roles, barely holding two minutes of stage time when they are present. At best they are props, and at worst they are emotional strings that Joseph chose to pluck for no other reason than to get a reaction from a suggested brutal rape and murder scene. Great. Reducing female roles to these basic stereotypes is utterly lazy, boring, predictable, and demeaning. And frankly, I expect more from the writer of Gruesome Playground Injuries, which performed in that space not three months ago.

In 2013 I expect more. Let me re-phrase: I want to expect more, but the realist in me knows that it’s fruitless to hope that a play treating all its male/animal protagonists with depth and nuance would also do the same for the very sparse female roles. And while it didn’t ruin the otherwise breathtaking performances from the actors listed above, it did depress me that two potentially skilled actors wasted their time serving as props for the gain of  male posturing. I’d almost rather they hadn’t been there at all than have them used in such a lazy way.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

On the Attraction of “Tall Skinny Cruel Cruel Boys” at Washington Ensemble

Hannah Victoria Franklin as Brandy (Photo: LaRae Lobdell)

There’s a lot to like in Caroline V. McGraw’s Tall Skinny Cruel Cruel Boys (at Washington Ensemble Theatre through June 24; tickets): For one, there’s Hannah Victoria Franklin’s monstre-sacré performance as Brandy, a self-destructive clown-artist working the birthday-party beat. (She explains to a young admirer that clowning is more of a post-grad career path.)

For another, there’s the circus-tent set by Pete Rush and a huge red claw under the bed (courtesy Jake Nelson and Marcanthony Lee). And for a third, there’s McGraw’s gonzo-playwriting: unapologetic, lacerating, and wrongly funny.

Brandy is right up Franklin’s force-of-nature hurricane-alley; as a friendly gesture, she spikes a high school student’s drink with her flask and then fucks him. (A high point in self-awareness deficits is when Brandy snarls, “UNBELIEVABLE!” and doesn’t mean herself.)

But in fairness to her, she does have this giant red claw who lives under her bed and has given her a fiery rash, a would-be clown collaborator named Reverb (Scott Ward Abernethy) to deal with, and frisky father of bratty Albert (Billy Gleeson) following her and her gambling problem around Atlantic City. (Sound designer Andrew Samora may be responsible for the audio joke that begins with the first part of the “Viva, Las Vegas” rousing chorus, but substitutes a deflated “Atlantic City” for Las Vegas.)

Improbably, Franklin and Abernethy both clown well — director Jane Nichols, notes Brendan Kiley, has taught clowning at Yale’s School of Drama, and you feel very grateful for that once it’s clear that it’s going to be part an integral part of the play.

Brandy’s opening bit with a blue violin is passable as children’s entertainment, but there’s actually something poignant and wonderful to what the duo come up with later on (a reworking of Sesame Street‘s “Menomina”).  And Abernethy’s Reverb grows on you, as playwright McGraw lets you know that he is struggling with confidence issues, too.

Kate Kraay has some highlight reel moments as Nina, the mother of a birthday girl, Frances, who thinks Brandy is the funniest thing ever. Nina is an independent, well-off single mom — when Brandy assumes she’s married, she roars back: “Married? What do I look like?” — who begins to inject a little reality-checking into Brandy’s hall-of-mirrors world-view. She begins a brittle narcissist (the kids in the play are stuffed dolls, the playthings of their parents), but Kraay gives her such self-possession, and even bravery, that you can see why Brandy would turn to her.

McGraw is less successful sustaining dramatic interest in the two high school characters, Jack (Jay Myers), and his girlfriend Tash (Sami Spring Detzer), who eventually corners Brandy and Jack canoodling. Detzer has fun with her indomitable goodie-two-shoes part, but the sequence where Tash fights the dragon claw feels a bit like sermonizing on the virtues of good self-esteem (while the previously scary claw turns blowhard). Coming just after a scene requiring an ugly, freak-show level of commitment from Franklin, it’s hard to swallow.

Nichols’ inventively moves the characters on and off the single set without the conventional scene-change blackouts, one moment blurring into the next, but that’s one time you wish for a more substantial beat between scenes.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Washington Ensemble Theatre’s “Smudge” is a Blip Onstage

Washington Ensemble Theatre lopes along with Smudge, closing tonight at 7:30 p.m. Playwright Rachel Axler has Daily Show and Parks and Rec credits (and Emmys) to her name, but this off-Broadway script has a decidedly darker tone, more in line with the anxieties of Rosemary’s Baby.

A young couple are expecting, but the stork delivers something not quite…anything, and they are left to deal with the afterbirth. New dad Nick (Ash Hyman) takes to his offspring right away, doting on the creature, and coaching it with strengthening exercises for its single eye. But mom Colby (Carol Thompson) oscillates between fear of and anger towards her limbless bundle of patchy fur.

The three-actor black comedy is rounded out by Noah Benezra, who if anything is underused. He has a manic energy in delivering his rants that is lacking whenever the plot returns to the matter at hand. The “baby” is played by a bassinet-turned-incubator replete with tubes and heart monitor beeps. Perhaps that’s why the chemistry of the cast is not quite right, with one of the actors running a shade behind the other two, or behind an inanimate object.

As is often the case at WET, the real star of the show is the set. Every play in the small space–it’s not called the Little Theater for nothing–must figure out how to use the tiny stage, and that’s often one of the most intriguing aspects about approaching a new play from The Ensemble. This time around, Devin August Peterson makes another memorable set within a set (within a set?) that manages to elegantly serve several functions at once. It’s no filling-the-stage-slowly-with-water, but it demonstrates a wit that the rest of the production lacks.

But back to the domestic horror story. Is it hysterical fantasy, postpartum depression, the delusions of parental expectations and fulfillment, or an extended allegory on disability and special needs? Yes. Probably a little of all of the above. And in its vaguery and openness, it loses any chance for deeper meaning. If it’s not about something, it is kinda about nothing. Just a smudge.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Get Intimate With “Ballard House Duet” at Washington Ensemble

Rebecca Olson, left, and Hana Lass, right, of Ballard House Duet

Have I seen a better acted show this year than Ballard House Duet (through December 17; tickets)?

I don’t think so. It is ferociously bold and unvarnished and about real people, giving the audience very little distance to shelter in.

This Custom-Made Play is presented by Washington Ensemble Theatre, and their intimate space has been reconfigured to let the audience watch from either side of a Ballard house’s living room as two women try the bonds of sisterhood.

This is to good-enough Seattle theatre as HBO or Showtime productions are to network TV.

It helps that playwright Paul Mullin had the chance to write the script with his two leads in mind, Rebecca Olson and Hana Lass. They are incandescent, girlish, scheming, despondent, vengeful, charming, giddy, and careworn. Because of the play’s structural demands, they often need to switch moods in the space of a beat. They even carry off the almost sadistic task of conversing with an invisible interlocutor, at length.

The two are very talented, but even so, their success with their “younger selves” speaks to considerable skill on the part of director Erin Kraft, who has also managed, with the tricky bilateral blocking required with the audience on both sides, to counterweight the spoken goings-on with a multitude of natural interactions.

If you know Mullin’s The Ten Thousand Things or Louis Slotin Sonata, Ballard House Duet represents a right back at Albuquerque: a visceral kitchen-sink drama in a Chayefskian vein. There’s nothing gimmicky to it — no overtly post-modern ironics or effects. Instead there’s a Braunschweiger sandwich, and a modern tragedy that has occurred in fragments.

You meet the sisters after their aunt has been taken to the hospital: Holly (Lass) has been trying to clean up a Hoarders-style mess, while Heidi (Olson) breezes in a week late, with a camera crew in tow, hoping that she can get some good pack-rat footage for her talk show, which seems largely to be about her. I could say they get off on the wrong foot, but it becomes clear that these two tend to wrong-foot their relations.

The plays runs forward and backward in their lives, trying to find that moment the cleavage took place, and something shattered. There’s Holly’s adoption, the death of their mother, Holly’s religiosity, Heidi’s careerist narcissism, an icky “uncle,” a boyfriend toyed with — the list goes on and on. It’s clear the two sisters love each other, in their way; they can be playful and gently mocking or loyal and compassionate. But as they grow older, they increasingly are locked into a pattern of grievance.

A few elements don’t come off so smoothly: An early recollection that their hoarder aunt refused to open Valpak-style coupons (because she didn’t want the coupons to be split up) gongs portentously. Mullin also overuses the allegorical utility of Heidi’s TV show. It begins to stretch credulity that Holly would agree to appear on it, and that any living producer would agree to the idea of that segment.

A late-in-play revelation doesn’t provide the emotional reversal it might, coming and going so quickly, for one, plus Holly lapses into DramaSpeak(TM) about “crossing lines,” when Lass is more than capable of giving you the betrayal emotionally.

But by then, you’re hooked. You just want to watch Olson and Lass keep sparking with this truth, the incompatibility of this accidental, familial love with the adults they are, and how they keep returning to try it again — resentful and singing their sisters’ songs.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Get Your Baba Yaga on at “Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls”

WET Washington Ensemble Theatre’s Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls (l-r) Leah Pfenning, Shannon Olivia Campbell, Samie Spring Detzer, Libby Barnard (Photo: LaRae Lobdell | PhotoSister.com)

The great thing about Meg Miroshnik‘s play, The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls (at Washington Ensemble Theatre through October 22; tickets), is the way it veers unapologetically into fairytale, just at the moment some crushingly grim reality would otherwise have to be faced. As Miroshnik portrays it, this isn’t regression or denial, but a way of staying focused on what needs to be done. It’s fairytale as survival pod: When things get out of hand, you strap yourself in and follow directions.

Miroshnik pulls these border-crossings off winningly for about two-thirds of the play (the correlations are aptly updated, with fatalistic Russian asides), but under the pressure to wrap things up her fairytales give way to cartoonish axe-wielding. WET’s intriguing production–featuring Amiya Brown’s seemingly infinitely reconfigurable set, with taxidermy that embraces the audience, and Megan Tuschhoff’s shadow puppets, recalling a less-baroque Prince Achmed–is riveting though, as are the (unpictured here) performances of Aimée Bruneau and Macall Gordon.

Set in 2005 Russia, Fairytale Lives follows innocent-abroad Annie (Samie Spring Detzer) on her trip back to the newly old country. She’s a twenty-year-old student, there to improve her Russian accent and learn business vocabulary. After settling in with an old “friend” of the family, she meets Masha (Libby Barnard) from across the dimly lit hall (Marnie Cumings, light design); Masha’s friend Katya (Shannon Olivia Campbell), mistress of a powerful, married bureaucrat; and Nastya (Leah Pfenning, who also plays the bureaucrat’s daughter), an “apartment prostitute” that Masha and Katya see less of these days.

Annie’s from California, and Detzer perfectly captures her obliviousness to social cues, while blithely telling new acquaintances that her Russian is rust. (Happily, everyone in the cast has benefitted from Hannah Victoria Franklin’s dialect coaching.) With her new clique established, you might think this was a girls vs. guys story–there’s that government czar, and Masha’s controlling “bear” is holed up with a vodka bottle–but it’s not simply that. The conflict is also intergenerational: Bright and capable Katya, Nastya, and Masha turn their sex appeal up to eleven (stilettos and barely-there hemlines) on nights out as they try to grab what they can, while they can.

“I saw these iconic images–teenage girls standing in the snow and old women with headscarves at the market–and I was interested in colliding this world of women with both the present and past,” Miroshnik said in an interview. Here, Seattle audiences get a double-shot of veteran stagecraft, in the form of Aimée Bruneau (who plays Annie’s track-suited mom Olga and an apple-dieting bitch-mother called Valentina) and Macall Gordon (“auntie” Yaroslava, who took over Annie’s family’s apartment back in the day and her alter-ego Baba Yaga, who naturally wants to fatten Annie up for a feast).

If Katie Hegarty’s costumes for Campbell’s Katya and Pfenning’s Nastya leave an indelibly long-legged mark, Bruneau (calculating her apple calories) and Gordon (wincing at every girlish inquiry) drive home a different perspective, which is that at some point, when you’ve gotten what you want, your task then becomes to figure out how to keep it. Director Ali El-Gasseir, who stages the schemings of  hot young things with such élan, also keeps the pot boiling during their face-offs with the old guard.

I can’t finish without mentioning the skillful sound design of James Schreck, who has woven music and incidental effects into what feels like the physical texture of the production. The Moscow street sounds like the street, the nightclub, a nightclub–you never stop to notice that it’s being piped in for you.