March 2017

Past

2017 Seattle Fringe Festival: Cuddling with Strippers

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Nik Doner presented his performance of a genre I would call comedy-memoir to a packed Black Box Theatre crowd this Saturday. Directed by Hannah Victoria Frankin with Hannah Mootz and Hannah Ruwe as exotic dancers to add true-to-lifeness. This show also featured video projection of some of Nik’s home movies and a stretch of a car crash video game as he narrated one particular drunken driving experience.

Part of the charms of attending performance entertainment like Cuddling with Strippers is the safe peek it offers into worlds alien to my own.

Past

2017 SEATTLE FRINGE FESTIVAL: WHAT WOULD OUR MOTHERS THINK?

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Faulty memories and dangerous politics. Life seen through two generations of women.

One of the early lines from this play is, “People have terrible memories and they’re never happy in the present.” Which could be interpreted as, many people never thoroughly analyze the past and many people conveniently imagine the good old days have passed them by, lamenting the present as the pits.

Past

2017 Fringe Festival: Savage In Limbo

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When looking over the program for the 2017 Seattle Fringe Festival* three words popped off the page: John. Patrick. Shanley. Yes, Lungfish Productions and Lion. Fish. Theater. Company bring us a play written by the author of Doubt and the movie Moonstruck during his struggling years. Shanley himself was 34 when he wrote about a motley collection of five high school classmates who drift into the same bar, like a joke with no punchline.

Shanley sets this play on a dreary no-action Monday night in an even drearier 1983 Bronx. In 1983, commercial, civic, and political so-called leaders were letting the Bronx literally fall apart, and the lives of these five were stalled as well. As the audience enters Murk (Jared Baron Spears) is well established behind the bar and actually dispensed drinks to the audience, if their tastes ran to wine or beer.

April White (Larissa Schmitz) sits alone folded into herself

Past

2017 Seattle Fringe Festival: Carry We Openly

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Carry We Openly Asks Just how Absurd can the US Gun Culture Get?

A little over two years ago the writer-director team of Nick Stokes and José Amador premiered Carry We Openly in tandem with Openly We Carry by Paul Mullin at Theater off Jackson. They have revived it for this year’s Fringe Festival* for four performances at the Center Stage in Seattle Center.

Lights up and we find Justice (Stefan Richmand) and his mother Felicity (Abie Ekenezar) frantically looking for It. Eventually, Justice’s grandfather and Felicity’s father, Liberty (Bob Williams) awakens and joins the search. For the duration of the play all the characters look for It, and It never seems to be found. One is not quite clear just what It is. They look everywhere.

Stokes intentionally leaves it unclear

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