April 2023

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Significant Other, or, Better Yet, Significant Self

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Tacoma Little Theatre Features Significant Other

Finding love is never an easy thing to do, but watching all your friends find love before you? It adds an extra level of difficulty, regardless of how happy you are for them. Significant Other acknowledges this struggle through Jordan, who is as excited to find love as anyone else yet is stuck going from engagement parties to bachelorettes to weddings. He cares for each of his friends deeply and showcases how happy he is for them, but he can’t help feeling sad for himself.

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How August Wilson Learned What He Learned

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The beautiful and humourous trials and tribulations of a black man in America.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has does it, yet again, with the outstanding production of August Wilson’s How I Learned What I Learned. Directed by Tim

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Hamlet (Variorum): A New Edition of Shakespeare

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An “unplayable” version of Hamlet made possible.

Say what you will about Hamlet, but a full-length, four-hour production can be a lot to sit through. Thankfully, with Hamlet (Variorum), you won’t have to. Performed by the Outsiders Inn at Explorations Academy in Bellingham, Washington, this adaptation of Shakespeare’s famed play is told through the structure of the First Quarto of 1603 (oft-called the “Bad Quarto) with the words of the First Folio of 1623, a more widely accepted version of Hamlet. According to director Greg Berry, you get a two-hour Hamlet “but you still get all the fireworks.” And fireworks there were. Though a low-budget, bare-bones community production, Hamlet (Variorum) played this moody tragedy well.

Past

The Niceties

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“I don’t mean to be insensitive…but”

Last night, Intiman Theatre opened a play by Eleanor Burgess titled The Niceties, which could also have been titled The Cruelties based on the personality of the one of the characters, Janine Bosko, a baby-boomer professor of American History at an elite university in Connecticut. Bosko argued with her young Black millennial student, Zoe Reed about a number of issues: the founding fathers’ sources of wealth, the true nature of the American “Revolution,” and the validity of Zoe’s feelings about being “the other” in American society in general, as well as at an elitist institution cranking out future employees of Wall Street.

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18th and Union-Spring Short Play Festival

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Plays with themes of flowers.

18th and Union is hosting its fourth annual Spring Shot festival, featuring their co-producing artists a for the three weekends! This celebration of our diverse garden of artists features 22 shorts organized in 6 collections billed as greenhouses running April 21st – May 7th! Sliding scale tickets are available for both in-person or streamed viewings.

Spring Shot Festival. 18th & Union. 1406-18th Ave, Central District, Seattle, WA 98112 (Corner of 18th and Union-5 Blocks East of the 23rd Ave PCC). Three weekends April 21st-May 7th, Friday 7 pm , Saturda y9 pm and Sunday 6 pm

For Full Schedule and Tickets: https://v6.click4tix.com/event-details.php?e=431593

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Roost-Play Reading at Langston Hughes Cultural Arts Institute

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Roost, Public Reading of play about Black women and reality TV

Reality television is everywhere. But behind gaffer-taped, sound-bite confessionals, what is life like after getting a final rose or being voted off an island? In the new play Roost, Sound Theatre playwright-in-resident Zharia O’ Neal chronicles various post-reality arcs of Black women for the Roost public reading at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute. Directed by Aviona Rodriguez Brown, the reading is a culmination of Sound Theatre’s first William S. Yellow Robe Jr. Playwright Residency cycle, through the Making Waves New Works program. There will also be a Talkback to follow, as well as a reception by Thyme Well Spent, a Black-owned business.

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Dice-Keeper 12th Night-Delightfully Creative Shakespeare

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Throwing the dice to determine who played each role was the least off-beat thing about this enchantingly funny production.

I have to confess, unlike many people I know, that I love updated productions of the classics, but only if the social dynamics and plot fit with the concept. Dacha Theatre’s production of Dice Keeper-12th Night, more than managed to do this, while presenting one of the most creative, spontaneous and enjoyable shows I have EVER seen. It was truly beguiling and by chance had a certain historical authenticity to the casting. i.e. There really was a male actor playing a female character, who has to pretend to be a man in the script.

Past

Hamlet (Varorium)

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“Why, What a Dunghill Idiot Slave am I,”

Is not a line from Monty Python or Saturday Night Live, but is, in fact, from the first draft of Hamlet by William Shakespeare, preserved in what is called the First Quarto, circa 1603. The second quarto Q2 dates from 1604. However, the text with which we are all familiar is the First Folio F1, dating from 1623.

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A Musical of Hip-Hop and Healing

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World Premiere of How to Break at Village Theatre

“Just break a little every day, it gets easier that way.”

Village theatre brings tragedy, hope and hip-hop to a moving musical that forces its characters to look death in the face, and keep dancing. How to Break focuses on hip-hop dancer Ana Ramos as she’s diagnosed with cancer and is interned at a children’s hospital for chemotherapy. She tries to keep up with her dance, stresses over her family’s finances, meets another hip-hop boy who’s sick, and faces the reality of her body breaking down despite her best efforts.

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