Author name: Alan Sydney

Past

Annie Baker’s Mysterious “John” Premieres at ArtsWest

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Something quite different is going on at the ArtsWest Playhouse this spring. The award-winning playwright Annie Baker’s play John is having its Seattle premiere here and it’s a very strange trip indeed. The Playhouse’s welcoming staff reminds incoming audiences that the show runs three hours with two intermissions. When so many new works seem intent on compacting their production into one fast paced act, Baker wants the time to provide the needed space for her four fascinating characters and us to explore the otherworldly bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the eerie and unsettling setting for her play. Baker’s plot that unfolds like a troubling dream performed by a cast that director Erin Murray describes as “out of this world talented” make for a very memorable night of theater.

Past

American Junkie Comes to Book-It

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Preshow Nirvana music is piped into the theater as the audience takes in Catherine Cornell’s effective set, deftly capturing much of what Seattle was in the late 1980’s: scuffed up, graffitited and more than a little bit seedy. The effects of the current dotcom boom and Amazon’s overpowering influence in nearly every aspect of the city is tangible here. The local scene was a very different place for a young Tom Hansen, scurrying to Seattle from Edmonds or Lynwood. Hansen’s 2010 memoir, American Junkie, has recently begun to be printed again. It is an engrossing and frightening tale of a young man battling a monstrous addiction to drugs who is somehow able to come out alive to tell his story. Jane Jones and Kevin McKeon have adapted the memoir for the unique Book-It Theatre style and Jones directs the production. Ian Bond takes on Hansen’s role and is flat-out mesmerizing as he brings this charming yet tortured character to life.

Past

Annie Baker’s Remarkable Uncle Vanya at Theatre 9/12

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Critics arguing that Seattle’s current theater scene is in an impressive Golden Age, need not look any further than the stellar production of Uncle Vanya taking place on Capitol Hill at Theatre 9/12 to prove their claim. Once again director Charles Waxberg has gathered some of our area’s top actors and elicited breath-taking performances from them as they work their way through Annie Baker’s 2012 translation of Chekhov’s classic.

Past

Penguin Productions Brings I and You to Greenwood

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A local troupe calling themselves Penguin Productions is staging a vibrant I and You in the Taproot’s Theatre’s Isaac Studio space. Shana Bestock ably directs Daisy Schreiber and Linda Cardona-Rigor in playwright Lauren Gunderson’s one-act gem. Opening night found the two leads rushing the opening scenes a bit, but once they found their footing they succeeded in presenting a solid rendition of this mind-bending exploration of Walt Whitman, transcendental philosophy and teen-age angst.

Past

Taproot Stages a Classic

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For years, Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1939) has been one of our nation’s most performed plays, presented by countless schools and Community Theater groups. Taproot helps celebrate this chestnut’s 80th birthday party by staging a delightful rendition to open their new season. Though this famous piece is hardly a challenge for our successful Greenwood troupe, the Taproot folks led by Marianne Savell’s able direction, make sure that it provides a wonderful evening of solid Comedy Theater. Savell writes in her program notes about the play, “It’s good. Like, really good.” It is indeed, and as comforting and enjoyable as a warm fire on a mid-winter evening.

Past

Seattle Rep Explores Divisive U.S. Era in The Last of the Boys

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Steven Dietz’s Last of the Boys opened at the Seattle Rep last week while our nation was in the midst of an historically lengthy government shutdown. In the early days of 2019 we seem to be embroiled in an endless battle of conflicting ideologies with no end in sight. How we will finally emerge from this predicament and the cumulative effect it will have on our country will doubtlessly be the study of many a future writer. In Last of the Boys, Dietz explores the effects of another era in which the U.S. was faced with what Seattle Rep Artistic Director Braden Abraham refers to as a “paradigm shift.” The Viet Nam War challenged our nation to intently reexamine what our country really stood for. Dietz sets his play’s action at the end of the 20th century and has his four characters come to terms with some of the devastating consequences of that much debated war. While the play does not succeed as a complete artistic vision, it does provide a number of moving and thought provoking moments in which the four Americans come to a greater understanding of themselves and the parts they played in the tumultuous 1960’s Viet Nam War conflict.

Past

All’s Well at Seattle Shakespeare

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Seattle Shakespeare is on an impressive roll: their productions now consistently feature some of the most outstanding acting found anywhere in the Northwest. A highly skilled cast is a necessity when it must handle Shakespeare’s prickly All’s Well That Ends Well. The rarely produced show is labeled a “problem play” because it features a naturalistic context in which social issues are debated. Yet Shakespeare insisted on grafting onto this framework a number of comedic elements borrowed from the ancient Italian Commedia dell’arte, as he includes stock characters and some absurd “bed play.” That the play’s hodgepodge of elements blend into a wonderful entertainment is all due to a marvelously adept cast deftly handled by director Victor Pappas.

Past

Juan Palmieri Debuts at ACTLab

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This month at the ACTLab, Arlene Martinez-Vazquez directs the debut of her English translation of Juan Palmieri, a play tracking the Tupamaro revolutionary movement that occurred in Uraguay in the late 60’s into the early 1970’s. The controversial piece was written by Antonio Larreta in 1971 but wasn’t performed until 1973 in Buenos Aires. Even then the play’s director was forced into exile. Though it won the Casa de las Americas theatrical award, it could never be performed in Uruguay until 2012. The work covers the death of the titular character as perceived by his mother, Carmen, played by an outstanding Carolynne Wilcox.

Past

A Thousand Splendid Suns Heats Up at the Rep

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In 2007, author Khaled Hosseini followed up his smash hit novel The Kite Runner with the darker and more challenging A Thousand Splendid Suns. The two works share a number of the same concerns, covering the tumultuous conditions that occur in Afghanistan, a country that is experiencing a mind-boggling thirty-nine straight years of internal warfare. In this latter novel, Hosseini focuses on the “collateral damage” experienced by the country’s women. Ursula Rani Sarma has adapted the book for the stage and has sharpened the focus on two of the novel’s main characters: Mariam a poor country girl and Laila, a more prosperous young woman from Kabul. The production is a tough go, featuring a nearly relentless and brutal subjugation of the two women. However, some outstanding performances and The Rep’s superior staging make this production worth seeing.

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