Author name: Marie Bonfils

Portable Performance Festival
September 8-25, 2022

It is with great joy and delight that Drama in the Hood announces 18th and Union’s Portable Performance Festival, a two-and-half-week festival of Storytelling. For many years, 18th has sponsored traditional storytelling to delight audiences (and reviewers!) With sliding scale tickets this proves to be a unique experience in Seattle:

“A festival of solo storytelling and minimalist performance! As we reemerge from the pandemic, we recommit to 18th & U’s original spirit and vision, inviting a new batch of creators to share their fresh “portable” work with new and returning audiences.

Portable Performance Festival. 18th and Union. 1406 18th Ave (Central District)Seattle 98122, Bus #8, one block East of PCC on 23rd Ave. Street Parking.
Tickets are on a sliding scale, full-festival passes, six ticket passes or individual show tickets are available.

For tickets and a full schedule https://18thandunion.org/portable-performance-festival-september-2022

N.B. Vaccination certificats and masks required, the bar is NO CASH, cards only

Highly Topical but Highly Disappointing

Harlequin Production, in Olympia, known for excellent theatre productions addressing topical social justice issues just opened This Flat Earth, a disappointing play by Lindsey Ferrentino, directed by the Artistic Director Aaron Lamb. Although the publicity stated that the play was about the aftermath of a mass shooting in a middle school, the play verged off into so many unfocused unresolved different subplots, it was difficult to say what it was ABOUT.

How the Emperor Lost his Clothes

For three more nights, Parley Productions is inviting the public to participate first in the immersive dramaturgical experience The Bacchic Rites inspired by ritual elements explored in the play, or just sit out and watch, as I did. Then watch a workshop production of Cowboys with Questions, a modern take on a Greek Tragedy by Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth. It could be subtitled: How the Emperor Lost his Clothes.

“You asked God a question, and he answered.”

Silent Sky, a play about an under recognized, extremely important female astronomer, whose discoveries, changed our view of reality as much as Einstein’s theory of relatively, opened at Tacoma’s Little Theatre Friday night. Technically, the production was every bit as awe-inspiring as the subject: astronomy.

Animal Saints and Sinners returns to 18th and Union

Eccentric storytellers and hometown favorites Scot Augustson, Kelleen Conway Blanchard, and Bret Fetzer join forces for an evening of strange and delightful tales about animals—saints, sinners, and the moral spectrum in-between.

Lizzie Borden took an axe,
and gave her mother forty wacks,
And when the job was done,
She gave her father forty-one.

On August 4th, 1892, Andrew Jackson Borden and Abby Durfee Borden were found dead in their home, the victims of a brutal hatchet murder. The main suspect was Andrew’s daughter Lizzie. The trial of Lizzie Borden was a national news story and over a century later the story is still an American legend.

Yes it’s back after the Pandemic!

The Seattle Outdoor Theater Festival is back – July 9-10, 2022
The festival has served as the unofficial launching pad for the Seattle’s summer outdoor theater season since 2001. After a two year absence, the producers are excited to bring it back.

Unique event with Music, Visual Art, Poetry

Path with Art’s Veterans Exhibition celebrates three years of the Path with Art veterans program—which grew out of Seattle Opera’s collaboration for the 2019 opera The Falling and the Rising—and will feature a performance by the Seattle Opera-Path with Art Veterans Choir. Artworks made as part of Veterans Cohort classes will be on display throughout the Opera Center, including a quilt symbolizing the connection between veterans and civilians, a sound installation, poetry readings, and more.

Air Play-Unique theater for adults and children

It is difficult to find a specific noun to define WHAT Air Play, now at Seattle Children’s Theater, IS because it defies categorization. It is easier to find adjectives: spectacular, highly creative, highly innovative, joyful, fun, visually and aurally pleasing.

Not Critical Race THEORY, Critical Race FACTS

A truly amazing play, Sovereignty by Mary Kathryn Nagle opened this weekend at Harlequin Theater in Olympia. Although it contains a huge amount of historical information, as well as legal wrangling about the Indian Removal Act, which took away the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation in the Southeast of the U.S. in the 1830’s, it was also a very engaging story of the continued oppression of Native Americans in present times and the struggle for Sovereignty.