Romeo and Juliet — The Off Road Version
Off Road Shakespeare’s (ORS) free outdoor production of Romeo and Juliet makes full use of Red Square’s unintended stages. The ensemble […]
Threatre22 Aces World Premiere of Downstairs by Theresa Rebeck
Seattle Claims World Premiere of New Theresa Rebeck Play by a Week
Director Julie Beckman has drawn vivid performances from the three actors in this show. Beckman culled Downstairs from the four scripts read in last year’s Construction Zone series for this full production. Good choice.
Somewhere I heard a quip that family are those people who feel obliged to take you in when nobody else will. In this case, Irene has taken in her brother Teddy (Christine Marie Brown and Brandon Ryan). Ryan opened the first act with about 45 seconds of acting without words that let’s us know he’s quirky. Irene enters the basement to strongly encourage her brother to find other lodgings. It doesn’t go smoothly.
(IM)Pulse—Spectrum Dance Theater Disrupts Complacency
Spectrum’s Dance Company’s “Theater of Disruption” lives up to that handle with dual World Premieres
Cruel, life-changing, and—too often—deadly violence suffered by LGBTQ people formed the basis for this 90 minute dance/dramatic performance by the Spectrum Dance Company + Donald Byrd. Though the press release mentions the killing of 49 people and injuring of 58 others in the machine gun attack by Omar Mateen a year ago at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Byrd drew upon the sadder and much older outlaw “tradition” of anti-gay violence. Evoking the artistic monologuist styles that emerged in the 1990s during the peak of the AIDS Plague, Byrd continued his exploration of a “theater of disruption.” This style of theater uses all the tools available for performance on stage to, in Byrd’s words, “engage audiences in issues that are difficult and intractable, and importantly to move closer to disrupting the artificial and often arbitrary boundaries between dance and theater.”
The Wild Hearted (A Parley Workshop Production)
The Wild Hearted, Parley’s 33rd workshop since 2014, played before a capacity audience 0f about 90 people at West of Lenin Monday evening. Four millenials plan a party to celebrate history in the making on Election Night, 2016. Spoiler alert: the history they witnessed unfolding was not the one they had gathered to celebrate. The roller-coaster electoral college results of this election night rip and tear at the thin affections these acquaintances hold for one another. The lines are funny and consistently land. With just 5 weeks of walk-throughs and scripts in hand, minimal props and a few deft sound cues, the play came fully to life. All the actors put emotion and movement into their performances.
Here Lies Love: Disco Down at Seattle Rep-Extended thru June 18
Here Lies Love is one of the first songs and it is was what Imelda jokingly said should be put on her tombstone. Despite the conflicts she had that are the story arcs of the show she may well get her wish. Currently 87, she returned to the Philippines and served four terms as a congresswoman after her husband died in 1989.
Okay, Imelda (Jaygee Macapugay), having called out love, what does it mean to be loved by one person who is not treated fairly by your family, and later by you? I’m referring to the poor woman who helped to look after her when she was a child, Estrella Cumpas (Melody Butiu). In several songs moving from their nearly shared poverty (Imelda may have been materially poor, but her family had some better-off members and social prominence), through Estrella being blocked from Imelda’s wedding party, to Imelda insisting on a meeting and offering a bribe for silence after Estrella writes a book about their mutual origins. Imelda lived the jet-setter life while Estrella’s was still mired in poverty. Still, as Estrella sings in their last encounter, there’s no shame in being poor.
Or again, what does it mean to draw the romantic attentions of both the future dictator of your country and the man who will lead the Opposition?
Possum—A Workshop Performance
Former firebrand radical Lucinda Celeste (Macall Gordon) is on the lam, which is like playing possum, in a primitive log cabin deep in the woods. Her devoted protector and supporter and ever hopeful to-be lover, Rex Eaglejeep (Asa Sholdez) is convinced that the State has revived the search for Lucinda. Lucinda is much less worried. Note to readers: it’s not paranoia if they are out to get you.
The pair’s non-stop haggling about security and safety is interrupted by Otto (Connor Kinzer). Otto claims to be Lucinda’s adult son
2017 Seattle Fringe Festival: Cuddling with Strippers
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.
2017 Fringe Festival: Savage In Limbo
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
2017 Seattle Fringe Festival: Carry We Openly
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
Sex with Strangers
ReAct Theatre Celebrates 24 Years with the Seattle Premiere of Sex with Strangers
Laura Eason’s Sex with Strangers has a solid Seattle Premiere in the capable hands of director David Hsieh of ReAct Theatre. This is ReAct’s first show at 12th Avenue Arts on Capitol Hill.
Hsieh has apparently a lucky hand to be the first to bring this 2009 play here as this play’s themes resonate across several local communities. The play ponders questions about internet technology versus old school paper books in our outerworld. Deeper questions reflect tensions within and between writers as they cope with feeling under-appreciated versus over-hyped for the wrong reasons and their impacts on our innerworlds.
This play has one audience among the many people working in tech, and another among the many writers and their readers who fill the Seattle Arts & Lectures talks and populate all those classes at Hugo House.