Book-It’s Repertory Theatre’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is a collection of stories that Raymond Carver wrote in different periods of his life encompassing the years 1964 to 1986. Adapter and director Jane Jones knows this material well, for she has worked with Carver’s stories before for this troupe. Book-It’s unique style of emphasizing the text’s language enables it to deliver a great deal of dramatic life into these dark tales.
Entering Taproot Theatre Company on the opening night of Dracula may well be compared to descending into the count’s crypt:
In Vincent Delaney’s captivating and uplifting new play at MAP Theater, real life stories of German prisoners of war held
The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest and silliest plays. Slapstick and mistaken identities rule the day, as the Bard seems to just be starting to find his voice. There are flashes of his startling imagery entwined within the convoluted plot line and tortured puns. Seattle Shakespeare goes all out for the laughs here, filling their new venue at Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Leo K. Theatre with a robust energy.
Not Exactly Louise May Alcott
Part of the Intiman Festival, Bootycandy by Robert O’Hara opened at the The Cornish Playhouse Studio, also called the Alhadeff Studio Theatre, at Seattle Center on September 17. It is a series of connected and extraneous sketches more or less about growing up black and gay in New York in the 70’s and 80’s. However, the content focused on the more sordid experiences of promiscuous gay men, rather than on gay men in that specific ethnic sub-culture.
The Waiting Period before the Phone Call
In these days of terrorist attacks, much has been written about the terrorists themselves, the brave heroic rescuers, the victims, but little has been written about the horrible “waiting period” between the attack and THE PHONE CALL confirming the death of a loved one. Until now that is. Still Life, by Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich, produced by Florward Flux productions made a valiant attempt to present the angst of two relatives, a husband and his mother-in-law as they await the phone call, confirming that his wife, and her daughter have been caught up in a subway explosion in New York City.
Not Everything Kinky is Unhealthy
Usually when I go to see a show with a small cast, in the back room of a café, I do not expect to see such an amazingly polished script or cast, as Forward Flux Productions presented in the “auditorium” of the Kaladi Brothers Coffee Shop/Gay City bookstore in lower Capitol Hill last Friday night. Green Whales, by Lia Romeo, defied all my expectations , being a truly amazing script with superb dialogue, a coherent plot, a quirky premise and one of the quickest most engaging pieces of exposition I have ever seen. The excellent direction by Wesley Frugé, added to the delight.
Playwright Steven Dietz enjoys a fruitful relationship with the ACT. Bloomsday is his 11th play to be taken on by the Seattle troupe and its world premiere is a gem. The premise is simple: a middle aged man experiences some “time slippage” enabling him to return to his past and encourage his younger self not to let that special girl get away. The setting is Dublin, the girl is a tour guide and the time is 35 years ago. A fun idea for sure, but what enables this work to soar is the exquisite language (a bit of it borrowed from James Joyce) employed by Dietz.
The Divorce from Hell
One of the most amusing yet profoundly tragic tales of the disintegration of a family is the subject of a one-person play, My First Sony, playing for one more night at Eclectic Theatre.
