When I went to see Medea, brilliantly staged by the Seattle Shakespeare Company at the Center Theatre, I anticipated spending an hour or two with a raging madwoman. But director Kelly Kitchens’s production portrays Medea as a normal part of the social fabric. In this 2400 year old Greek tragedy by Euripides, we get a new perspective on womanhood and speaking up.
Seattle Repertory Theatre’s production of Karen Hartman’s powerful new play, Roz and Ray, is confrontational and heart-wrenching. It tells the
This Seattle Repertory Theatre production of A Raisin in the Sun impacts the audience with a potent, Brechtian blend of
A Book for the Time Being is a 422 page novel by Ruth Ozeki published in 2013. In the 2 hours and 40 minutes runtime of this play, Book-It packs in a lot in on topics such as: online and physical bullying, loneliness, depression, suicide across generations, Buddhism, dementia, environmental pollution, animal familiars, and (in passing) quantum physics! It was indeed a Herculean task to bring this unwieldy novel to the stage. Chiang and Ferri pull it off with aplomb.
Director Desdemona Chiang is a genius.
Next Case! Shall Judas Iscariot go to Heaven or Hell?
Mothers stick by their children when they have no one else, even in Death by suicide. In the gripping opening monologue of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s 2005 masterpiece The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Judas’s mother Henrietta wails her grief. As a woman and mother she recalls his birth as a burst of light. Her buries Judas after his suicide from despair at the irreversible consequences Jesus, his leader and friend, suffers by his betrayal. She gets no help from the other Apostles, no other friends came either.
Hilarious Satire of Sincerity in the Corporate World
Unlike film, it isn’t often that Foreign language THEATER comes to Seattle and when it does, people often shy away from it because they feel that only native speakers will be able to understand it. Au contraire mes amis,!!! Now we have Building, by Leonore de Confino a satire produced by D-Boussole a San Francisco based company French-language company, which was so well acted in the French tradition of physical comedy, and so well-directed, by Frédéric Patto, that even had I not known a word of French, I would have understood what was going on and laughed just as much.
Heavy Teen Consequences for Thinking with your Glands
In 1988-89, when I lived in London, I received weekly Monday night tickets to the RSC; however I never saw as delightful or entertaining a version of any Shakespeare play as the Seattle Shakespeare production of Romeo and Juliet, currently running at the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center.
Grief and Trauma are Anything but Tedious
Kimber Lee set for herself in brownsville song: b-side for tray the task of rounding out for the public the “other story” of someone like Tray Franklin. In the play Tray is 18 and working on his scholarship essay. In real life, Franklin was a black college student and winning amateur boxer who was one of three youth shot by gang members in Brownsville, Brooklyn in 2012. His friends survived, he did not.
Listen carefully to the opening soliloquy by Lena, Tray’s grandmother (Denise Burse) as she speaks apparently to the “press” or non-Brownsville society in general—”Tray was not …” she insists and repeats. Burse cries by the end of her long speech.
What is the b-side?
Conventionally Unconventional
When the Victorian version of “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” is ignored between a mother and daughter, and the wealth, which paid for the daughter’s expensive education, comes from prostitution and pimping, all hell break’s loose in George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Directed by Victor Pappas, Seattle Shakespeare Company opened this delightful play at Center House in Seattle Center last weekend
Danielle Gregoire found her inspiration of her A Necessary Sadness shows from John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.* People voluntarily respond to her call for a 5 minute set on a sorrow in their lives.
