Limited Perspective

My 2025 in Theatre Speaking of gifts, as we do in the holiday season, I received some special ones in my 2025 year in theatre. Among others, I directed again (twice) and I had a review published. Neither of those things had happened for about a decade. Directing I put my name in to direct a short play for As If Theatre Company's Kenmore Quickies. Surprisingly, they said yes. It was surprising because my experience with directing included one show and one show only. I had produced and directed a short play for the Pocket Theater’s Fringe Explosion in 2015. Their risk and mine paid off. Our show was a success and won the vote for audience favorite. That never would have happened, though, without the excellent script by Vincent Kovar and wonderful actors assigned to the show. It all melded. That led me to the second directing gig. Vincent asked me to direct a staged reading of his play, The Iron Whore for Driftwood Theatre’s First Draft program. Also a success! At the talkback afterwa...

I have a review on the Sound on Stage blog. Here is the link: https://www.thesoundonstage.org/stage-reviews/stage-review-life-on-the-moon-baked-theatre-workshop   Photo credit: Cat Brooks

Look at these two sets. I’m fascinated with sets. The one on the top is for UW Drama’s current play, They Don’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! This photo is from a few steps up the center aisle of the Jones Playhouse during intermission. I hadn’t noticed in-person, but in the photo it almost sort of floats. It reminded me of the set for The Case for the Existence of God at ACT last year, bottom photo, taken from the front row.That set really did just float there. I still can’t articulate what that small, contained space with the lid off did, but it was affecting. Maybe it’s as simple as that. The two characters repeatedly meet in that little office until the drama boils over and the lid comes off. In the UW play, it’s the opposite. The show is a farce (with heart and a real bite.) The characters repeatedly stray off the linoleum squares to play various manic scenes outside the apartment and to talk to you and me in the audience. It’s flat on the ground and connected to the world, not floating at...

  You left ground and sky weeping, mind and soul full of grief. No one can take your place in existence or in absence. - Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī I shared this quote on Facebook years ago. It’s from the 13th century Persian poet known as Rumi. I don’t know what prompted me to share it at the time, but it came up on my “memories” list recently. I wonder what it means. No one can take your place. That one is easy enough. We all have had the thought that someone we have lost is irreplaceable. But what about the other part, the part that says their absence is irreplaceable? What could that mean? Google AI Overview has this: In existence: Everyone has a singular role and purpose that no one else can fulfill. In absence: The space left by a person's departure is unique and cannot be filled by anyone else. But is that it? Don’t those mean the same thing? David Byrne said, “Say something once. Why say it again?” It seems there could be deeper, less pat, and more contradictory (hopefully,...

Leave it to me to find earnestness in a show written by Cole Porter, of all people, and produced by Reboot Theatre Company , but find it I did. It came out blazing right away with powerhouse Kat McFadden as Reno Sweeney doing amazing work on I Get a Kick Out of You, You're the Top (partnered with Mackenzie Malhotra's Billy Crocker), and Friendship (partnered with Rolando Cardona-Roman's Moonface Martin.) The program says McFadden once played Maureen in Rent. I would have loved to have seen that. One number followed another. The choreography was cute and entertaining, but all through the first act, I kept asking myself, where is the tap. Like Marvin the Martian asking, where's the ka-boom? Then came the ka-boom. The tapping in the titular number, Anything Goes, at the end of act one with Harry Turpin's choreography, as carried out by the cast, swept me away. The shoes chattering in perfect time with the band, the hands darting, the faces popping. The crowd, of course...

Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life - Mary Oliver I started my review of the Alan Ayckbourn time-travel play Communicating Doors with, “What if you could do it all over again and have it come out differently?” For Constellations , now playing (through Sunday 8/7/25) at SecondStory Rep, I want to start off with: what if you are doing it all over again right now? The multiverse is the idea behind Constellations. I am not sure I know exactly what the multiverse is, but how it came across in this play is that each choice you make ripples and ramifies and leads to a future that possibly is radically different than if you had chosen to respond in another way. But the play is not a thought experiment. It’s about two people, Marianne, played by Leah Shannon and Roland, played by BJ Smyth. In one universe, they never meet, in one universe they meet but nothing happens, in another universe they meet but break up, in another they get married but it falls apar...

  My quick reaction to PHOEBE IN WINTER Produced by Strawberry Theatre Workshop Written by Jen Silverman Directed by Kate Drummond The Concord Theatricals blurb of the play says, “When three brothers return home from a distant war, they prepare to settle into their old lives. But … a war that was once far away now threatens to reignite inside their home.” This is not the first piece of media to explore “the war comes home.” When it does in this play, it’s dark, it’s comic and it’s darkly comic. It starts to feel like a poem. There are these short, sharp stanza-scenes. The language is heightened, as the emotion is. Each of them ends with a flourish, a wow moment. I literally said “wow” out loud at least once (I’m that guy.) The meaning and implications go in many directions and you’re not sure where, but you get swept up in the excitement and energy generated. About two-thirds of the way through, there is a shift. Maybe, to mix metaphors, it’s like a new movement of a symphony, a ne...