Throwback Thursday: The Inappropriate Suitor

This is another in the Throwback Thursday series, in which I post pre-2018 reviews that first appeared on my Facebook page, before I started Limited Perspective. Today's entry was prompted by the recent announcement that Ghost Light Theatricals is wrapping up and is passing the torch (their space, The Ballard Underground) to Copious Love Productions. 

 In its final season, Ghost Light continued to incubate new works from local playwrights, including The Inappropriate Suitor, reviewed below, Kayfabe and The Grey Golem.  They will end their run with The Salem Witch Orgasms in 2019.  

She is probably “riding black ponies through canyons of vice.”  This is the worry -- and accusation in absentia against a runaway student by the headmistress of a women’s boarding college in The Inappropriate Suitor, a new play by Ghostlight Theatricals running now at the Ballard Underground.  It’s a trip.

Sometimes theater impacts you by presenting a familiar situation and diving deeply into it.  Other times it is effective when a show takes reality and drags it three feet to the left, disorienting you just enough to give you an alternate perspective. 

In The Inappropriate Suitor, the alternate perspective, it seems, is on parenthood, conceived as a will to control.  The headmistress of the Mirketiden school attempts vainly to corral Ronveig, a student with her own ideas. 

Doctor Spangler is sharp enough to suspect that the human spirit cannot be contained without scientific intervention and so she creates a golem, a supposed improvement on her lab assistant, Hotchan. 

The show bills itself as “a classic ‘us against the world’ love story.”  So it’s not hard to guess that Ronveig and Hotchan attempt to find love in a seemingly hopeless place. 

Their story plays out as a chase through their retro-futuristic world.  The pace is fast and the dialogue, like the line above about “canyons of vice” is arch and delightful. 

If you want to see something different, see The Inappropriate Suitor.   

Photo by Ghost Light 

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