Limited Perspective

If you've taken an acting class, you might have done an Uta Hagen exercise requiring you to perform a two-minute slice of life.  Just you, on stage, silently doing something you might do on an ordinary day.  Maybe you're ironing.  Maybe you're making a sandwich.  The point is for the audience to see you acting naturally.  It's not as easy as it sounds. American Buffalo , now playing at Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts in Marysville starts out with an Uta Hagen exercise, basically.  Scott B. Randall plays Donny Dubrow, the owner of a junk store.  Before the house lights even fade down, Donny comes on stage and begins doing what he might do on any typical morning.  He has his coffee cup in hand.  He straightens up this. He looks at that.  He takes a small trash can out into the alleyway and empties it.  He goes out the front door to get the morning newspaper.  It's engrossing to watch all the things he does and guess or conclude why he does them. It's a pe

We are still living in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.  So says Steven Dietz in Last of the Boys , now playing at the Seattle Rep. Actually, so he doesn’t say.  Here’s a quote in a recent Seattle Times article , “I’ve long thought that this play is not ‘about’ Vietnam any more than my play ‘Lonely Planet’ is about HIV/AIDS.” But for me, it really was.  The war determined the path of each of the five characters. Ben (Reginald André Jackson) is a Vietnam veteran.  He’s the last resident of a trailer park in California’s Central Valley.  With a wall of sand bags forming the front of the stage (see photo) and stacked in a neat line in the back, he is literally barricaded in.  And he is haunted, again literally, by the war.  The ghost (Josh Kenji) of a kind of unknown soldier appears so regularly at night that Ben prepares for him by ironing a clean, white shirt so he can look good for each appearance.  Their regular nighttime visits revolve around the legacy of Robert McNamara, Sec

A Doll’s House    at Tacoma Little Theater A little while ago, I saw that Seattle Rep is doing A Doll’s House, Part 2 and that set me in motion.  The play promises to fill me in on what happens after the door slams in Ibsen’s original.  So I read the original and was left with another question.  Why does Nora leave at all?   It seems pretty clear, but not entirely so.  Before I see Part 2 , I want to see how this show interprets the characters and their relationships.  Plus I can’t wait to see the scene in Act Three where Nora and Torvald talk after the party.  The fire jumped off the pages of the script when I read it recently and I want to see those same flames dance across the stage in Tacoma.  The Light Princess by Dacha Theatre I have been a Dacha company member for the past two seasons and I have acted in Dacha shows since the beginning, since before the beginning really.   So, naturally there is no way to stop me from seeing one of our shows.   What makes me an