Things I am looking forward to seeing in January and why


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 anticipate this one so much is that for the first time we are doing a musical.  The show is by Lila Rose Kaplan, with music by Mike Pettry.  It’s about a princess who “is cursed to have no gravity -- physical or emotional … As the kingdom scrambles to break the curse before her sixteenth birthday, the princess finds a love that helps her celebrate what makes her different.”  It’s aimed at young audiences and has a fast-paced, punchy, funny script.  That is such a good fit for Dacha because we always bring energy and movement and zaniness. 

Everybody by Strawberry Theatre Workshop

I am excited to see this one for the story and for how they carry it off.  Strawshop says,

Everybody explores the most universal of truths: you can’t take it with you, but everybody tries. When the character Somebody faces imminent death, the choice between Friendship, Love, Kinship, Cousinship, and Stuff, is complicated. Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins adds to the mess by asking the core company of actors be cast by lottery every night, letting fate decide the journey as they play out this new riff on a 15th Century morality tale.

It’s the lottery that draws me in.  I am certain it will not come across as a gimmick or stunt at all.  Again I will refer to Dacha to explain.  Dacha has in each of its first two seasons done Shakespeare Dice.  This means, as with Everybody, none of the actors knows which part they will play until an audience member is invited up on stage to roll a giant die to determine who’s who.  Two seasons ago it was Twelfth Night and last season it was Hamlet.  Hamlet, I saw five times.  The story would morph and expand in unexpected ways each time as each actor brought out different aspects of their character.  That in turn would cause whole scenes to crack along different fault lines, revealing different things inside.  It was crazy!

The payoff I am looking forward to with Everybody, even if I see it only once, as I did with Twelfth Night, is the unity it will bring.  With each actor having to know the whole play and all of the characters, I think I will see results I might not otherwise get.  If each actor has to get into each character’s shoes, that seems a perfect fit for a play that is about universal truths. 

I realize this post was pretty thick with Dacha references.  It was not really my intent to do product placement or anything like that.  But this blog is after all called Limited Perspective and what I want to see in the future is bound to be driven in part by the things I have seen and done in the past.

Photo by me of Green Lake in Seattle earlier this month.

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