Limited Perspective

I have so many thoughts all jumbled up in a mess about The Clean House , by Sarah Ruhl. That seems appropriate but I don’t know what to write and I want to say something before it closes, which it does on Sunday. So I will just say that there is a part early in the second act, where Lane, as played by Cindy Giese French cries, then laughs, then cries, then laughs again , then cries again. It’s in rapid succession and like two sides of the same coin as she deals with the good news and the bad news. She does it so well and it’s perfect because the whole play is like that – for the characters and for the audience. You laugh, you cry. It’s a great script and well done in the intimate little space As If Theatre Company has created in the Kenmore Community Club. It’s a great debut for this new company.

“I felt like I was in the room with them!”   My friend said that about the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf .   It was his way of explaining why he would never consider re-watching it.   It made him too uncomfortable.   For me, I had that same feeling of being in the room with George and Martha and Nick and Honey, and the same discomfort and excruciation – and that’s why I loved it!   This is surely part of why I go to so many plays.   Live theater literally puts you in the room with the characters.   They are right there .   Uncle Vanya , by Theatre 9/12 and playing now at the Trinity Church parish hall on First Hill in Seattle does a beautiful job of connecting the audience with the characters.   It starts with arrangement of the space.   Fifty or sixty chairs for the audience are set up, if you were to look at them from above, in the shape of a house.   Where the peak of the roof would be, the samovar sits on...

This past December, I read three plays, The Piano Lesson by August Wilson, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House , and As You Like It .   In The Piano Lesson , Berniece is operating all alone in a world of men.   Everything has either fallen apart or is in the process of doing so.   It’s up to Berniece to literally exorcise a ghost, send everyone back where they belong and make things right.   In the other plays, Nora and Rosalind make things right, but in different ways. In the foreword to The Piano Lesson , Toni Morrison says she likes to read plays, rather than see them done on stage.   She prefers “the vigorous interactions between reader and text and meeting the imaginative demands of the work on one’s own.”   This seems greedy, to want to hoard a play from the actors, the director, the other theater artists, and the audience whom you might otherwise share a play with.   But of course reading a play alone, with only your own interpretation, lets...