Limited Perspective

Bandages on my legs and my arms from you Bandages, bandages, bandages Up and down on my legs and my arms from you Bandages, bandages, bandages - Hot Hot Heat Shakespeare Dice: As You Like It is a feat of theatrical storytelling that just might propel Dacha Theatre Company to international acclaim. The troupe has wrapped Seattle-area previews and are on their way (perhaps even as I type this) to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It’s the same comedy we’ve known for 400 years: cousins Rosalind and Celia flee to the forest to escape dueling dukes and brawling brothers, and in this hopeless place manage not only to find love but to spread some as well, resulting in reconciliation and a round of weddings. In Dacha’s telling, the show starts, as many risky things do, with a roll of the dice. The idea is, the entire cast memorizes the entire play. Then, at the top of each performance, an audience member is invited to roll the dice (actually a single “die,” for you sticklers) to decide which a...

Everybody, the play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins didn’t work for me when I saw it produced by Strawberry Theatre Workshop in 2019. I saw it again recently, this time produced by UW School of Drama. That one didn't work for me either. I’m not sure this is the fault of either production. Maybe it’s the script, or maybe I am just missing the point. The show has a theme worth exploring and a message worth heeding but I am not sure if there is a way to make it land. Read the rest on The Sound on Stage here . 

Disappearance at the Rocky Mountain Leatherdyke Snowpicnic, a new play written by Monty Rozema and directed by Adrian Prendergast follows a group of partygoers into the wilderness, anticipating a weekend of fun and debauchery. They get that, along with maybe some things they didn’t expect. What the audience gets is a fun, ensemble comedy. The show is about two hours and ten minutes with intermission and plays June 5 to June 20, 2026  at Annex Theatre in (as they dub it) the relative safety of Capitol Hill, Seattle.  That's the blurb. Read the rest on The Sound on Stage here . Photo by Sayed Alamy, courtesy of Annex

I had the chance to participate, as a guest, in a Japanese tea ceremony. Attention was called to a banner with Japanese script reading “ichigo ichie,” literally, one time, one meeting. In the larger context, we were told, it means every moment is once-in-a-lifetime. Therefore, hold it close. In the context of the tea ceremony, it meant the tea would be “prepared with sincerity and served with respect.” And it was. No surprise, I related it to theater. That’s what theater is, I think. In preparing, and in serving a performance, the artist honors the moment, creates the moment, even, just as the ones leading the tea ceremony did. It happens once. The moment is over. But it also remains.

 ... now appears in the Sound On Stage blog. Read it here . 

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...

Something happened.  It was transcendent. Lorenzo Pugliese as Frankie Valli was singing the big number, Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You. “I love you baby!” he sang. The crowd – and it was a crowd at that point, not a theatrical audience – was in a frenzy.  Time and space were bending. Individual identities became fluid. This was not Mr. Pugliese in front of me. It was the real Frankie Valli. This was not the Village Theater in Everett. This was, like, the Sands Casino in Las Vegas in nineteen-sixty-whatever.  Pugliese/Valli came down the stairs at stage left and worked his way along the front row. I’m not kidding. It was like he was someone else. It was like the crowd were all someone else. I was someone else, somewhere else. We all floated there. Together.  Later in the show, when The Four Seasons are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Tommy DeVito, one of the group, says,  “Listen, fellas. I wanna tell you something. This is the greatest award you...

In the director’s notes in the program for Same Time Next Year , produced by Heart Repertory Theatre and now playing at the Sammamish Valley Grange Hall in Woodinville, Jane Ryan writes,    “I didn’t think I would want to direct it because it is about an extramarital affair and I’m happily married to my true love for 45 years. But many of my friends told me how much they love this play, and folks I would meet recounted their fond memories of seeing the play or the movie.” This is perfect. It’s the same attitude of the characters, George and Doris. They wouldn’t have said ahead of time (would they?) that they wanted to have an affair, but when it presented itself — there it was and it looked so good they couldn’t resist. They live with that tension through the ups and downs of their lives for 25 years and we get to see it play out in two hours on the stage.  BJ Smyth (George) and Erin Michele Gabbard (Doris) do a beautiful job with these characters and their relationship. ...

Everyone is guilty of something ...  You know those birthday cards you get from your office co-workers, the ones that have a picture on the front of a wacky collection of characters – there they all are, in all their weird uniqueness. The opening scene of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None at Renton Civic Theatre is like that. And it’s great. This murder mystery opens with a sort of butler and maid (already there are suspects!) preparing an island home for an important event. Then the guests begin to arrive in small groups. It’s a delicious kind of exposition. You get a little bit of time to take in the whole personality of each of them. After all eight arrive and, along with the butler and maid, stand there arrayed across the stage, you have your complete greeting card tableau. When one of their number drops dead, and they realize their lives are on the line, they go at each other. Perhaps more than the mystery itself, it’s this clash of personalities that makes this sho...

I don’t think I’ll experience the infinite in time. Seems unlikely anyway, So I’ll have to do it now.  Pascal says  The sure way to bet is that there is a god.  But I think I can hedge it  By seeing heaven that’s here.  Just in case. 

I’ve seen several plays in the past few weeks that integrate other art forms. Letters from Max at Seattle Public used poetry and letters. Max and his teacher, Sarah make sense of Max’s impending death from cancer by writing to each other. The original poetry, written by the playwright and attributed to the character Max, provides a perspective that neither conversation nor action could give. Audience and actors lose themselves in the rhythm and depth, together. Blue to Blue at Annex through April 12, incorporates the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Beryl is adrift in the wake of her mother’s death. Two characters are described in the program as a Greek chorus, but function more like a different Greek character, Charon, by ushering Beryl across the river of grief. They do this by producing snippets of Dickinson’s poetry. It’s essential to get Beryl to where she needs to be. The third show, Cornelia’s Visitors, by eSe Teatro is still playing. You have a chance to see it at West of Lenin tho...

A Ritual If I had written about Letters from Max, a Ritual , now on stage at Seattle Public Theater last night, I might have said I didn’t like it. I would have said there were missing pieces that made it a mere nice story, but not a complete play. You might have been surprised, because from my writing about theater, it seems that I like everything. The show is about words in various forms: letters, poems, inquiries, challenges, pleas, laments and more. On the website of the playwright, Sara Ruhl, it says, “This play shares letters and poems passed between Sarah Ruhl and her former student Max Ritvo, as he candidly discusses terminal illness and tests poetry's capacity to put to words what otherwise feels ineffable.” This morning, it came unlocked. The most important words are the last two of the title, “a ritual.” Sarah Ruhl really means it. Writing, sending, receiving and reading of letters is Sarah and Max’s life-sustaining ritual. The show is staged to show the ritual nature o...