Limited Perspective

The playing space at Woodinville Rep is unusual. It’s maybe sixty or eighty feet from stage right to stage left. Early in the first act of The Foreigner , Melanie Workhoven as Betty Meeks crosses nearly all of that distance to speak to Jared Hernandez as Charlie Baker. Betty is old, so she goes at a slow pace. With all that time, if you didn’t know when she started, you figure out by the time she gets there exactly what joke is coming. And it pays off an yway with a huge laugh. It’s terrific timing. It’s the timing of the actor and it’s also the innocence of Betty that makes the joke and the show work. Pretty soon, Bjorn Whitney as Owen Musser creeps into the space with such malevolence and menace that you’d think you were suddenly somehow watching a Sam Shepard play, maybe. The audience booed the actor at the curtain call, just to make sure Owen got the message! It took all of the humor, charm and goodness that Betty and Charlie and some of the others could generate to balance ...

Casa Valentina , by The Lesser Known Players opened tonight at the Erickson Theater Off Broadway. It has lots of words. It’s a play, after all. And they are extremely clever words. Playwright Harvey Fierstein even not-so-obliquely compares himself to Oscar Wilde. But some of the simplest statements are the most effective. Near the top of the show, one of the characters says, “I don’t think I belong here.” And it hits. The line is said by a character arrivi ng at a resort in the Catskills – it’s 1962 – where men who dress as women can be themselves. It’s exactly where he should be, you think. And yet … That’s the theme, a question really: can you draw a circle large enough, or small enough that you fit into it. Near the end, the wife of one of the characters asks him a question. I won’t say what it was. He answers with (again) a very simple line. “Yes,” he says. And the word and everything it implies just hangs there and expands out into the space, washing over the characters an...

Note: This is taken from a Facebook post from September 7, 2017, when I saw Dacha Theatre's production of The Seagull.  I'm a Dacha company member but I did not participate in the show other than as an usher. So, I was eager to see what we had come up with and this was my brief take on the show. Dacha's current show Ghost Party opens September 20, 2018.  Info here .  The Seagull Tonight I saw Dacha's The Seagull.  I have only read the play. Once. I found it hard to make out sometimes how the characters were oriented toward each other -- or even themselves.  So to see the characters fully embodied was a joy and a thrill. So that's how it started for Nina and Trigorin!  So that's how it ended for Masha and Medvedenko! So that's what happens while mom is bandaging son's head! Fire! Ice! Blood!  What had been obtuse was made sharp, sharp, sharp. Photo of the set from dress rehearsal at intermission.  Originally published in mod...

Two Sisters and a Piano From Dramatists Play Service: "Set in 1991 [in Castro's Cuba] this play portrays two sisters, Maria Celia, a novelist, and Sofia, a pianist, serving time under house arrest. Passion infiltrates politics when a lieutenant assigned to their case becomes infatuated with Maria Celia, whose literature he has been reading." A review in Variety of a production of Two Sisters and a Piano at the Public Theater in New York City in the year 2000 contains this li ne, “The play’s overall impact is ultimately slender.” I saw the final performance of Theater Schmeater’s version tonight and my response to Variety is: What? How about the death of hope? That’s not slender! And what about: in the midst of and despite that death, the two sisters’ love endures? Also not slender ! The playwright, Nilo Cruz has said his intention was to provide a “many-layered” experience including “humor, familial bonding, love through adversity and how desire is affected...

My review has hit a dead end. So anyway, this show is really good and super funny and you might cry-laugh at some of the beautiful moments. Here's my unfinished draft ... Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England The essential thread of Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England involves two characters named Early Man 1 and Early Man 2. An unnamed fancy liberal arts college is closing down its museum. No one goes there anymore. Its history is random and absurd. The show opens with lights-up on the museum’s life-size diorama of Early Man 1 and Early Man 2 in fur and leather costumes that might remind you of Barbarella. The couple comes to life. It turns out they talk exactly like liberal arts college students from about 2011. They talk about student loans. They analyze their on-again-off-again relationship. They take Xanax. They appear this way, Greek chorus-style, several times, never directly interacting with the other characters. You might be able to dismiss the pa...

Chocolate Hearts at the Slate You don’t see a lot of plays about characters at the end of an arc. Or at least that’s not where they start out. Everyone does seem to start there though in all three plays by John Ruoff going under the title Chocolate Hearts, produced by James Oliver Burrows’ World Stage now playing at the Slate. In Confessions of the Cocoa Luna, three Americans have run away to Costa Rica late in life after things have hit dead ends. One is almost literally  sleepwalking in the cabana while the other two, played by John Murray and Connie Murray, look back and forth between the moon and their regrets. Murray and Murray basically reprise their roles in the second play, the eponymous Chocolate Hearts. Connie as two-time widow Meg becomes a sort of late-middle-age manic pixie dream girl who snaps John Murray as dentist Dr. Doug Smile (really) out of his funk. They meet in a cemetery where Doug has come to visit his wife’s grave. There is a sweet moment at the e...

Here's your review of Prelude to a Kiss, by Strawberry Theatre Workshop, now playing at 12th Avenue Arts, which I saw tonight. The company had begun producing Reckless but decided late in the process that it was not the show they wanted to do. So I asked one of the actors at the opening night reception afterward how it was to have less than three weeks to prepare for a show. He said they all just jumped in. That full speed ahead, all-in attitude was evident from the first moment of the show. It was as if they had been doing it for weeks. Strong choices. Fully formed characters. I was sucked right in. MJ Sieber is a lovable puppy dog as Peter. Anastasia Higham as Rita falls hard for him -- or maybe she's been waiting for him a long time -- in the opening scene, where they meet, as if by accident, at a party. Later, as if by another accident, Rita has switched bodies with an old man. Each tries to live the other's life. The theme of the show, based on everythi...