Limited Perspective

We have a practice in Dacha Theatre Company at the end of every rehearsal that we call “thumbs.” We form a circle and everyone sticks out a hand and puts up a thumb.  Someone begins by selecting another person in the circle and paying them a compliment.  It could be something they did in rehearsal, on a break, or it could be a compliment about who they are as a person.  The one selected puts their thumb down and then acknowledges someone else for something they did or something they are.  The process goes on until all the thumbs are down.  It’s a beautiful thing. It can be hard to accept compliments, acknowledgements, praise of any kind.  We often feel that whatever we have done, we just barely managed it, or it happened by accident, or luck, or it was really nothing, or we inherited that trait from a parent and can’t claim any credit for it – or a thousand things.  At least that’s how I feel, most of the time.  But none of that is necessari...

I’ve seen a lot of improv this month.  I’m a big fan of all forms of improv.  No net.  Gotta get it done.  It’s badass.  Tonight, it was a show called This Improv Writes Itself by Big Cult at Copious in Ballard.  There were only five Big Cult actors and most of the time, one of them was running the sound/light board.  So that left just four actors in front of the audience to play the scenes.  In most comedy improv that I’ve seen, there are six, eight, ten actors.  So when the energy is lagging and the scene needs something to keep it going, an actor can run in from the wings and goose it up – or end it with the wave of a hand.  Big Cult apparently likes a challenge.  They toughed it out with just the four on stage and the one in the booth and no one to save them. Also, in most comic improv, they give themselves a lot to work with. Usually they take multiple suggestions from the audience for each bit so they have sev...

Nina Simone: Four Women calls itself a play with music and does, in fact, have two complimentary sides.  There is a line early in the play that sums it up, in part.  I don't remember it exactly but it's to the effect that when the scars heal over, they turn out blacker.  Playwright Christina Ham is saying the harder you try to erase identity, the stronger it comes back.  It's an anthem to perseverance.  And it applies to the four characters both as black women and as their individual selves.  They claim and hold their power. At the same time, the characters are at their strongest when they are singing together.  Once early in the show, this theme became apparent and then later, in the number Sing: Oh Mary it really paid off.  Throughout the show, each of the characters had been advocating for their own point of view.  There was a kind of dissonance.  But when they came together in song, again, there was power. The song seemed to ...

The Salem Witch Orgasms gave me a feeling.  I felt like it was the early 90s and I was at the Re-Bar watching one of Dan Savage’s Greek Active Theatre shows.  There was lots of zany romping, a big, funny, fast-paced show, and it took place, pretty much in a bar.  SWO is the first show I’ve seen in the new Copious space (formerly known as the Ballard Underground) and it works really well.  It has an underground (I guess because it is) cabaret vibe that was perfect for this show.  I recommend both the venue and the show. Photo by me of the set. 

I am trying to think of another play that is meant to be scary in the way that a ghost story is, in the way that many movies try to be.   From Poltergeist to Halloween to Rear Window, there are movies that intend to leave you frightened, anxious, and at just the right moment, to make you startle and shout.   The Woman in Black at the Seattle Rep goes after all of those things.   It was so fun!   The audience – me included -- would shriek and then laugh at themselves for being so swept up.   I can’t recall off the top of my head having that kind of theatrical experience before.   Sure, ghosts accost Hamlet and Macbeth and Scrooge but it’s just not the same.   Those ghosts are not meant to do the same kind of work.   They do more goading than menacing and they don’t really sustain things over time.   They’re more schticky than spooky. The Woman in Black uses many theatrical storytelling tools to draw you and then grab you.   ...

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...