Rock 'n' Roll by Tom Stoppard

Directed by Kurt Beattie at ACT

I like Tom Stoppard's plays and I like classic Pink Floyd so this play was a good match for me. As it is a Stoppard play he includes several different elements including Classic ideas of Love and the Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution.

The play quickly switches between these themes and it was little difficult for me to follow especially since I didn't know much about the Velvet Revolution.

For me the main theme is about nostalgia and the trouble of looking forward and back in our lives.

This was my first show at ACT Seattle and I was impressed by how intimate the space was. This show was in the round so no seat was very far back.

Opus by Michael Hollinger

A play about the struggles and intimacies of an accomplished string quartet. I liked the contrast of the characters and between their past and future.

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

A downer of a play about a very dysfunctional family.
The script is lively with complex interplay of dialogue and a few moments of painfully good timing.

Transition by Reggie Watts & Tommy Smith

This was a great, fun, energetic, and thought-provoking evening that included musings on romance, race, and the dis-humanity of our ever increasingly technologized lives, as well as wildly creative music (including of course, a love song to Sasquatch), and many very funny homages to 80s pop culture.

For me this evening was a perfect balance of message and entertainment, allowing us to enjoy thoughtful ideas with plenty of sweetness, never crossing the line to either pointless spectacle nor overly-serious artyness.

The 39 Steps adapted by Patrick Barlow

Seattle Repertory Theatre


A zany spy thriller with Pythonesque humour. Lots of fun stagecraft with a train chase, shadow play and two actors playing about a dozen characters, some in the same scene.

Doesn't amount to much, though.

The Seafarer by Conor McPherson

A Seattle Rep production by Conor McPherson of a contemporary Faust tale set in a poor Irish fishing town.

Tim Etchells & Theatre Replacement's That Night Follows Day

That Night Follows Day is a theater piece created by Tim Etchells, exploring the ways adults shape children by the things we say to them.

Etchells originally created this piece for a Flemish theater company, and this is the first time he has allowed an outside artistic company to remount his work. It was the US premiere.

That Night Follows Day has a large cast consisting only of children, and this production was directed by Vancouver's Theatre Replacement.

The set was simple and basic, a large piece of playground equipment. Most of the piece had some or all of the kids standing up at the front of the stage saying lots of various phrases that "You tell us..."

While this concept could have easily had a cutesy and contrived result, the kids, the script, and direction pulled it off in a way that ended up being quite powerful and thought provoking. While there were a few unavoidable "aww, cute" moments, by and large the experience was more of the sober "out of the mouths of babes" variety. Very few of the things said were things that kids would not have naturally said, leading me to wonder about the script creation process. Did Etchell sit down with kids and get their input in creating the script? Maybe by asking them a few questions, and then writing down what they said? Whatever the true source, the script certainly rang as genuine observations of kids on adult behavior and teachings, with blunt and often very funny honesty.

Chad said afterwards that he found himself throughout the show flipping back and forth from feeling like these kids' parent or uncle, to identifying directly with the kids themselves, depending on the particular subject matter. I had a very similar reaction, especially during the moments when they braved into the hurtful and identity-crushing sorts of statements that most of us have heard on numerous occasions by thoughtless or badly behaving adults who were supposed to be guiding us through our childhoods.

But ultimately the overall result of the piece was sweet, powerful and thoughtful, leaving the mostly adult audience with meaty food for thought about the significant impact our offhand words and actions can have on the malleable young people around us, whether those might be our own children, or just a young future citizen passing us by on the street.

Betrayal by Harold Pinter at The Seattle Rep

This is the first Pinter play that I have seen. That seems unusual to me because he is one of the most famous 20th century playwrights and I minored in theater in college. I had heard that his plays had a particular sparseness of dialogue with deliberate timing. After seeing the Rep's Betrayal, and I think it's representative, I believe I like Pinter's style. The sparseness and compactness (it's 74 minutes) have an efficiency that I enjoy.
The Rep's production was very good. The actors fit their parts well and the set was appropriate and subtly flexible.
The story is about adultery and the play is about memory, trust and people's histories with each other. The structure is unusual and magnifies the dramatic irony in a very satisfying way.

The Road To Mecca by Athol Fugard

The Road to Mecca is a play by contemporary playwright Athol Fugard, with a story based loosely on the life of artist Helen Martins. We saw the Seattle Rep's production of the show, directed by Leigh Silverman and starring Marya Sea Kaminski, Dee Maaske, and Terry Edward Moore. The play was originally produced in 1984, and was adapted into a film in 1992.

The real Helen Martins lived from 1897 - 1976 and was the creator of the Owl House, known today as a national landmark in South Africa. She woke one day to her singular vision of turning her home and yard into a sort of Mecca away from Mecca, and spent the rest of her life up until her death working on it. Especially the inside of her home made great use of the play of light, using ground glass, mirrors, and other reflective surfaces and objects to catch and reflect the light in different ways.

The action of the play takes place all on a single night, very late in Helen's life, when her good friend Elsa, a 20something schoolteacher living far away in the big city, arrives for an unexpected and brief visit to her dear friend in the dusty and desolate desert for some very important and pressing reasons, which we learn more and more about as the play progresses. As the evening moves on we discover Helen has been having troubles with the rest of her small-town community, and that her friend Marius (town pastor and no friend of Elsa's) is due for a visit later that evening where Helen will be faced to make a very important decision about her living conditions.

For a story that takes place completely in one room involving just three characters and several compressed hours of action, this play is immensely rich. It has very much what I think of as a traditional essence of theater quality about it in that it is all about the actors and the story, and would have been be almost as engaging a theatre experience were it taking place only on a bare stage with three plain chairs and a the most basic lighting effects. Fugard has pared things down to provide us with just the most essential defining moments in the lives of the three characters, which leave us knowing an entire lifetime's worth of living, philosophy, and personal growth for all three. The effect was riveting throughout, and would never have worked were it not for the wonderful acting of the expertly-tuned cast.

This isn't to say the set design and lighting had no effect. With the primary subject of Helen's life being her artistically rendered living quarters, which came alive in the cast of candlelight, the play was made immensely richer having the visual references to enhance the actor's dwelling place. We didn't need to imagine the magic that Elsa was speaking of when she described how glorious Helen's work looked, because the set and lighting showed that beautifully themselves.

You can hear an excerpt of a radio adaptation of the play by LA Theatre Works here.

Chelfitsch: Five Days in March

Chelfitsh is an alternative theater group from Japan. The narrative of Five Days in March is a simple story of what was going on in lives of several 20-ish Japanese people during the US invasion of Iraq. The invasion is a backdrop to tales of coupling, music and protests. The script is Japanese with projected supertitles in English.

The key part of the performance is the theatricality of it. The performers dress and talk naturalisticaly and the set is almost completely bare. The store is told in repeating cycles with overlapping performers voicing the first-person narratives of the characters. The actors gesture and walk in partially movements repeated in cycles. Hard to describe in words: a performer drops his arm in a casual style, then lifts it and drops it again and again while talking.

I liked the show. The story was humorous and mildly titillating enough to hold interest. It was confusing to follow due to the changing performers and repeating narrative. This confusion surprisingly became enjoyable as it combined with the physical movement of the performers.

After the show I realized it reminded me of minimalistic theater movements I learned about in college. I had never seen such a show live and it seems like Chelfitsch is a contemporary follower of that. I enjoyed how Five Days in March focused strongly on movement and language and the memory of that stayed with me afterwards.