new city theater.

The other night I went to see MUD at New City Theater, a play they had first commissioned and performed in the early 90s. It is a startlingly beautiful work, spare and haunting and mysterious, starring Mary Ewald, one of my favorite actors ever. The director, John Kazanjian (who happens to be Mary Ewald’s husband), has set up the room - the theatre is one long room, raw brick along one wall - with the stage in the middle and a single row of 26 seats (the box-office website tells you there are only 20 seats, but I counted 26). The “stage” is a curtained cube, veiled with a sheer scrim that lets you see the actors inside, but creates a separation between you and them that is contrary to all our preconceived notions of what theatre is: that, unlike a movie, there is no impermeable membrane between the viewers and the actors. It is unsettling, but then, it is an unsettling play.

A few weeks back I had a couple of different people ask me, “Why do you see so much theater?” And I came up with an answer, sort of, but I didn’t really manage to say all that I really wanted to say. The short answer is very simple: I grew up in Seattle, I had an enormously privileged upbringing by parents who were passionately interested in the arts, and who took me everywhere with them. The long answer is more complicated, and it is tied up with two things: the end of Intiman Theatre, and the death of Mark Chamberlin. Nobody tells you this, and you have to learn it the hard way: you have to tell people when they matter, when they are doing work that matters, when they are creating something that means something to you, because when they are gone it will be too late. And also, this: you have to believe in what you are doing, and when it turns out that even this isn’t enough, you have to get back up and try again.

I keep coming back, again and again, to the night that Mike Daisey gave a benefit performance of HOW THEATRE FAILED AMERICA, that spring when Mark Chamberlin died and Intiman closed, only one show into their 2011 season. I keep going back to Jerry Manning telling everyone that they should go see Elizabeth Kenny’s SICK at New City Theater. I keep trying to remember what made me listen and go home and buy a ticket. I wasn’t a Rep subscriber yet. I had an ACTPass that I used maybe once a month. I hadn’t reached the point where I went to so many plays that even the actors started recognizing me. All I know is that I went to see SICK at New City Theater, and I kept going back, again and again, and I kept my eyes and ears open, when J. told me to go see STUCK at WET or when R. told me to go see TORSO at Theatre Off Jackson. It was like being swept along in an avalanche, or a tsunami.

One thing I told V. a few weeks back, when he asked me why I see so many plays, is that very quickly I began to see them as forming the arc of a body of work, not just for a playwright, but also for a director, for an actor, even for the sound and set designers. For the way a theater builds a sense of identity, an aesthetic that transcends the individual artistic director who may embody it for a period of time. The art is what remains. But, paradoxically, it is people that matter the most. Their voices hang in the air, like the last notes of a song vibrating in your heart before they dissolve into nothingness. This is what Jerry Manning seemed to understand better than anyone: It is the people who matter, and as E. M. Forster said, a hundred years ago, we need “only connect.” I saw him all the time, all over town, tiptoeing in the back door of his own theater, seated in the back row at Strawshop, walking down Broadway with Gretchen Krich, one of his closest friends and another one of my favorite actors.

I remember SICK as being a free-flowing narrative, broken up by a friend of Elizabeth Kenny’s, who would hit a buzzer when she thought the anecdote had gone on long enough. She would give Elizabeth another cue card, and the story would continue from there. It felt improvised, but in a controlled way. Much later, several plays later, I would see more clearly the level of precision and uncontrolled control executed in all of John Kazanjian’s work, Sometimes it felt like every single molecule of air in the theater belonged to him. There isn’t any other way to explain it. There isn’t anyone else who makes me feel this way.

 last night.

LIVE! FROM THE LAST NIGHT OF MY LIFE was one of those plays I read about after it happened, one of those plays I was always sorry I didn’t get to see. It belonged to that era of theatre-going when I went to ACT a lot, maybe sometimes the Rep, but I hadn’t discovered any of the little theaters that are all over Seattle. I had been going to Strawberry Theatre Workshop for a few years already and I had just discovered New Century Theatre Company. I had already walked away from Intiman when they imploded, finally, in the spring of 2011. Everything changed for me after that. My theatre-going life is divided into two distinct periods, Before Intiman Imploded, and After.

But we were talking about LIVE! FROM THE LAST NIGHT OF MY LIFE. Written and directed by Wayne Rawley, it is being remounted with the entire original cast and almost the entire original crew. It is one of the funniest plays I’ve ever seen, and also one of the saddest. Doug Sample works the graveyard shift in a convenience store, and tonight is going to be the last night of his life, because at the end of his shift, he is going to kill himself. Meanwhile, all night long he has to deal with shitty customers and a talking advertisement and with all the people in his life, past and present, and occasionally future, who keep walking in and out, with the occasional dream dance sequence with his secret backup dancers. Wouldn’t our lives all be better if we had backup dancers to follow us around?

What makes the play beautiful is two things: the mind-numbing ache of working a minimum-wage job and being told, over and over, that you could just do so much more if you would try and live up to your potential. And also this: the absolute emptiness of depression. It’s so easy to say, well, just one day more. Just get through one day more. There are things worth living for. But what do you do when you don’t see anything in your life worth living for? When there is no amount of love that can drown out the voices in your head that say, you are worthless? That you’ll never do anything and you’ll never be anyone, and you are just going to be stuck here, day in and day out, in this shitty little convenience store?

The saddest, most heartbreaking thing about LIVE! FROM THE LAST NIGHT OF MY LIFE is all the moments where Doug might have decided, well, ok, maybe I won’t kill myself tonight. All the moments where someone walking in the door could stop him, all the times when someone could have just been there five minutes earlier and help him find something worth living for. The sunrise that floods the convenience store windows comes too late. The cop who almost finds the gun in his bag doesn’t open the bag. The friend who loves him can’t quite reach the darkness inside him, no matter how hard she tries. There is no saving Doug, just as there is no saving so many people, every day, all the time. But there is still hope for some of us.

The National Suicide Prevention Hotline can be reached online at www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org or by phone at 1 (800) 273-8255.

LIVE! FROM THE LAST NIGHT OF MY LIFE is produced by Theatre 22 and is playing at 12th Ave Arts through April 18th. Tickets here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/907030

theatre notes.

Last week A. and I went to see SEVEN WAYS TO GET THERE at ACT, and I can’t stop thinking about it. I wasn't sure exactly what it was going to be about - a bunch of men-babies talking about they can't get laid, maybe. And there was a little of that, sure, but there was so much more than that, and I can't stop going over all the little moments of the play in my mind. It was very, very, funny and very, very honest, and I cried at the end. I loved it, and it surprised me how much I loved it. Co-written by Bryan Willis and Dwayne Clark, SEVEN WAYS TO GET THERE is based on Dwayne's real-life experiences in a men's therapy group in Seattle during the late 1990s. The soundtrack is all 90s alt-rock and it takes me back to my high school years, but that isn't why it all felt so real to me.

All of us have problems, the play tells us, no matter how different our lives seem on the surface. All of us have fears and doubts that paralyze us, and some of us stand at the edge of a darkness that can't be described or understood, and some of us fall over that edge into the abyss. There's never any warning, only signs so insignificant that one only thinks about them afterwards, picking apart every last word, every last minute that you saw someone you thought you knew and understood. But you never can. There is a line from Holly Arsenault's play THE CUT - a work in progress, so I don't know how it will end - that keeps echoing in my head. A dying woman once tried to commit suicide as a teenager. "I should have died thirty years ago," she tells her lover. Those thirty years of survival felt like a gift.

Five years ago this month the writer Elspeth Thompson committed suicide near her home on the Sussex coast. She had been depressed for weeks, and had begun taking antidepressants that, instead of halting her descent into darkness, sent her spinning further into space, into the cold lake waters, pockets weighed down with stones like Virginia Woolf, who had done the same thing sixty-nine years earlier. I think of them both when I hear Mike Daisey talk about depression, about how close he has come to that same end, and yet somehow still walks back from the edge. But the people who struggle every day never really know. They never know if they can keep putting one foot in front of the other until one day turns into one year turns into ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and that yawning abyss recedes into a faint shadow in the distance. And those of us who watch them and ache for them, we never know, either. We can only wait, and hope.

nostalgia is dead. long live nostalgia.

I walk across my neighborhood every day, and every day something has changed. The old buildings have been torn down and rebuilt as ugly modern apartment buildings with storefronts downstairs, those dreaded mixed-use building that defile every block of Capitol Hill these days.
I heard today that the Harvard Exit movie theater is closing next year. The Harvard Exit was where I spent much of my childhood, as my parents only ever watched foreign films with subtitles. I am sad, but at the same time, I can’t quite recall when I last went. Same goes for the Egyptian, which died and was resurrected by SIFF.

I like nostalgia as much as the next person who says “I remember when…”…”things were so much better then…” Do we really mean that, or do we just like to say these things to show that we were there first, and therefore are way cooler than you could ever hope to be? I remember I hated the new ACT space when they moved across town from their intimate quarters, long since transformed into On The Boards, to the sprawling Eagles Auditorium, where they crashed and burned through a couple of seasons before closing, briefly, and then coming back from the dead.

There are things I miss. The lamb chops at Labuznik. Beef noodle soup at Green Village II. The old Shanghai Garden, which really isn’t as good as it used to be. The old REI which always smelled like creosote. The Seattle Art Museum used to be in Volunteer Park, where the Seattle Asian Art Museum is now. When I was in elementary school, the Seattle Children’s Theatre was in the Poncho Theatre at the Woodland Park Zoo.

But the old memories give way to new places, new things, maybe not better, just different. A new skin grows over that raw place left behind when you shed the old one. There’s nostalgia, and there’s the paralyzing effect of looking back so single-mindedly that you completely miss what’s in front of you. Like Lot’s wife, I suppose, if that’s the right metaphor. A city is a living thing, changing and evolving before your eyes, and there will always be things you love and hate about it.

Nostalgia is dead. Long live nostalgia.

things I remember about St. Louis.

I arrived in St. Louis, MO in 1982, where my father taught at Washington University and lived there until 1985, when he took a sabbatical at the University of Washington in Seattle. We moved back to St. Louis for part of 1986 - one semester of 1st grade - and then back to Seattle. Dad had gotten tenure at Washington University, mom balked at living in the Midwest for the rest of their lives, and he was offered a job at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. We came back to Seattle in the dead of winter, to an unfinished house still in the midst of renovation.

There is not much I remember about St. Louis, because I was very young and my world was contained by the small boundaries of the street where we lived, Clayton Child Center where I went to daycare and then preschool, Chinese school on weekends, the brick campus of my father’s university. I remember winter snow and summer heat that left the lawn prickly and stubbly under my feet. We lived in Ladue, a couple of miles from the university, which I did not then understand was predominately wealthy and predominately white.

We were the only Chinese family on our block, a long cul-de-sac of nearly identical brick houses; I was not old enough to see this. I did not understand that my dad drove a BMW (back in the days when professors drove BMWs) and my mom drove a Mercedes (a hand-me-down from her father). I did not know that sometimes the police would see them driving their nice cars in our nice neighborhood and pull them over. I was not told that these were all factors when we moved to Seattle and my parents bought a house adjacent to the predominately-black Rainier Valley and sent me to public school in South Seattle. I would not understand until later that our Asian-ness gave us a level of protection somewhere between the privilege of white folks and the complete lack thereof for black folks. We might get hassled occasionally, but we didn't worry about getting shot by the police.

What I also didn't remember is that St. Louis is a city of suburbs connected by endless freeways. I didn't know that about 11 miles to the northeast of our comfortably upper-middle-class-white-suburb of Ladue lay the black suburb of Ferguson, and that the fault lines that had been apparent when we lived there 30 years ago would burst into flames with the death of a black teenaged boy at the hands of a white police officer. The song of the south is a wail of anguish at the injustices of this country. Last night I heard the roar of people chanting as I sat in my living room and turned to see over a hundred, maybe two hundred protesters marching down my street.

 

I thought about a moment from an early draft reading of Robert Schenkkan’s THE GREAT SOCIETY, when a simple traffic stop in a Los Angeles neighborhood explodes into what became the Watts Riots of 1965, a small moment that turns into something cataclysmic. I thought of Italo Calvino’s words after he witnessed the Montgomery protests of 1960: “The thing that is difficult for a European to understand is how these things can happen in a nation…without the involvement of the rest of the country. But the autonomy of the individual States is such that here they are even more outside Washington’s jurisdiction or New York Public opinion, than if they were, say, in the Middle East.”* How little we have changed in 54 years.

*Italo Calvino, March 6, 1960, Montgomery, Alabama. (from HERMIT IN PARIS: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS).

it's just me and all the old geezers.

A few weeks ago, I went to a matinee of VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE at ACT. It was a Saturday, and I looked around me, and the other 400 people in the audience were between 65 and 85 years old, give or take. And they LOVED it. They roared with laughter, sighed with recognition, had a whale of a good time. I enjoyed the play - it’s very funny, and it starred many of my favorite actors - but more than that I enjoyed their enjoyment. They understood and responded to the cultural references that sailed over my head by a good thirty or forty years. It’s a very special experience, going to the theatre with people who remember and understand the time referenced in a work. I notice this especially in plays that connect to the Vietnam War; for those who were young at that time it seems to have just happened only yesterday.

A couple days later I came across The Stranger’s review, titled ‘Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike Is Clickbait for Wealthy Geezers.’ This is not an unfair assessment, it is the truth. This is how theaters like ACT and Seattle Rep survive, because the aforementioned Wealthy Geezers are their lifeblood. The season line-up has to include something new, something “daring” (daring by Wealthy Geezer standard to make them feel like even though they are on Medicare they are still Hip and Culturally Aware), something Tony-award-winning, maybe a musical. You have to have at least one clickbait play, and you should ideally position it at the end of the season, so the WGs will a) sign up for next year’s subscription and b) throw in another $3,000 donation. If you are Seattle Rep, you won’t even list a donor in the back of the program for less than $1,000 a year. This is why I tend to donate money to small theaters for whom the $100 I send them means more than pocket change.

And you know what? I’m ok with all of this. The support of the Old Geezers means that Seattle Rep can commission something like Justin Huertas’ LIZARD BOY, a comic-book musical jam-packed with - as it was when I saw an early version - dick jokes and teenage first love. It means that ACT can create their Central Heating Lab program, which helps support new and independent theatre companies who have a name and a vision but no space to create in. In time I won’t be the young kid in the audience - I will be one of the Geezers. Maybe by then I’ll be the one donating $3,000 a year. Maybe by then I’ll be in a position to commission new work. Maybe by then my taste will be the one that dominates while the younger generation rolls its eyes.

Personal taste is just that - personal. You have to see things you don’t like, things that don’t move you or that you don’t connect with, in order to understand more clearly what it is that you do love. I don’t love Tony-award-winning plays, those big Broadway machines that sweep the awards and then are produced by every single regional theater across the country the next year. I love new work, but I also love classics - Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Beckett. Shakespeare is his own category. I look for stories about loss, longing, love, hope, forgiveness; I look for familiar faces, changing, pushing themselves, evolving, people I have loved for a long time, new people I look forward to seeing more of. This is what matters to me, what keeps me coming back. I hope it never goes away.

nobody knows why.

Several months ago a friend in her 70s told us that her lymphoma had returned. She has had several battles with cancer, followed by bone marrow transplants, chemotherapy, Chinese medicine. She has congestive heart disease and an elderly mother with dementia and leukemia, and some days it seems like only sheer force of will keeps her moving forwards. The most recent round of chemo worked, in the sense that it got the lymphoma back under control. What people don't always understand is that "in remission" is not "cured." There is no "cure." There is only a sleeping giant called "cancer" that may or may not reawaken before something else manages to kill you - old age, car accident, a tree falling on your head. You monitor your body and manage your symptoms the best you can, and sometimes you buy yourself more time, five years or ten or twenty or thirty. And sometimes you don't.

A famous man committed suicide earlier this week. It was shocking that someone who was so funny, and so beloved, could be weighted down with so much pain that death seemed like the only choice left. And yet it was not shocking at all; he was open about his own troubles, and then I remembered that often the funniest people have the most demons, and they live with the hope that the laughter of the people around them can drown out the voices in their head that tell them, "you are not worthy of survival." For these people who have those voices in their head, there will never be enough love, never enough laughter. Then I remembered, too, that depression and mental illness, like the heroin addiction and alcoholism that killed Philip Seymour Hoffman, are like cancer in that they are manageable if you are lucky but not something that can be cured if by "cured" you mean "completely eradicated from your body." That shadow of the valley of death recedes and reappears at the edge of your vision, waiting.

I keep coming back to something that Marion Cunningham says to Ruth Reichl in TENDER AT THE BONE: "Nobody knows why some of us get better and others don't." This applies to so many things, cancer and mental illness and addiction. You can do all the right things - chemo and radiation and therapy and antipsychotics and rehab and yoga and macrobiotic diets that seem to be mostly consisting of seaweed. You can be positive and forward thinking and looking to the light and eternally hopeful. And you may still die sooner than you are ready for, certainly sooner than anyone who loves you is ready for. This is why I hate the language surrounding death and illness of any kind: it isn't a battle you lose or win. It's such bullshit. The body is at war with itself, no winners, no losers, only the understanding that each day is no guarantee of a tomorrow. Mike Daisey calls it "wrestling with the devil," and he would know. How true it is, there are days when you are standing triumphantly on the belly of this beast, and there are days when you are flat on the mat with some asshole's elbow on your throat.

Maybe some day those of us who wake in sunshine every morning, more or less, will understand what people who wake with demons shouting in their face go through to shout back even louder in order to get out of bed. The shame shouldn't be in their feelings and daily struggles, but in our inability to comprehend their despair. Even then the only thing we can do is say, you are loved, you are loved, you are loved. And understand this: so often this is not going to be enough to pull someone back from the darkness.

A line by Joseph Conrad, an oft-repeated refrain in Salman Rushdie's JOSEPH ANTON, comes to me: "You must live until you die."

wild geese.

 I was about three when my parents took me to a friend's house for dinner and I fell in the pool. I don't remember this part, only the floating candles shaped like lotus blossoms, which our hostess lit for me after nightfall. My father tells me there was an ominous silence, and they ran over to find me in the pool, struggling and unable to swim. My mother tells me that I was totally fine, I'd been taking swimming lessons which my dad didn't know about, and I was trying to dog-paddle. I feel this illustrates the difference between their individual parenting styles, which continues today, thirty years later. I remember it as a warm summer day, and I must have been entranced by those flower-shaped candles. I still love lotus flowers, and I still love to swim.

Much later I was a sophomore in high school and learning to paddle a whitewater kayak. Unlike sea kayaks, these are meant to flip over and then back up, using a twist of your hips and a swift shove with the flat of the paddle. I never got the hang of it. This was borne home to me one October afternoon, when we went out on Lake Washington for a practice session. All the guys had made it back already, and I with my inferior upper-body strength was still what felt like a hundred yards offshore. A wave tipped me over and suddenly I was suspended upside-down in the lake, my paddle twisting uselessly in one hand, my apron trapping me tightly to the kayak. The apron is what keeps you from a) getting splashed and b) falling out of the kayak every time you flip over. This is only useful if you can flip yourself back up. If you can't, you pull a loop at the front of your apron to disengage it from the lip of the seat opening and get out that way, which seems easy when you are upright on dry land but not quite as easy when you are hanging upside-down underwater.

Mostly I remember how long the seconds seemed as I tried to free myself from the kayak. It was cold, and dark, and I couldn't see anything. I became entangled in whatever weeds are floating around a lake in autumn, fighting my apron and my life-jacket and my long braid of hair. Much later I would hear Mike Daisey talk about nearly drowning in a pond in the middle of a Maine winter, and I would think about this afternoon and how thankful I was that I was wearing the wetsuit that my mom had bought for me a few days before, and that my glasses were strapped to my head with pair of neon-bright Croakies. I finally pulled the apron loose and wriggled free of the kayak. I hadn't lost my paddle, or my glasses, or my shoes. My friend Blake saw me swimming towards shore, and came back out to tow me in. I have never been happier to see anyone in my entire life.

A few days ago a friend and former colleague died in that same lake, not far from where my kayak had tipped me into the cold October waves. In her sixties, she had been ill for some years with a progressively worsening brain disorder, a profound cruelty to someone with a brilliant mind. It robbed her of the ability to speak or even to write. It was about to take away whatever independence she had left, and so she made this, her final choice. She walked into the darkness while she still could. My heart aches for her, but only because she had to do it alone. This has been a long goodbye. There will be more of them in my life, and each one teaches me again and again, it never gets easier, not really. Instead I choose to remember these things: she loved birds, white chocolate martinis, and poetry. It was through her that I discovered Mary Oliver, for which I have always been grateful. She was as stubborn and immovable as a rock, but so gentle you did not realize that you were beating your head against a wall of granite. Now she is finally as free as the wild geese.

WILD GEESE

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

- MARY OLIVER

the persistence of memory. for Jerry Manning.

We were not a Seattle-Rep-going family when I was young; my parents always considered it too conservative for their tastes, which became my tastes. Ours was an ACT-subscriber house, which shaped my teenage years and then the rest of my life so far. Much later I was drawn to the Rep for EQUIVOCATION, a co-production with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and although I haven’t loved everything I’ve seen there (especially the splashier, Big-On-Broadway plays) I have always loved the talent and care that has gone into each work. Ben (Moore, the managing director, who just retired) and Jerry (Manning, the artistic director), Jerry and Ben - they had an extraordinary sense of vision, of identity, an understanding of their audience that was impressive even when I didn’t agree with it. The sudden death of Jerry Manning today is a tremendous, terrible blow.

I often saw Jerry at other theatres around town, but there are two other moments that stand out in my mind, which I will remember for the rest of my life. The first was at a benefit performance Mike Daisey did of his monologue HOW THEATRE FAILED AMERICA, shortly after the closure of Intiman Theatre, now the Cornish Playhouse. I remember that he seemed hesitant about being there that night. I remember that there was a little bit of the sense that it was The People With The Money Making Decisions versus The People Who Are Trying To Make Art. And I remember him saying, “This is Elizabeth Kenny, her one-woman show SICK is really great, and it’s just been extended at the New City Theatre, and you should go see it.” And I went and I saw it, and it changed everything. I push myself harder now, I pay more attention to the people who make theatre in this town, I see as much as I can. That was three years and two hundred and fifty plays ago, and it all started that night from a little comment that Jerry Manning made. I owe so much of how I think about theatre now to him and what he said that night.

Early last year I went to the New Play Festival readings at the Rep, which were all memorable (especially the stunning ALL THE WAY and THE GREAT SOCIETY by Robert Schenkkan), but my favorite moment was watching Jerry work with Justin Huertas on his comic-book musical, LIZARD BOY. It was not something you would expect to see at the Rep, jam-packed with Dick’s jokes and references to Grindr, that gay-hookup app, and the tremendously haunting voice of Kirsten DeLohr Helland. Before the talkback session, Jerry turned to us and said, rather cheekily, “Do y’all know what Grindr is or do I have to explain it to you?” I laughed, but I also saw that he took his mentorship of Justin and his work very, very seriously. Theirs was a meeting of the minds, bonded over a shared love of comic books (who knew?) but more than that an understanding of our human need to tell stories. That reading changed how I look at the Seattle Rep, how capable they can be of pushing themselves and their boundaries.

I never met Jerry Manning, but I was very much influenced by him and his vision and his love for art and more importantly the people who make art. Art matters, but people matter more. What is that line from MRS. DALLOWAY? “What does the brain matter? Compared to the heart.”

weekend thoughts.

When my parents moved back to Taipei after thirty years in the United States, back in 2003, I felt strangely abandoned. I was 23. I was living in my childhood home, which seemed huge and empty and echoing, and every noise terrified me. I had my dog for company and a job that occupied my days and I spent my evenings watching CSI and reading Television Without Pity. I had the safety net of my mom's friends, who would sometimes invite me to dinner, but I had no friends, except for J. who was still a student at UW. Once in a while we would go out to B&O Espresso and eat cake and talk about everything and nothing. I was so lonely, even as I pretended to myself that I wasn't. I didn't talk to my old friends from college; a crippling bout of what I later realized was depression had left me paranoid and increasingly isolated from everyone around me in my senior year. Everyone seemed to know where they were going and what they wanted to be doing, and I was floundering. Disappointment - my own and that of my parents - seemed to grab me by the ankles and weigh me down, but when they left for Taipei I was finally able to breathe again.

I turned 25. A guy introduced me to poetry and Charles Bukowski and I began to read a lot of poetry and Bukowski. I taught myself to drink whiskey. I went to the theatre occasionally, newly flush with a disposable income. I learned to cook for myself all the things we never ate when I was a child, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, steak and creamed spinach, pancakes for dinner. I started blogging every day, five hundred words, more or less. I bought a condo and moved out of my childhood home, which my parents later sold. I learned to dine alone in restaurants, striking up conversations with Kelly, one of the owners of Lark, which quickly became my favorite restaurant. It was the first restaurant that became totally mine, not someplace I only went with my parents, like Rover’s or Lampreia. While reading the comments on Nancy Leson’s Seattle Times food blog, I became aware of a Flickr user who went by the name “Suomynona.” I couldn’t know then that two of the women I followed via his Flickr stream - one had blue hair, one seemed to take a lot of photos of her shoes - would later become my friends Rachel and Kate. All of this was still in the future.

C. and I were talking this morning about how it takes time to build a new life, both in a new city and in the city of your childhood. I've known her for almost a decade, and it’s hard to remember that the life I have now is not quite five years old, although its roots stretch farther back. The overlapping circles of friends I talk to nearly every day sprang up almost overnight, and at the same time developed slowly. Life is like that; everything happens very quickly, except when it doesn’t. The loneliness I felt at 23 faded so gradually that I almost forget it ever existed, except that it left me with two reminders: I would never feel that way again, and being alone is very different from being lonely. I seldom think about that time, that big empty house, the tick-tick-tick of the gas cooktop as I made dinner every night, the creaking tree branches scraping against my windows when it was windy out. I miss the gas cooktop but not the uncertainty of being young.

the city is ours.

Kate was the first person to notice the way I move through a crowd when she saw me cut through a mass of people during rush hour in a London tube station. One blink and I’d be several feet away, looking back over my shoulder at the rest of my friends. “It’s like you TELEPORTED,” she said. It isn’t about shoving your way through, although sometimes a neatly deployed elbow is essential, but instead looking for pockets of space between the people around you. A sideways wriggle, a swing of the hip, a swift step forward and to the left, and you have leaped over a surprising distance the way a salmon leaps over the fish ladder on his way down the river and out to sea.

I thought about that crowded tube station again after lunch today as my dad and I walked from one end of the Pike Place Market to the other. It was noon on a Saturday, and there were throngs of tourists walking at a snail’s pace, stopping at random to look at postcards or windchimes or straws of honey. I realized then that it is the more than 25 years of weekend visits to the market that have honed my crowd-teleportation skills to a fine art. We came here all the time when I was a kid, and now we still come almost every weekend whenever my dad is back from Taipei. Back then there was a ritual: brunch at Cafe Campagne or Maxmiliens, croissants and eclairs at Le Panier, produce at Sosio’s, browsing at DeLaurenti’s.

I thought about how people complain about the tourists at the market, clogging the aisles and the sidewalks with their strollers and their camera bags and their insistence on lining up down the block outside the Original Starbucks. I thought about how my friends commented on the insanity of going to the market on a Saturday and then over to the University of Washington to see the cherry blossoms in bloom, on the same Saturday. The UW quad, like the Pike Place Market, was a seething mass of people from one end to the other, and more were pouring in from all directions, like ants converging on a fallen cupcake at a summer picnic.

I mention my friends’ comments to my dad, who laughed and said, “When you have lived in Seattle long enough, you are not afraid of crowds. You own the city.” At this point I should admit that we have two secret weapons: my dad’s infinite patience, and his handicapped parking permit. There is a third secret weapon: an understanding of what it is to be a visitor in someone else’s city. You cannot complain about tourists unless you have never been one, if you have never inadvertently blocked someone’s path because you were looking at the Tube map, or if you have never taken too long to order a gelato from a vast array of unfamiliar flavors. Or if you have never stood on the side of a road in a Portuguese town getting directions to the next town in the fractured French that you never properly learned. All of us have been at one time or another a stranger in a strange land. And if you practice your teleportation skills, you will never let a crowd stop you from wherever you want to go in your own city.

restaurant notes. the neighborhood phenomenon.

My family has been dining at Nishino since it opened, in 1995. Before that it was an Italian restaurant called Trattoria Carmine; one day we came to dinner and found an affable Japanese couple running a sushi restaurant in its place. For eighteen years now they have anchored a small strip mall off the intersection where Lake Washington Boulevard crosses Madison and heads into the Arboretum. Continue on eastwards, towards Lake Washington, and the neighborhood becomes leafier, grander, wealthier. To your left, a golf course/residential community called Broadmoor - once spoofed on ALMOST LIVE! - sprawls in all its manicured glory behind high brick walls as you get closer to the water.

The women of Madison Park are groomed and affluent-looking; they wear diamond engagement rings (of a reasonably moderate size, chosen by husbands at the beginning of lucrative careers) and diamond studs (the 20th anniversary upgrade, they are each twice the size of the aforementioned diamond rings). They play tennis, and their sport-jacket-wearing husbands play golf. And Nishino is their canteen, their neighborhood joint, their local diner, their clubhouse. There are parents with their preteens on school nights and couples on date nights and friends having a relaxing dinner together, letting their hair down now the kids have grown and gone. I have never spent any amount of time around WASPs, but watching the occupants of Madison Park greet each other over dinner seems to come pretty close to how I imagine them.

In the years since my parents moved back to Taipei, dinner at Nishino has just been with one parent or the other, so we now eat at the sushi bar instead of in the raised dining room. The restaurant has modern paintings on the walls and the light is a sort of peachy glow, all the better to smooth out crow’s-feet and minimize that Botox shine and illuminate the freshly highlighted and coiffed heads that are busy air-kissing across the tables. Every time I come here, I notice two things: the owner recognizes almost every single person who comes in the door, including my parents, and at least half the people in the dining room know each other. Another thing I’ve noticed: the sushi chefs are busily making boxes upon boxes of sushi takeout in-between serving us our perfect nigiri.

Since Nishino opened, more than eighteen years ago, I have never seen it not busy. It is always mostly, if not completely, full. Before we started dining mostly at the sushi bar, we sometimes couldn’t even get a table. This is extraordinary, because it is not an inexpensive place, and yet it is the most neighborhoodiest neighborhood joint I have ever seen in the entire city of Seattle. Tatsu Nishino chose to open his restaurant in a neighborhood where its inhabitants have both a great deal of money and a considerable sense of community, and also he and his wife remember and treasure their customers. This sense of community between the owners and their customers, and also between their customers themselves, this is what has kept them alive and thriving for almost twenty years. It’s the most amazing thing.

theatre notes. young playwrights program, I & II

Last weekend I went down to see the Young Playwrights Program at ACT. The previous fall some 200 students had participated in a city-wide theatre workshop, writing their own plays with the help of Seattle theatre artists. The program is led by the incredible Anita Montgomery, ACT’s literary manager and education program director. In addition to all this, she is unquestionably one of my favorite directors, tough and gentle at the same time, and extraordinarily open.

The eight plays chosen from that initial 200 were presented by various directors and actors, working closely with the young playwrights, who ranged in age from about 12 to perhaps 17. I was staggered by the array of talent before me; these kids were stunningly articulate, smart, hilarious, and heartbreaking. There were lighthearted mysteries and scathing social commentaries and meditations on life and death. I could see how these actors and directors gave their own shape to the words from these young writers, but they were true to their individual voices. The topics were often somber, but as grownups we forget that even the young are not too young to understand that the world can be a dark and complicated place.

What did I know then, that I’ve since forgotten? Did I know then, as these preteens and teenagers grasped so vividly, that out of the tangled maze of the world that surrounds us sometimes, art and its creation are like Ariadne’s thread leading us away from the Minotaur, back out, blinking, into the sunlight? Maybe I’ve always known this. Maybe this thought has followed me, always. Art is a solace, a companion, a guide, a mirror inward and outward. I hope these students will keep writing, or at least look back and remember how to put into words all the joys and pains of life, and then move on.

we will leave some traces.

 Those of us born in 1980 fall in that no-man’s-land between Generation X and the Millennials. We learned about AIDS as children, old enough to understand what sex was but still young enough (mostly) not to be having any. We knew it wasn’t anything you could catch by hugging or kissing; my middle school health class screened every single AIDS movie-of-the-week ever made. This awareness permeated every aspect of our culture in the 1990s, created from the fury and pain and determination of an entire generation affected by AIDS. This fury became a driving force that poured energy and perhaps more importantly, money, into research. Research meant drugs, not a single, perfect cure, but at least a way to manage the “spectrum of illnesses” that define AIDS, as Susan Sontag described it.

The other night I went to see THE NORMAL HEART with two friends a generation or two older than I. Larry Kramer had written this play in 1985 and set it in 1981-1982, following a circle of gay men in New York City who were watching their friends drop dead in waves from some mysterious illness that nobody understood. It is so full of anger and fear and pain and loss that I was shaking by the end of it. The lights came up and M. was crying, and I have never seen him cry before. I am old enough to remember the Challenger disaster of 1986 but not quite old enough to remember these early days of AIDS. Of being so in the closet that you would not dare to talk publicly about AIDS because that meant having to talk about being gay. Of doctors trying to treat any number of symptoms without knowing what they were treating. Of men reveling in the sexual freedom of post-Stonewall New York City and then finding that all this free love was actually killing them.

Between each scene various actors recited lists of names, too many to count. From around me in the audience I could hear the occasional gasp of recognition, a few scattered sobs. I understood that they were calling the dead, but it wasn’t until afterwards my friends told me these were names of people from Seattle who had died of AIDS. One of the actors had asked several friends for the names of people they’d known. Now I understood: those sobs came from people crying out from the pain of survival, and this was a handing down of the names. A line from Eugene Ionesco’s THE CHAIRS came back to me: “We will leave some traces, for we are people and not cities.”

IT WASN’T ANYTHING YOU DID

"How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one that I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?
“I don’t know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?” - DAVID SEDARIS, from THE NEW YORKER

Last night I went to a reading of Frank Basloe’s SLEEPY HOLLOW, which sounds like it would be an action adventure but is really about living ghosts. Five friends meet for an uncomfortable dinner in a house in Westchester County; as it begins, you know there is something going on that no one will talk about. It takes a while to get to the heart of the uneasy truth: one of them tried to commit suicide three months before. Even though he is alive, everyone seems to treat him as a ghost, not wanting to face him, not wanting to ask what made the world so unbearable he tried to leave it. He is a traveler returned from a distant land, where few people ever come back from, viewed with mistrust and alienation by everyone, his wife, his children, his old friends. The forced awkwardness of the first half of the play rings false, until your mind catches up and you realize, it's as real as real life.

It’s hard to know how often people fail to commit suicide, except in movies where someone always comes in at just the right moment, playing it for laughs. How many of us have watched people we love walk back from the razor's edge? If they really meant to die, how is it possible that they could fail? It's only then you realize how our lives turn on the thinnest of coincidences, coming home too early or too late to save someone. It’s hard to know how to respond - pretend it never happened? Pretend they won’t try again? Wait for them to succeed next time? Both Stephen Fry and Mike Daisey have talked about their failures to slip away silently, but the ones who have succeeded, they give us no answers. The dead can’t talk, and anyway, everyone knows answers only lead to more questions.

Last night I thought again about the husband of my mother’s old college friend, who hanged himself when I was in high school. I had just met him and his family earlier that year. I can still remember his face, his thick shock of badger-striped salt-and-pepper hair. What we didn't know then was that he'd been battling depression for some time. One night, his wife called our home, her voice troubled, and I wrote down her phone number on a napkin that then was accidentally thrown away. In those days my Chinese was much worse than it is now; I'd forgotten her name, and it wasn't until a few days later that she finally reached my mom. I’ll never forget the shame that went through me when I heard why she'd called. I couldn't sleep without thinking about their son, some years younger than I, who'd been the one to find his father's body in their garage. I hope he understood, it wasn’t anything he did.

on the edge of farce. theatre notes.

I found the New City Theater because of a roundtable discussion on the state of theatre in Seattle at the Rep in the spring of 2011. Intiman had just closed. Mike Daisey was in town for THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS, and he gave a benefit performance of HOW THEATRE FAILED AMERICA, followed by the roundtable. The actress Elizabeth Kenny was part of this discussion, and she was a ball of energy and anger, and when introducing her Jerry Manning had said "you should really all go see her show SICK, it's really great." I went home and looked up the New City, which turned out to be in the central district, not far from my apartment. Soon after I went to see SICK, and it was amazing. The space was amazing, two narrow rooms: a long lobby crammed with art and books and chairs, like the living room of the most interesting people you know, and the performance space, which seats at most fifty people.

Much later I learned that John Kazanjian - who directed SICK and pretty much everything else produced by New City Theater since its inception in 1982 - and Mary Ewald, who's starred in most of its productions - began the theater in their living room (they have been married for over thirty years). It still feels like a living room - when they did HOMEBODY a few months ago, they divided the already small theater space in half and squished the audience (now reduced to 20 people) into a scraggly semicircle around Homebody (played by Mary Ewald), seated at a little tea table shoved against one wall. Kazanjian and Ewald are the masters of monologue. I've seen them do Beckett (HAPPY DAYS) and Kushner (TINY KUSHNER and HOMEBODY), and Ewald in Caryl Churchill's THE SKRIKER (at a different theater) last fall was totally mesmerizing. So when I heard that Kazanjian would be directing New Century Theatre Company's latest play, I was hyperventilating with excitement until opening night. It wasn't until I got to the theater and sat down in the lobby with my program that I realized I had no idea what the play was going to be about.

The title, THE WALWORTH FARCE, gives one the idea that it will be funny. And indeed, it is funny, until it isn't anymore and becomes terrifying. Later I think of Harold Pinter's "comedies of menace," which start out quite amusingly and then turn a sharp corner and catapult you into a murky, creepingly menacing sense of dread. The comedy is immediate and physical, a funny wig, three characters spinning around each other in a dance. But it balances on the knife's edge of anger; this is what makes it work, the bitter counterweight to the laughter. The underlying unease - just exactly what the hell is going on here? - keeps you trembling on that edge. When you realize the truths that keep the three men of this story trapped in this dingy apartment - only one of them ever leaves, to buy food, and one day unwittingly brings the outside world back with him - the story becomes heartbreaking.

What I have always loved most about New Century Theatre Company is how much they feel like a family - several of them seem to be actually married to each other - and how watching them is like seeing a murmuration of starlings rise as one being from the earth and sweep across the sky. I can't explain it any other way. There is a connection and a familiarity and a physical awareness of each other. And for the first time I understand how, in a way, John Kazanjian is still directing plays in his living room. This space that is New City Theater is like his own skin, with its brick walls and painted floor, and the slamming of doors and thrum of music like his own heartbeat, and ours.

(not) waiting for godot.

The other night C. and I headed down to the waterfront to see Arts on the Waterfront's production of WAITING FOR GODOT, which I last read in 1997 (high school) and had never seen performed. This production benefits Teen Feed, which provides food and other support services for homeless teens, year-round. The stage was set up at the end of the piers that make up the Waterfront Park, if one could call it a stage, a few rows of seats marking a boundary. We sat on the floor, leaning against the railings, our backs to the sun. A couple of battered pallets, a tree that seemed to be sculpted from found objects, a spotlight or two for when night fell. You can make theatre anywhere. Any bit of earth will do. I know this now.

I don't remember what I made of WAITING FOR GODOT the first time I read it. In those days I was in love with Stoppard and was soon about to fall headlong into the embrace of the Russians. I didn't understand Beckett then, and if my incomprehension of HAPPY DAYS last year and the staggeringly brief (15-minutes-long) ROCKABY last month is anything to go by, I *still* don't understand Beckett. It's possible I never will. But in the hands of these young artists - none of the actors or the director seems to be over the age of 24 - it becomes something extraordinarily beautiful. There is almost a tenderness to it, a sense of understanding what it means to love and need another person. I hadn't seen this the first time around.

The play as I remembered it is about middle-aged men waiting for this mysterious Godot, who never arrives. This is different. This is the urban backdrop of the Seattle Wheel and the tourist traffic of the waterfront, the highrise condominiums marching along, with the sounds of cars driving along Highway 99 and the occasional squawking bird as a soundtrack. Against this concrete jungle softened by the hushed blue waters of the Sound and the glow of sunset, the play turns onto its head, the baby-faced actors turning the story into one of troubled runaways searching and waiting for a destiny that may never come. The words wrap around them like a new skin. They understand what it means to be young and uncertain about the future, because they *are* young and uncertain about the future. And yet, by making art at the end of an empty pier at sunset on a summer evening, they are not waiting for Godot, but walking forward into a world wide with possibility.

life and death in the theatre.

I was at a reading of Allison Gregory's UNCERTAIN TERMS over at Seattle Rep several weeks ago when the past rose up and roared over me like a wave. It was a warm summer evening and we were in one of the back rehearsal rooms, crowded with chairs. The Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society had taken over the rest of the theatre, busily preparing one of their musicals, and as I made my way through the maze of backstage corridors I kept seeing men dressed like pirates and women in corsets and ringlets, ruffles everywhere you looked. It was all a little bit surreal.

The play shifts back and forth between the past and the present, and between the living and the dead. This took me a bit of time to understand. The characters are a man, his former wife and brother-in-law, his former mother-in-law, a real estate agent, and a girl who believes he is her father. It was funny, and it made me ache in ways I can't quite explain. The part that slammed us all into a wall was the part when the real estate agent recounts the sudden death of her husband, at the end of the first act. His death as she describes it is the death of Mark Chamberlin, who died suddenly in the hospital after a seemingly innocuous bicycle accident more than two years ago. The air in the room changed as we realized what we were hearing.

I remember all this so clearly because the death of Mark Chamberlin came at almost the same time as the end of Intiman Theatre. The former was a shock; the latter was a slow and inevitable decline. The two things together changed me as a theatregoer. They have haunted me. I can't put it any other way. I have thought again and again about these two things, and also about Mike Daisey's HOW THEATRE FAILED AMERICA in the spring of 2011, and the roundtable discussion afterwards, so filled with anger and sadness. All these things are intertwined now. It was at this time I became aware of more and more theatres that I hadn't even noticed before, all over my city. The more plays I saw, the more seemed to appear, as if my desire for more caused them to multiply exponentially.

The people in Seattle who make theatre, they seem to make it out of an inescapable need to create; for them, there seems to be a sense of purpose in staying here, in trying to make art here. Not as a stepping-stone onto something "bigger," but as an end unto itself. As an artist, you're told that the great leap into the unknown is to head off to New York, or LA, or Europe. But I have come to feel that it is as much of a leap to stay and build something, to choose Seattle not out of fear or inertia but because this is home, and anything is possible.

scar tissue.

Yesterday A. told me about an incident at a recently opened restaurant where she took a young friend to lunch, some weeks back. I won’t mention the name of the restaurant because I don’t know the whole story, yet. What I do know is this: with the check came a postcard of that iconic Eddie Adams photo of a Vietcong prisoner being shot in the head on a Saigon street. Printed on the postcard were the words “LET’S SHOOT SOME GOOKS." I stood there on the street corner blinking in the bright sunlight, looking at A., wondering, did I really just hear her say that? I wanted to throw up. I wanted to throw things. I wanted to scream. I couldn’t believe that in this day and age someone would think that this postcard would be an appropriate thing to give to anyone. Ever.

A few days after that lunch A. got an apology from the restaurant, and I do believe it was sincerely meant. I do believe that this was honestly an act of ignorance and not malice, or at least I want to believe it, but I am reminded that racism isn’t always about violence, not all the time. It’s more subtle than that. More often than not it is about ignorance. I had to explain to a friend who is a few years younger than me what the word “gook" meant. I can’t even remember how old I was when I learned it. What I want to know is what went through the mind of the person who handed this postcard to my friend, and I want to know what goes on in the minds of people who produce these postcards. What the fuck is so funny about a public execution? About war? About calling people “gooks"? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE.

I woke up angry this morning and stayed angry all day. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the plays I’ve seen this year that touch on the Vietnam War - for some reason there have been several of them - and of the viscerally emotional reactions of audience members around me who are old enough to remember that time. There are still scars and ghosts not laid to rest. There is still a latent, simmering anger, and the understanding that we never learn from our past mistakes. That someone would make a joke or a profit from an entire country’s scar tissue is beyond contemptible. The Eddie Adams photograph of a Vietcong execution is an indelible part of our visual history, our collective memory, our understanding of what atrocities were being committed halfway around the world, more than forty years before social media allowed us to experience a revolution in realtime. To turn it into a joke is a sacrilege. And I keep wanting to ask, for what? Why? I’m waiting for an answer.

theatre and poetry notes.

I didn’t know Kim Ricketts as well as I wish I had, but I knew two things about her: she loved her children more than anything, and she breathed poetry the way a fish breathes water (to borrow from Denise Levertov). I think of Kim whenever I read something by William Stafford, and especially when I read his poem ‘A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER.’ I was told that this was her favorite poem. I hadn’t heard it since her funeral, but it came up again during one of the plays in Seattle Rep’s Writer’s Group Showcase.

Elizabeth Heffron’s PORTUGAL is about the aftermath of an industrial accident at a Hanford nuclear waste farm. There are intertwined stories, but it is mainly about a young mother who is coming to the realization that she will not live to see her children grow up. Near the end, her mother-in-law gives her a book of poetry, and this is the poem that the young woman (played by Emily Chisholm, one of my favorite actresses) reads aloud to her husband. She read it with the serenity of someone who knows that they are going to die, and has accepted this as an unchangeable fact. I started to cry a few lines into the poem and didn’t stop until the play ended fifteen minutes later. It was a little bit embarrassing.

A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

- WILLIAM STAFFORD. STORIES THAT COULD BE TRUE: NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS.