theatre notes. september skies.

S. and I headed down to the Odd Duck Studio for what we thought was going to be a sketch comedy parody of Back to the Future. I had a two-for-one coupon. We were early, so we ate a hot dog around the corner at Po Dog and then went back to the theater. Neither of us paid any attention to the posters outside the theater, which in retrospect was rather foolish of us. The Odd Duck Studio is a hole-in-the-wall theater that takes you into a little storefront with bars on the windows, down a hallway lined with various art/theater notices, widening into a small concession stand/ticket office, and then finally to the 35-seat black-box theater itself. The kid at the concession stand was perplexed by our two-for-one coupon, then politely told us it was pay-what-you-can, which only confused us further. Then we took our seats and looked more closely at the program: We were about to see September Skies, and not the Pork Filled Players. WHOOPS.

Eventually we figured it out: the website which proclaimed that Pork to the Future was "coming up next" was out of date, and in fact it had occurred two years earlier. There is something fateful and poetic about showing up two years late for a parody of Back to the Future. TWO. YEARS. LATE. It was all the more poetic because the play we were about to see instead is about fate. The story takes place on September 10, 2001 and early in the morning of September 11, 2001. The setting is Boston Logan Airport (with an interlude in a hotel bar). Anyone who has not spent the past ten years in the remote Amazon will know what will happen to these two people, who through various twists of fate and choices find themselves on the 7:45 am American Airlines flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles. This flight left Boston on the morning of September 11, 2001, and crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City an hour later. The play ends as they board the plane, but we already know their fate, because it is written down in our histories.

It is not really fair to call September Skies a 9/11 play. The circumstances and timeline of its setting give it a kind of immediacy, an emotional connection for nearly everyone who sees it, but that is only because 9/11 is still new for us. A century from now it might be seen the way we see something set the day before the sailing of the Titanic. We all know that they're going to hit the iceberg, but what matters is the human story spread before us, and how we connect to it. And here, the story is about fate: about cancelled flights and chance meetings with someone met briefly at a party some time ago, about falling into - or out of - love, and self-doubt, and the choices we make. And how cell phones were really, really tiny about ten years ago before the iPhone came along and turned everything around again. It's an interlude, a moment between a man and a woman, where nothing is decided but for the hope that perhaps, someday, they might meet again. Haven't we all had that?

September Skies, written and directed by Jim Moran and produced by the Eclectic Theatre Company, is at the Odd Duck Studio through October 1st.

theatre notes. two queens, one throne.

J. and I went to see Mary Stuart at ACT on Sunday afternoon. I'd been looking forward to it ever since I saw the cast list, months back. Anne Allgood I've adored since Rock 'n' Roll a few years back; I met her in the audience at O Lovely Glowworm and she was unfailingly kind and gracious. Suzanne Bouchard I've loved, as I've said countless times before, since 1992. Either one would guarantee my attendance; the thought of the two of them together practically made my heart explode in anticipation. The excitement grew even greater when I saw the rest of the cast, most of them familiar to me.

Somehow I'd missed out on studying Tudor England in school, and I didn't really know much about Mary, Queen of Scots, or even Elizabeth I, or the histories, stories, and myths that surround them. In a way my ignorance made it easier to fall into the story, without the distraction of looking for the seams where truth and fiction are knitted together. All that was left was passion and intrigue, faith and love, desire, hope, doubt, and jealousy...There were audible gasps from the audience at all the dramatic moments - there were a lot of them - and at intermission I turned to J. with my jaw hanging open, unable to utter anything more than "OH MY GOD."

The play was electric. There's no other way to describe it. I've seen a lot of plays this year, and this one stood out - for the energy and chemistry of the cast, the way all the elements fell together into a smoothly polished piece. It was tight. Sometimes there are weak points in an otherwise solid production - a script that feels unfinished, a director who's new to the game, clashing accents that jar the ear, an actor who isn't quite up to the rest of the cast. There was none of that here. The two queens - Allgood and Bouchard - are so brilliant that halfway through, I had the sudden feeling that they could have easily changed places, Anne as Elizabeth and Suzanne as Mary, instead of the other way around. You don't often see that. My heart was still pounding, hours later.

I'll be thinking about this one, for a long time yet.

Mary Stuart is at A Contemporary Theatre through October 9.

theatre notes. inherit the wind.

The Erickson Theatre off Broadway is one of my favorite theaters in Seattle, not least because it is only four blocks from my apartment. It's a black box, with maybe 120 seats, give or take, the stage an open rectangle at one end. "Backstage" is usually whatever space is behind some piece of scenery at the rear, as far as I can tell, and changes between scenes are lightning-quick. I've been here many times, now, usually for a Strawberry Theatre Workshop production (the exception was the New Century Theatre Company's O Lovely Glowworm), and I wonder what will happen in 2012 when the Balagan Theatre moves in and takes over the space.

It's been nearly twenty years since I read Inherit the Wind in middle school. We watched the movie in class, with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March. I'd forgotten most of the story. When I heard that Strawberry Theatre Workshop would be producing it this fall, I knew that I would be there. I recognized many of the actors from previous plays; while a play or a playwright will catch my eye, the cast is what ultimately guarantees my attendance. Here, as usual, there is a tightly knit ensemble orbiting around the two planets of Drummond and Brady, some of the actors switching back and forth between characters almost at the drop of a hat. Literally.

After all this time, the play remains as powerful and relevant as it ever was - after twenty years since I read it, fifty-some years since the play was written, eighty-six years after the Scopes trial on which Inherit the Wind was based took place. What are we fighting for in the name of righteousness? How do we fight for something without understanding what it is we're really fighting for? How do we cling to a belief that we can't defend? How do you defend the breaking of an indefensible law? I wish I could remember what I thought of this play twenty years ago. Maybe I am still asking the same questions. Maybe I already understood the answers, and have since forgotten them.

Inherit the Wind plays at the Erickson Theatre through October 8th, produced by the Strawberry Theatre Workshop. They do good work. You should support them.

a few thoughts on regional theatre.

I grew up in Seattle. My first play was, as I've said before, James and the Giant Peach at Seattle Children's Theatre in 1989. I fell in love with A Contemporary Theatre with Shadowlands, and then The Revenger's Comedies in 1992. With the exception of My Favorite Year in New York City (1992) and a few thrilling seasons of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (1996 and 1997), all the theatre I have known has taken place in Seattle. It did not occur to me that what was performed in my city was "regional theatre" until Intiman Theatre won a Tony Award for 'Best Regional Theatre" some five or six years ago. It did not really occur to me that "regional theatre" could be dirty words until Mike Daisey gave a benefit performance of How Theatre Failed America at the Seattle Rep last Spring.

Daisey was talking about how a friend of his - nameless, so it could be anyone, anywhere - felt as though being the artistic director out in the hinterlands was like being in exile. (That may not be quite what he said, but it's how I remember it). The arrogance of this nameless director made me furious. That was six months ago and dammit, I'm still pissed. I don't know who this friend was, which podunk city he was stagnating in, whose frontier dust he was eager to shake off his pant cuffs. It could have been Seattle, or it could have been Paducah. All he wanted to do was to head back to the bright lights of the Big City. The Big City is New York, of course. When it comes to Theatre you have London and you have New York City and if you are anywhere else you may as well be doing community productions with amateurs who should probably stick to their day jobs. This is bullshit.

The only way for regional theatre to transcend its label of "regional theatre" is to be produced by people who consider it to be the end unto itself, and not the means to an end. The latter treats his theatre as a ticket back to civilization, to his imagined Shangri-La. This shows only contempt for the audience, and in the end we will not weep when the hollow shell left behind falls apart. The former at least gives the impression that he is there because he cares about the place and the people who bring life to the theatre - the actors who live and work in this town, and the audiences who come to see them. Such people are Jerry Manning at Seattle Rep, Kurt Beattie and Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi at ACT, Greg Carter at the Strawberry Theatre Workshop, and Scott Nolte and Karen Lund at the Taproot Theatre, to say nothing of the collective passion of the actors who make up the New Century Theatre Company. These are just the people whose theatres I frequent regularly. This is Seattle, a theatre kind of town, and there are many, many more.

The more time I spend in the theatre - it is only September and I have seen at least twenty plays since January - the more I feel that three things are needed: Love, passion, and faith. I add one more thing - a sense of community. A sense that my city is made up of dozens of theatres large and small and one giant repertory of actors, many of whom I have loved since that first season at ACT in 1992. This is one of the great things about being a grown-up in the city of my childhood, of seeing the same actors again and again, growing and evolving as the years slip past, challenging themselves and me as well with every new part. That thrill when I see a familiar face - often many familiar faces - in my program, it never goes away. I hope it never does.

part four.

(See part one, part two, and part three).

It is July of 2011 and I am 31 years old. I am back in Russia after an absence of twelve years, longer than I meant to leave. Our ship has left Moscow behind, heading up through a series of canals and locks and rivers that will lead us northwards, to St. Petersburg. We pass clusters of dachas tucked into birch forests, swimmers resting on grassy riverbanks, and sunburned vacationers fishing hopefully on the rocks. We stop in Uglich, Goritsy, Kizhi, Petrozavodsk, Svir-Stroi. There is a kind of music to these names. These are places I've never visited before, so there are no old memories there. We cross Lake Onega, and then Lake Ladoga, the largest lake in Europe. In the middle of the night, we reach the point where the Neva River joins the southern tip of Lake Ladoga; we are almost to St. Petersburg.

The city seems so much bigger, now. It has sprawled out in all directions, like a drop of ink on wet paper. But the metro stations are the same, dim subterranean cathedrals of marble. The real shock is Nevsky Prospekt; all the shops are new. The café where I drank mineral water and ate buterbrod as a student has gone. The Hermitage is bigger, more labyrinthine than before, or so it seems, the rooms packed with tourists herded here and there by flag-wielding guides. Outside, long lines of people wait in the bright sunlight of the square. Only the grand staircase is as I remember, and the rooms of Rembrandts, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Picassos and Matisses. Peterhof, too, all golden fountains in light-dappled green parks, is much the same, only with more people. The slippers they make you wear in the palaces are disposable now; the famed Amber Room at the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo has finally been restored. And everywhere, more people, more tour buses, brass bands playing national anthems of various countries.

Nostalgia is dangerous; it makes it hard for you to see clearly the time and place of the present, so blinded you are by the past. I am not 19, or 13. I am 31. I don't speak Russian anymore, only understanding enough to nod my head when kindly museum docents speak to me, or to translate tombstones of famous people for my mother. The Russia I see now is in a constant state of renovation, repair, rebuilding, more busloads of tourists arriving every minute. There are 24-hour supermarkets and florist shops and fast-food outlets everywhere you look. But then I turn the corner into an old street and find the carved stone façades of buildings, with their lace-like wrought-iron ornaments, still beautiful. In the parks, allées of linden trees cast a soft, cool, green shade across the paths, as they have for a hundred years, two hundred, three hundred. It is the city I loved twelve years ago, and it always will be.

I'll be back. I won't wait twelve years, the next time.

part three.

(Read part one and part two).

It is July of 2011 and I am 31 years old. I arrive in Moscow to find that the airport is bigger and newer than I remember. I am here to meet my mother for a river cruise; some friends had invited her to join their college reunion, and I am tagging along. Our cruise ship is a far cry from the one I took twelve years ago; like everything else, it, too, is bigger and newer. The chocolates on the pillow are dark and smooth, much finer than anything I'd seen during my previous trips. Mom arrives, and we have a late dinner; gone is the black bread and the tiny water glasses and the miniscule paper napkins. The world has changed.

In the morning we head out to tour the city. On the way I see a billboard for the techno-pop duo Ruki Vverh, who we'd listened to avidly back in college; in October there will be a 15-year-anniversary concert. Fifteen years? Are we really that old? Yes, we are. The traffic is immense, the boulevards packed with cars. There are luxury vehicles and mid-range cars and SUVs, cars of all makes and models. Later someone tells us that the number 1 car in Russia is the Ford Focus, although there are still plenty of the boxy old Ladas. We arrive at Red Square in the blinding sunlight, St. Basil's Cathedral looking much as I remember it. A little smaller now, perhaps. A line of people snakes all the way down one side of the square and past the State Historical Museum. They are waiting to visit Vladimir Lenin in his red-and-black mausoleum; he only sees visitors three or four days a week, from 10am to 2pm, something like that.

Everywhere there are people, more people, still more people, tour groups with their radio receivers and flags and matching badges. I'm one of these tourists this time, not a student, and it is a strange feeling to be herded about and coddled with air-conditioning and four-course lunches and dinners. Everything is bigger. Everything has the air of being just-renovated or rebuilt or in the process of being renovated or rebuilt. The Communist-era Hotel Intourist where we stayed last time has been torn down and replaced by a Ritz-Carlton which will run you approximately $2,000 a night. The exchange rate is not much more, about 28 rubles to the dollar; in 1999 it was about 26 rubles to the dollar - but everything costs at least four times as much, now.

One morning, we walk through the Novodevichy Cemetary in the pouring rain, and I find Bulgakov's grave again. No roses today, but I take another photo, in focus, this time. I stand on Sparrow Hills, for the third time now, and look down on the changing city below, new buildings springing up everywhere like toadstools after a storm. We take the metro and I find that the escalators no longer seem to move as swiftly as I remember. At the Tolstoy museum, a unexpectedly cheerful docent at the door chatters away; to my shame my Russian is mostly forgotten and I am not sure what she is telling us. But her smiling kindness is a far cry from the grim babushkas who guarded the museums a generation ago. Our last morning in Moscow, we head to the Tretyakov Gallery and rush through the art-filled rooms at a brisk trot. I am not ready to leave yet; I wish I had a few more days. But there is more awaiting us, and it's time to go...follow me, my reader, and only me!*

to be continued...

*from The Master and Margarita.

part two.

(Read part one first).

It is June of 1999 and I am a month shy of my 19th birthday when I arrive in St. Petersburg. I have a year of Russian classes under my belt, but as it turns out my host-mother does not understand me any more than I understand her. I know enough to get around the metro system and to buy mineral water and piroshky at the university snack bar. We have language classes during the week and group excursions all over, but there is still plenty of time on our own. How thrilling it is to be on my own in St. Petersburg! Our first night in the city we wind up at a rock concert held in a former church, performed by a metal cover band called Tequila Jazz. After the smoky darkness of the concert the sky outside is still shockingly bright: these are the White Nights of early summer, when the sun never quite sets.

The last of the lilacs are in bloom, lilacs and lilies-of-the-valley, and old babushkas sell bunches of flowers outside the metro stations. Their sweet fragrance floats deep down the escalators, drawing you back up to the light. In the afternoons after class we head out to wander up and down Nevskii Prospekt, hanging out in cafés or museums or in green parks dappled with sunlight and shade. The air is full of linden pollen, which makes me sneeze. We go to Peterhof and are dazzled by the golden fountains, and see the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, many rooms still undergoing restoration. It is the bicentennial of Pushkin’s birth, and he is being fêted everywhere.

We take a weekend cruise to Valaam, first taking a taxi to the St. Petersburg port terminal. It is a terrifying drive down Nevskii Prospekt, my friends and I clutching each other as the taxi driver careens down the avenue, blaring the soundtracks to various Quentin Tarantino films. The river-boat is filled with locals, the cabins are tiny, and the food is bad. At night there is a disco, and we dance and drink until dawn; one fellow student is nearly seduced by a waitress keen to get on with this American stranger. Bleary-eyed and mosquito-bitten, we wander around Valaam Island and its beautiful monastery and church. On the way home, I stay up late into the night and watch the sky remain filled with light, as we sail past riverbanks crowded with birch forests. My professor points out the remains of a fort on a small island where the Neva river joins Lake Ladoga. “It’s called ‘The Nut,’ because it was hard to crack…”

Another weekend we take the night-train to Moscow and stay in the Intourist hotel, a short walk from Red Square. Our room reminds me of a train compartment, two hard couch-like beds on either side of a narrow space. The food is a little better this time around, and there are more Western shops in the GUM shopping arcade. The juice is still only orange in color but not flavor, although the glasses are slightly larger and the juice somewhat more chilled. We go up to Sparrow Hills, looking out over Moscow with the towering Stalin-Gothic Moscow University at our backs. I think about Bulgakov’s master and his Margarita saying goodbye to earthly life forever, on this very same spot, some seventy years before. At the Novodevichy Cementary I buy two red roses and lay them at Bulgakov’s grave.

In St. Petersburg, everything is so flat and the nights so bright and the palaces so colorful and endless, there is a sense of unreality, as if you've walked into a nineteenth-century painting. It feels like a stage set, placed at the edge of the earth by Peter the Great nearly three hundred years before. The Gulf of Finland seems to drop off into space; it almost makes you believe the world really is flat. I walk around the city early in the morning, when the Palace Square is still quite empty, with my camera and my notebook, trying to fix it in my memory for all time. I am in love with this city in a way I will never love anyplace else, because I am young, and because I feel free for the first time in my life. I will come back, I think to myself.

part one.

It is August of 1993 and I am thirteen years old. I come to Moscow for a month on a school exchange program, and my host meets me at the airport with a hug and a kiss on both cheeks. Her family has a car, which is rare, and a vast four-room apartment, which is equally rare. There is no elevator, and we walk up slippery dark stairs to the cozy warmth of their high-ceilinged flat. Tanya is nearly fluent in English, as is her father, an executive at Aeroflot, the Russian airline. They have lived abroad. They have a vast collection of movies on tape, which is unheard-of. Tanya’s mother is a wonderful cook who serves a full breakfast and multi-course lunches and dinners, which always end with homemade fruit Jell-o. One day at lunch I absently eat all the olives, which are hard to come by in those days, and Tanya scolds me for my greediness.

In restaurants, everywhere the food is the same: tomato-and-cucumber salad, black bread and butter, unidentifiable meat with fried potatoes or rice, watery soups, and ice cream. My fellow students and I are perplexed by the tiny triangular one-ply paper napkins, the lack of ice, and the breakfast juice which is orange in color but not exactly in flavor, served in tiny glasses that we downed in one swallow. We buy Fanta or Coke in glass bottles at streetside kiosks, or ice-cream bars. The Mars ice cream bar is a thing of wonder. We go to the recently opened MacDonalds, bigger than any MacDonalds I have ever seen, and eat Big Macs, which I never have at home. One afternoon we head out to Gorky Park and buy shashlik from a man with a primitive little barbecue stand and go on all the amusement park rides. The roller-coaster cars have seatbelts like the ones on airplanes but no other restraints.

One weekend we head out to Vladimir and Suzdal, and see the beautiful white Church of the Intercession, which rises from a riverbank surrounded by lush, green fields. In a restaurant filled with wood paneling our teachers and some of the older students drink a roughly pleasant Georgian wine, which I am allowed to sip. Another weekend we take the night-train to St. Petersburg and stay in a grim Soviet-era hotel with bare rooms and dim lightbulbs and a cockroach in the bathroom. In the lobby we encounter a very, very drunk Finnish man, the drunkest man I’ve ever seen. It is cheap to take a train or ferry to St. Petersburg from Finland, and cheap to drink yourself into a stupor.

In the palaces we wear felt slippers over our sneakers, which make it fun to slide around on the parquet floors. At the museums we see groups of schoolchildren quietly sitting on the floor as their teachers tell them about the paintings. I haven’t learned any Russian, but I can puzzle out a few words here and there. This does not help much when I get lost on the metro, when everyone else gets out and I get left behind. Tanya is in tears by the time they find me at the next stop. The metro stations are like underground palaces, dimly lit and elaborate with marble and gilt and tile. The escalators seem endless, even though they are very, very fast.

The golden month slips by, and we return home. A few weeks later there is an attempted political coup against Boris Yeltsin, who retaliates by dissolving his government. I turn to the news and see that the Russian White House is in flames. Only weeks before I had driven by that same White House. Some time later I get a letter from Tanya. “Everything is as it was before…I suppose we will know the truth of what happened only after a hundred years…”

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

I've been to a lot of these Pinter Fortnightly events, now. There have been one-acts and sketches and radio works and full-length plays, fitting themselves together into a Pinterian universe that can't be described, only experienced. It's shocking how prolific Harold Pinter was, with not a dull work amongst the dozens he created. The necessary ingredient, of course, is the passion and skill of the actors who gather together for these readings. They have an afternoon's rehearsal, that's all. What makes it work, every damn time, is the physical and emotional chemistry and sense of timing of a group of people who know each other, who have worked together, sometimes for decades, even if they've never done Pinter before. There is trust, between the actors and also between them and the audience. We're all excited to be here, and it shows.

Tonight's reading is of The Birthday Party, Pinter's first full-length play. Savaged by the critics upon opening, it was eventually considered a classic. The alternating humor and menace of this work is echoed in the later plays of this era, The Room, for example, and The Dumbwaiter. Apparently Pinter loved Abbott and Costello, and there is a lot of sharply funny verbal comedy. (Perhaps there is physical comedy, too, but that's hard to convey in a reading). The ambiguity and obfuscation of the language remains a hallmark of Pinter's work throughout his career. As so often happens, the play ends with me wondering what the fuck just happened, but I find it thrilling all the same.

Even more thrilling is seeing R. Hamilton Wright, whom I have loved since The Revenger's Comedies in 1992. Frequently seen playing someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown (or actually having one in The Prisoner of 2nd Avenue last month), it is a real charge to see him as one of Pinter's more suavely menacing characters, both in The Birthday Party and also in last year's The Dumbwaiter. Every one of the actors (and Frank Corrado, who directed and gives the stage directions) is familiar to me, Wright most of all. I have seen them in all kinds of plays, over and over, and when I leave the theatre I feel that fierce gladness which never goes away, that gratitude that they love what they do so much that they do this for the fun of it. To learn something. To steep themselves in Pinter's language, for just one afternoon, one night. At first they did this for free, but I think now they get paid a little something.

I'll miss the next two Pinter Fortnightly performances, unfortunately, but I hope to make it to the next round come fall.

www.pinterfortnightly.com

movie notes. the tree of life.

(contains spoilers).

I wasn't sure what to expect from Terrence Malick's latest film, The Tree of Life, but the trailer had been haunting me since I saw it, months ago. It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, although generally this is not something that encourages me to see a film. It is even harder to describe the film, now that I've seen it. I don't quite know where to begin. There is that strange, flickering light that wavers onscreen; is it the origin of the universe? I have no idea.

Early in the film, a woman in a house filled with pristine mid-century modern furniture receives a telegram telling her that her son is dead. We watch her husband receive the news at an airfield, barely able to hear above the roar of the planes. We watch her grieve. We flash forward in time again to see another son, now a grown man, still with the weight of his brother's loss upon him. This man, played by Sean Penn, moves silently through his contemporary glass box of a house with its barely furnished rooms, his hair sleep-tousled into a bouffant crest like a startled cockatiel. He seems lost. What is he looking for? We see the earth form itself, waves breaking apart, land rising, dinosaurs in forests and along rivers. Wait. Dinosaurs?

But the heart of the movie, for me, is these three brothers in childhood. The time looks to be the early 1950's. There are two ways through life, says the mother, the way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. You feel that the mother has chosen one path, and the father another, and that their boys are forever pulled between the two. There is something menacing in the way the father treats them, and yet there is a kind of deep love there, in the way he looks at his sons, in the way he is forever cupping one hand around the neck of one of the boys, pulling them into an embrace. I keep thinking of a line by Kim Stafford in the prologue of Early Morning, describing a bike ride with his brother before dawn. Their father, the poet William Stafford, puts a hand on each of their shoulders before they set off on their bikes, heading down to the Pacific ocean. How long can you feel a hand, steady on your shoulder, after that hand pulls away?

This heart of the film, the three boys, is what I loved most. Their family is not like my family and my childhood was not that childhood, but there were things I remembered. What it felt like to run through tall grass, flinging myself down into the green coolness and rolling down a gentle slope. Swimming in a river or a lake or an outdoor pool under a hot sun. Being with my two cousins, when I visited them in Taiwan or later, when they came to live with us in Seattle. They were like my brothers, and some nights we would all fall into one bed together, our arms and legs tangling in sleep so that one would wake with someone else's foot in their face. The stinging nostalgia almost made me weep.

Stafford, Kim. Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford. Greywolf Press, 2002. p. ix.

draft 3.

(for whit).

I dreamed of spring
and lilacs stolen from gardens
as the memory of their fragrance
slips me back in time
to that faraway summer
in St. Petersburg,
city of palaces strung along
necklaces of boulevards,
floating at the edge of the sea
so far north the horizon seems to stop, there;
you have come to the end of the world.
Old women in kerchiefs
sold bunches of lilacs
and lilies-of-the-valley
outside metro stations,
their scent trailing
down the escalators
into the subterranean palaces of the metro
guiding you back up to sunlight
like Persephone returning
to spring and earth.

theatre notes. brownie points.

Have you ever had a fight with someone so big that it changes everything? The kind of fight where you say things you can't take back, the kind of fight that smashes the tenderness of years to bits, and you can't even understand how it began? Something very small just keeps building up to a moment, where every little resentment you've just shoved down deep rises up and boils over. You can feel that instant, just as you hear those angry, hurtful words leaving your mouth: it's like stepping over the edge of a cliff, and you don't know where that free fall is going to take you. You can see the words hit the other person, pow pow pow, and just as clearly they can see it in your eyes, that dawning awareness that shifts into horror as you realize: you can't erase the memory of what you've just said.

A. and I were at the Taproot Theatre last night to see Brownie Points, a modern play about what happens when five mothers are trapped together on a camping trip. This is based on a true story, about an incident at an Atlanta private school where the two African-American mothers in a group were assigned kitchen duty for a class camping trip. A big fight broke out; friendships were lost. The camping trip never happened, but the playwright, who had a child at that school and knew all the mothers involved, wondered, what if the camping trip had happened? What if they were all trapped out there and had to talk things out, had to work through the minefields of hurts?

It's a funny play. The language is clear and sharp and authentic. But it is heartbreaking, too, because it underscores an uncomfortable truth: we are not ready as a society to face the ghosts of our own past. It isn't only about race and prejudice, though. The other threads twisted through the central theme are those of motherhood and identity, for being a working mother, for being a stay-at-home mother, the guilts and doubts that weigh on us for the choices we make. And that shattering reminder, that we have all had that moment of giving into some deep-buried anger we didn't even know existed, and let loose words that can never be unsaid, never be forgotten. What matters most is the lessons we take away from these moments.

Brownie Points runs through June 18th at the Taproot Theatre.

theater notes. mike daisey. (x2).

Last Friday I went to see Mike Daisey at the Seattle Rep for the second time in a week, after Wednesday's How Theater Failed America. I'd heard about The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs back when he was workshopping it at the Rep, maybe last year, and couldn't contain my excitement when I saw it in the line-up for this season. It had been a theater-packed month - Pinter Fortnightly at ACT, All I Ever Wanted at Theatre Puget Sound, O Lovely Glowworm by New Century Theater Company (at the Erickson Theatre), This and How Theater Failed America at Seattle Rep. I was exhausted; my mind was going in circles at a hundred miles per hour. But I had to see this.

I remember Mike Daisey's 21 Dog Years, the monologue about his years at Amazon at the end of the millennium. I was in my early 20's when he performed it at Intiman Theatre, some eight years ago. I went with my father, and laughed hysterically but as silently as possible (otherwise it would have been awkward). Later in the car, my dad asked what I'd thought. "I loved it," I said. "I don't think your mother would have enjoyed it," he said. She wouldn't have - it was laced with obscenities and cheap laughs, as subtle as the dynamite used to implode the Kingdome (which Amazon executives watched from their offices, high up on Beacon Hill, a recurring theme in this work). The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is a little different, although it is still brutally and unsubtly funny. It is a love story, the way How Theater Failed America is a love story.

This time I met up with my friend H. at the Rep. H. is an Apple fanboy. He and his wife have iPhones and MacBook Pros and iPads and no doubt a couple of iPods. He apologized for being so casually dressed but then this wasn't the usual theatre audience. It was packed with other Apple fanboys and computer geeks, all khakis and jeans and an ocean of fleece. I had not realized until that night that Mike Daisey himself is a computer geek, but we learned he is the kind of guy who takes apart his MacBook and cleans all the components and puts them back together. This is how he relaxes after a show. His family had one of the early Macintosh computers (a gift from a wealthy grandparent) and he'd stay up late into the night writing code (or whatever it is geeks did on computers back in the 80's. I got lost at this point in the narrative. I imagined it as something like the movie War Games).

Mike Daisey is a big guy, sitting like a bullfrog at a desk squarely in the middle of the stage. What I already know from experience is that he has an expressive face and graceful hands that flutter and swoop like birds to emphasize various points in his story. There is a stack of notes written on yellow-lined paper, and a glass of water. His voice fills the room. Daisey tells us about the early years of Macintosh computers, the evolution of Apple, and the megalomaniacal genius of Steve Jobs. His voice changes, though, when he dips into the reality of what it takes to produce a shiny new iPhone. As he sneaks his way into the Shenzhen factories that build Apple products the realization dawns that actual human beings are piecing these things together, bit by bit, by hand, moving in an assembly line as though they were machines and not people. They work for a pittance and live in cramped dorms and have no healthcare or union organization, the last of which is illegal. This is not news, though. This is what China is like. It could be any electronics-production factory, making products for any international brand.

It is not really so much The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, after all. It is the agony and the ecstasy of Mike Daisey, balancing a thirty-year love affair with Apple computers against the blood, as he puts it, of the Chinese people which he imagines welling up from the keyboard of a MacBook Pro. Against the tyranny of a company who says "here is this beautiful shiny new thing that you must have" with one hand and gives you a swift "FUCK YOU!" with the other. He gets this basic human emotion we all feel: our reckless need for things we know, deep down, that we don't actually need.

Wednesday poem. W. S. Merwin.

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

'For the Anniversary of My Death.'
W.S. Merwin.

Ever since I learned that a friend I loved would be going into the darkness and not coming back, this poem has been running through my mind. I didn't know when the darkness would come, only that it was waiting for her. She died a month ago today.

for whit.

(draft 1).

I fell asleep dreaming of spring
and lilacs stolen from gardens
and the memory of their fragrance
and time slips backwards
to a faraway summer
in St. Petersburg,
that city of palaces strung along
necklaces of boulevards,
floating at the edge of the sea
so far north the horizon seems to stop, there;
you have come to the end of the world.
Old women in their kerchiefs
sold bunches of lilacs
and lilies-of-the-valley
outside metro stations,
their scent trailing
down the escalators,
like Persephone descending
to the underworld.
Or rather, the reverse:
the sweet fragrance leading you upwards
from the subterranean palaces of the metro
like Persephone returning back to spring and earth.

theatre notes. mike daisey.

Intiman Theatre closed its doors for the rest of this year's season just after the first play ended its run. The staff were laid off and the actors who were either contracted or had hoped to perform this year were left without roles to fill. I felt guilty for not having supported them lately. I had not been pleased by the casting of actors from New York in some of their productions. Seattle is full of great actors who would have made fine Othellos and Desdemonas, and I really didn't give a shit that some "well-known New York actress" (as described by the woman who called to convince me to subscribe for that season) was coming to perform the one-woman play The Year of Magical Thinking. While I loved other recent performances, I did not like another play that was so new that it seemed unfinished. It was so much a work-in-progress that a character who was mentioned in the review and in the program did not actually appear onstage. I lost faith, and there were other theaters eager to fill the void.

Then I heard Mike Daisey was going to give a benefit performance of his monologue How Theater Failed America at the Seattle Rep. Proceeds would go to Artist Trust, which would administer grants to artists who had not received any kind of severance from the closure of Intiman. There would be a round-table discussion afterwards, with various theater actors, directors, administrators, and writers. I walked in not knowing what to expect. The theater was packed. I spotted Jerry Manning, the artistic director at Seattle Rep, and Michael Patten, most recently seen in O Lovely Glowworm. There were people of all ages, but mostly young, which is encouraging. And then Mike Daisey took the stage.

He was funny, as I expected. I laughed until I was wiping tears away. And then I cried, because it was heartbreaking to confront the reality that it is impossible to make theater and make money at the same time. You have to do it out of love, and that has to be enough. How Theatre Failed America is a story about how Mike Daisey fell in love with theater, and how it saved him when he was overcome with a dark, suicidal depression. At the same time it is a battle cry, or perhaps a wail of despair. "There's never been any money!" he says in the beginning. Not five years ago, not twenty. Theaters come and go all the time. But he is heartbroken, he tells us, that the theater next door (Intiman) is closed. Intiman is where I saw him in his career-making performance of 21 Dog Years, several years ago. This place is important to him. It was ruined, he says, by the Tony award for best regional theater which it was awarded five years ago. He called the award "The One Ring,"* which brought glory and then downfall on those who possessed it.

The round table, later, is angry. There is hope, too, but mostly there is anger. The actors and writers are angry that they can't make a living in the theater. Hans Altwies (who I loved in This last week and who is co-artistic-director of NCTC) tells us, furiously, that he makes a living as a cabinetmaker, and has to make enough so that he can "lose money" by acting. The younger audience is angry because they are not seeing themselves represented onstage. Allison Narver is angry because she is still reeling from the closure of the Empty Space Theater in 2006, a decision made too hastily by its board members after a huge fundraising effort to save it. It's still clearly a raw wound for her, one that may never go away. Later I am too shy to walk up and tell her that Three Tall Women, which she directed at Seattle Rep last fall, was one of the best productions I'd ever seen. I wish I had.

Ultimately, even with all the anger pulsing in the room, we have to remember why we are here: because we love the theater, and as long as we love it, it will go on. It will. It must.

A quote by Tom Stoppard comes to mind: "I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture."

*obviously a reference to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings series.

theatre notes. o lovely glowworm. (coda).

This was the second time I went to see O Lovely Glowworm; I've already written about the first experience.

I generally don't go see a play twice in one run, but I was so enchanted and confused by O Lovely Glowworm that I had to see it a second time. I also have to admit that the theater is four blocks away from my home, which made it an easy decision. This time, on the last night, the theater was completely packed. There were familiar faces in the audience - Hana Lass a few rows behind me, and I thought I saw Suzanne Bouchard farther back. (I clutched my friend J. and hissed "IT'S SUZANNE BOUCHARD! I'VE LOVED HER SINCE I WAS 12!" but fortunately no one else seemed to have noticed).

The late Mark Chamberlin was the one who persuaded the members of New Century Theatre Company to produce this play; it was his love for O Lovely Glowworm that started it all. It is clear that the act of rehearsing and performing, night after night, was a way of grieving for this much-loved lost friend. But the play has to stand on its own, without this hovering spirit, and so it does. At first it is all a little confusing in some places (the first time I saw it, I was still thinking, WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON at the intermission), bogging down in others. But this time the varying story arcs begin to connect more clearly, and the puzzle pieces of the 'scenes of great beauty' start to fit into place.

At the heart of the story is a maggot-ridden stuffed goat lying on a rubbish-heap. To distract himself from the agony of living, he invents these 'scenes of great beauty,' weaving together the lives of a miserable boy convinced that his great invention is just around the corner, two soldiers on the run from the Great War who fall in love with a mermaid, and the goat itself, who is trying to figure out his own identity. Is he a tram-conductor, a racehorse, a unicorn, a dog? As tangled as the stories are they bring us back to some very simple things: the pain of existence which does not stamp out our search for identity and for a purpose in life, the possibility of hope when all seems lost, and most of all, our never-ending longing for love.

What keeps me coming back to plays like O Lovely Glowworm and theater companies like the New Century Theatre Company is the sense that it is a labor of love. That there is a tremendous amount of trust and friendship between the actors, who have all known each other and worked together, in some cases for years. They do play readings on their nights off and gather for drinks after a show. They come to each others performances. Seattle is a theater town. I'm lucky to be here.

certified copy. (movie notes).

*contains spoilers.*

I had heard of the director Abbas Kiarostami, but had never seen his films before. Certified Copy promised Juliette Binoche and the golden sunlit landscape of Tuscany, and since I love both of the above I knew I would see this one.

A man is giving a presentation of his new book. A woman arrives, late, with a preteen son in tow. The son is restless, bored, hungry, that dangerous combination every parent is familiar with, and they leave, after the woman hands a note to the man sitting next to her. Later, the man (the writer) finds her in a shop, and their story begins. They are strangers, or so it seems. They converse in English, with the polite words of people who are getting to know each other, as she drives through the countryside. They walk through the cobbled streets of an old town, look at art, drink coffee. Are they flirting with one another? Perhaps. And then the story takes a turn: they are not strangers at all. They are husband and wife.

Suddenly, the dialogue (now mostly in French) is not that of strangers, but of a couple who has been married for a while - fifteen years - and who are not together most of the time. It's never quite clear why they don't live together - part of their argument touches on an earlier car accident, which happened while she was driving home from one city to another, with their son in the car - but then it's not quite clear if this story is a continuation of the first one, or a new story. It's a little like being in a Calvino novel. I'm reminded of that Kieslowski film, The Double Life of Veronique, which splits into two halves as it traces the lives of the two Veroniques, only here you are even less sure of what's happening before you.

The woman, played by Juliette Binoche, isn't necessarily an admirable character. She is capricious, flirty, coy, then needy and almost desperate. But later there's a scene where she and her husband (played by the opera baritone William Shimell, who by the way is incredibly handsome) are arguing over dinner, and you see in her face this remarkable openness. There is something childlike about the way that Juliette Binoche looks into the camera, which has stayed with her throughout her entire career. Childlike is the wrong word, and so is innocent. Defenseless, perhaps. Yes, that's it - she has a way of putting down all her defenses, even when or especially when asking for something she cannot have. Her husband. His arms around her. Him walking beside her, always.

handing down the names.*

Wednesday was the memorial for a friend who died last week. It was held at St. Mark's Cathedral, up at the north end of Capitol Hill, a giant barn of an Episcopal church. The sun was out and the cathedral was full of light; the ceilings are high and the walls are set with many-paned windows. Even on a cloudy day it must be a bright space. J. and I sat near the back, and watched as people streamed in through the doors. I wondered what stories people would tell us when they got up to speak. I wondered what her children would say about their mother. I thought about my friends who knew her better than I did, what they would tell their children about this woman who blazed across our lives like a meteor shower, bright and all too brief.

What will my friend's children tell their children about the grandmother they will never know? I think about my father's parents, who died long before I was born. I know so little about them and yet they must have shaped my father somehow, even if his mother had died when he was six years old and his father when he was eighteen. My mother's mother died when I was eight, and I barely knew her. Will I tell my own children about her legendary temper, about the time she supposedly threw a television down a flight of stairs? How many generations pass one story to the next before it fades away and is forgotten? How long does this handing down of the names go on?

I hope we will keep telling our children about our friend, the friend who loved books more than anything except people. Who had no patience for bullshit or paper napkins. Who said that life was short; drink the good wine. I listened to these stories told by her friends and her family and tried to remember every one. I wish every day that I had gotten to know her better, but I will remember that raspy laugh and those fierce hugs for the rest of my life.

Her frequent collaborator W. got up to speak early in the service, and he was funny and irreverent, bringing out a flask which he couldn't open. He was followed by a famous local restaurateur, who got the flask open and took a couple of swigs. But it was the clergywoman leading the service who brought down the house, at the end, when she had W. bring his flask up to the lectern. She calmly drank from it, and we all exploded into cheers. It was that kind of memorial service. It was awesome. I can't think of a better way to celebrate a life.

*"handing down the names" comes from the title of a play by Steven Dietz which I saw at ACT in the mid-90's and which has stayed with me every since. It follows the story of an immigrant family across continents and through generations.

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

I may have squealed aloud when I saw Liz McCarthy on the cast list for last night's Pinter Fortnightly reading. Unlike many of the other actors I remember so clearly from the early-to-late-90's, I haven't seen her since my teenage years. She was the young ingenue in those days, not long out of drama school, blonde and fresh-faced. I loved her and missed her and was thrilled to see her again. She's older now, of course, but then so am I. More self-assured, more poised. (Her, not me).

This week's Pinter Fortnightly showcases two short sketches flanking a longer one-act work. They date from Pinter's "political" period, the first sketch ("New World Order") and one-act ("Party Time") from 1991 and the last sketch ("Press Conference") from 2001. A few more pieces of the breadth of this body of work fall into place; immediately apparent, as always, is Pinter's mastery of language. This time there is no tenderness, only words swiftly dealt like cards at a casino table or hurled like ninja throwing stars. Only a fierce awareness of how power can be wielded unjustly and how silence is tantamount to participation in any violation against another human being.

Later, we watch a BBC television interview with Harold Pinter from 2006 or thereabouts. He'd already had a couple of battles with the cancer which would kill him at the end of 2008, but while his throat was a bit scratchy he was wonderfully at the top of his game. "Life is beautiful," he says, "but the world is hell!" In such a way the extraordinary happiness of his personal life - as documented by his wife Antonia Fraser in Must You Go? - is balanced by the frequent bleakness of his plays. It is a sort of inversion of that adage of the clown being the saddest person of all, that this tremendously happy person is the one best suited to throw open the windows onto the darkness of humanity.

In his interview, Pinter struggles with trying to explain what makes something "Pinterian." I can't describe it, either, but there is something about the way that he uses language or the kinds of characters he creates. The way painters can be recognized by their brushstrokes and colors, or the view of a particular bridge. There is a kind of assurance that is clear from almost the beginning, echoing from the earliest plays all the way to the end. This is what marks Pinter as a great playwright, this ability to grow and develop new ideas along changing times and politics and yet retain a singular voice and identity. It's really something. And there's still more yet to be explored.

a poem for a Saturday.

I found a scrap of paper as I was cleaning up my room last night, floating to the surface of the tide of flotsam and jetsam that fills that bedroom. It must have been tucked into a letter from my friend Ana, written when we were young. "A Wednesday Poem," it says. A handwritten note on the back suggests that we have 'Wednesday poems' every week, but somehow I think this tradition never took hold. It seemed serendipitously appropriate to find this at the end of a week of grieving for a friend, who died Monday afternoon. The letter I had been writing the Sunday before is in my bag, unfinished. I wrote another letter to her daughter, instead, late Monday night, still reeling from the news.

Day brings what it is going to be. Trees -
wherever they are - begin to stand.
I have a crossing to do today
onward through this shadowy land.

How still the earth stayed that night at first
when you didn't breath. I couldn't believe
how carefully moonlight came. It was
like the time by my mother's grave.

Today I am going on. In former times
when you were back there, then
I tried to hold the moon and sun.
Now when they ask me who you were -

I remember, but remember my promise
And I say, "No one."

Letting You Go.
(William Stafford).

My friend loved poetry; when her children were young she put poems in their lunchboxes every day in April, which is National Poetry Month. In return, they started a blog of poems for her at the beginning of this month, the three now grown children choosing a different poem each day. She died before April came to an end. This friend loved many poets, but her favorite poem was another one by William Stafford, posted here.

in memory of Kim Ricketts.

This afternoon I got the email that I have been dreading for weeks. The wonderful Kim Ricketts had passed away after a long illness. She had been in and out of the hospital all winter, the hospital which I can see from my windows. The hospital which is within a stone's throw of the bar where she went into labor with her oldest child, nearly 27 years ago. The news of her passing hit the internet with a speed most often reserved for famous celebrities, like Elizabeth Taylor, and the outpouring of grief on Twitter and Facebook for Kim and her family was like a tidal wave. I expect it will continue over the next days and weeks.

Most of us in Seattle who love food and books have been touched in some way by Kim and the events she put together. I attended one of the dinners she had at Lark (for David Tanis and his book A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes) two and a half years ago, and while I didn't meet her that night - I was too shy to introduce myself in those days - it was one of a series of moments that changed everything. Her motto - and her company's - was "connecting people, stories, & ideas." She loved books more than anyone. She loved her three children - and they her - with a pride and a wild strength that was like a hurricane, and my heart is aching for them and her husband and the rest of her family.

I told Kim, all the time, in my letters to her, that I was so grateful to have met her, and that she was so loved by all of us. Nothing was left unspoken. It is a rare and precious thing, to understand what someone means to you, and to be able to tell them this. I was lucky to have this chance. We all were.

"Only connect."
(E. M. Forster).

theatre notes. O Lovely Glowworm.

(in memory of Mark Chamberlin).

I had planned to see New Century Theatre Company's production of O Lovely Glowworm even before the untimely death of Mark Chamberlin a month ago. He had been very much involved with the company from the beginning, and was already in rehearsals as the Goat when he died. In the wake of his passing, another founding member of the company, Michael Patten, stepped in, and this tightly knit small cast pulled together a beautiful production dedicated to Mark's memory. Throughout the tender "scenes of beauty" that make up the play there seemed to be an undercurrent of grief and loss for a fallen comrade, or perhaps I was imagining it. Perhaps I was imagining that shattering poignancy to every word. Perhaps it was all really there.

O Lovely Glowworm is a shape-shifting creature, a tangle of fables that leap from one to another. At first I can't tell where the separate stories are headed, until the second act when they begin to collide and then intersect. The thread that ties everything together is very simple: our never-ending human need for love, desire, faith, that is almost an ache. This thread is pulled and twisted by the Goat, who looks on with longing at the human comedies and dramas that swirl around him like the eddies and whirlpools that guard Philomel, the mermaid who lives in the lake. I am confused and enchanted at the end, and I want to see it all over again.

The New Century Theatre Company feels like an actor's theatre company, more born out of a collective passion of a group of performers than a single director's vision. In my program is a list of people who have donated to the company over the last year; I recognize many of them as actors whom I've seen on Seattle stages over the past twenty years. Sitting behind me in the audience is Anne Allgood, who I remember from Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll and one of the Pinter Fortnightly readings last year. (I introduce myself at intermission, telling her I recognized her laugh; I'm learning not to be shy). Nearly all the actors onstage are familiar to me, and I remember all over again why I've come: theatre is about passion and faith, and it gives me something to believe in. It is an enduring kind of love.

It would not be fair to Michael Patten and his wonderful performance to try and imagine Mark Chamberlin as the Goat. But his presence seemed to be there, still. The part that moved me most to tears was when the Taxidermist (Patten, in one of his shape-shifting roles) prepares the goat (a stuffed dummy, really), talking to him all the while. "You are loved," he says, gently. For a moment I am not entirely sure if he is only speaking to the goat.

O Lovely Glowworm, presented by the New Century Theatre Company, performs at the Erickson Theatre Off Broadway until May 14. http://newcenturytheatrecompany.org/

more theatre notes.

I heard the other day that Intiman Theatre was closing for the rest of the 2011 season, only just begun. I must say that I have not supported them lately, but the sadness I feel is still very real. Many of my dearest theater memories stem from their magnificent productions - Betrayal, Ghosts, The Importance of Being Earnest, (all when I was in my teens), and more recently, To Kill a Mockingbird, Heartbreak House, Crime and Punishment, and A Thousand Clowns. Lately my attention has been more preoccupied with other theaters, with ACT downtown and Strawberry Theatre Workshop in my own neighborhood, and the Taproot up in Greenwood, which has a tender intimacy that reminds me of the old ACT Theatre on Queen Anne. There is the New Century Theatre Company which I discovered last year with the incredible On the Nature of Dust, and the Pinter Fortnightly readings run by Frank Corrado, and my time and money are taken up with other things. But these are all only excuses.

I feel guilty. For not having contributed. For not subscribing to another season. For not taking the time and making the effort to ensure that our city did not lose any of our incredible wealth of theater. I take heart in remembering that ACT went through its own turbulent times, perhaps ten years ago. They had moved from a tiny space a block or two from Seattle Center (which houses both Intiman and Seattle Rep) over to a giant building downtown, which contained three separate stages on different levels. There were a few rough seasons, which I don't quite remember because I was off to college at the time, but I remember wondering if they would survive. And they did. The Taproot was rebuilt after being devastated by a fire about a year and a half ago. I hope that Intiman's new director will find her own ground, coming back to us even stronger, and better than before. There will always be room for all these theaters in Seattle.

Art is a necessary privilege. We need art the way we need air or water, unconsciously. If it is taken away then our souls will die the way our bodies will die without air or water. But at the same time it is a privilege, too, one that can be taken away if there are no resources to sustain it. I hope Intiman will be able to regroup in the coming year, and find a way to move forward.

Re-reading. Pinter/Fraser.

To console myself for not being able to get a seat for tomorrow night's Pinter Fortnightly, I'm returning to Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?, that beautifully tender gathering of memories of her life with Harold Pinter. I read it in one fast gulp last fall, staying up late into the night. It opens with the two meeting for the first time, after a 1975 production of The Birthday Party. "Wonderful play, marvellous acting, now I'm off," she says. "Must you go?" he asks. She stays, and eventually they leave the party, with Pinter giving her a ride home. I offered him coffee. I actually gave him champagne. He stayed until six o'clock in the morning with extraordinary recklessness, but of course the real recklessness was mine.

Pinter knew all about recklessness, of course. Think of the lovers in Betrayal, their tangled stories unraveling until we can see that first knot from which these twisted threads emerged, that first tryst in a bedroom in the midst of a party. Earlier (that is, earlier in the play but later in the story), there are those letters Jerry sends to Emma when she is off in Venice with her husband. (I'm going by a memory, now fifteen years old, of how it all unfolds). What we don't see, of course, is what happened before that - what unspoken messages, accidental touches, speaking glances across a room - that led to the point where the play ends. Someone has to make that first leap into the "must you go?" moment that leads to all the other moments.

They were Bohemians, Fraser writes, shedding the class divisions inflicted upon them by the press - she from the titled upper classes, never mind that her father became an earl late in life, he from the working classes - to meet in this kingdom of Bohemia. They were like the Schlegels in E. M. Forster's Howards End, who were the answer to his question, "who will inherit England?" some sixty years before. Aside from being a great love story, theirs was a kinship of two writers, though not collaborative like the Didion-Dunne marriage, writing in separate studies in their combined household, working on plays and screenplays (him) and researching historical biographies (her) wherever they could, in London or in Scotland or in New York. They had three decades of happiness, not without cost, but real happiness, even if it is seen through the rose-colored flushes of early passion and late widowhood.

The more I read of him, the more Pinter I see performed, the larger and more intricate grows the puzzle that is his vast body of work. I feel as if I have only just begun.

Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2010. p 5.

farewell. (coda).

(in memory of Mark Chamberlin: 1955-2011)

The first Pinter Fortnightly reading of this year (now we are in the third year of this wonderful series) was scheduled to take place tonight. It was canceled in honor of Mark Chamberlin, who passed away quite suddenly last week. He was to have taken part in tonight's performance, but his memorial service was this afternoon, instead. I wrote of my sadness at his death earlier, and of the sense of loss that surely must be felt by the Seattle theater community, to say nothing of his family and friends.

The theaters of Seattle, large and small, make up an intimately connected constellation that spreads across the city. They form a tight network of actors, directors, and writers who make their home in this city and whose work I have been privileged to experience for the past twenty years. People come in from the outside, of course, visiting directors from New York or the occasional movie actor from Los Angeles. But the heart of the community is people like Mark Chamberlin, who settled here as a young man and continued to grow and develop over the years as an actor, constantly evolving, constantly challenging himself.

I remember the first Pinter Fortnightly reading I attended, nearly two years ago. I remember my heart leaping at the sight of Suzanne Bouchard, Michael Winters, and Frank Corrado. I remember recognizing Marianne Owen in the audience. The gods of my youth were real now, and even better than they had been when I was young. The more Pinter readings I attended, the better I understood Pinter, of course, but most of all, the more I could see the extraordinary level of trust and collaboration between the actors. It gave a soft tenderness and depth to Pinter's often brutally sharp words, but maybe that was what Pinter intended.

This sense of trust and connection happens best when you have a distinct community of people who have known each other and worked together often, sometimes for decades. This is what Mark Chamberlin was very much a part of, and I will always remember the last role I saw him in, as Gibbs in The Hothouse. He was suave and menacing and hilarious by turns, and later made a wry reference to "the Scottish play" during the post-play discussion, which made everyone laugh. I looked forward to seeing more of him, and now that will never happen.

movie notes. Jane Eyre

A few weeks ago, I went to see the newest film version of Jane Eyre with a fellow literature-geek friend. Both of us had read the novel as young girls (mine was a hardcover classic edition, one of a set that included Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, and Walden. The last one doesn't quite go with the others). It surprised me how deeply the dialogue has sunk into my consciousness, how much I remembered of it. This is what happens with books that you have read many times, that you've loved for most of your life. The most memorable scenes remain the same from movie to movie, bringing them alive as they have been in your imagination for twenty years.

L. has seen every film version of Jane Eyre there is; I've seen most of them. There are a lot. The New York Times recently had an article explaining this: as costume dramas go, this one is relatively easy (that is, inexpensive) to produce. There aren't that many characters or houses to costume, unlike, say, Pride and Prejudice. It's a more sympathetic story than Wuthering Heights (everyone in that one is selfish, weak, batshit insane, or some combination of the three), and in this version, much funnier than I remember it being. L. and I giggled a lot, much more than we should have, I suspect.

If you think about it, Jane Eyre is the precursor to the modern romantic comedy: our hero and heroine have their "meet cute" when the latter startles the former clean off his horse. There is some bantering dialogue, the thrilling incident of his bed catching fire and her tossing a jug of water at him, their gradual falling in love, and the inevitable separation and ultimate reconciliation. There's a crazy ex (for him) and the seemingly perfect match who nevertheless isn't quite her soulmate (for her). There is tragedy and heartbreak - as Brenda Blethyn says on the commentary for Saving Grace, you've got to have drama to give the comedy its emotional weight - and, of course, a happy ending.

My favorite thing about this version of Jane Eyre is the luminous strength of Mia Wasikowska. She is not shy. She will not waver, will not break, will not give in, the most indomitable of Janes. She is not beautiful, only heartbreakingly young. Watching her impossibly slender figure walking away from Rochester and all he can offer calls to mind that line from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: "...they were made of thin invisible steel." I have never liked Jane Eyre so much before.

farewell.

I was deeply saddened last night to read that the local stage actor Mark Chamberlin had died after a bicycle accident over the weekend. I saw him last year, in ACT Theatre's production of The Female of the Species, and also at various Pinter Fortnightly events. He sat near me in the audience one night and while I didn't have the chance to meet him, he was warm and funny and charming and quite disarmingly handsome. His passing has rent a hole in the tightly knit fabric of the Seattle theater community, and I am reminded again of the fragility of human life, and also that when you have the chance to thank someone for what their art has meant to you, you have to grasp it with both hands or else be left with an everlasting sense of regret.

For twenty years, Mr. Chamberlin was one of many actors whom I loved and admired in our local theaters, and I am sorrier than I can say that his great light has been lost to us. My heart goes out to his family, his friends, and his colleagues.

l'heure d'été. (movie notes).

*contains plot spoilers.*

I watched l'heure d'été (Summer Hours, directed by Olivier Assayas, 2008) some weeks ago, and it left me with a kind of lingering wistfulness. I think it's one of those films which will stay with me for a long time, from the opening sequence to the last moments. In between it is a meditation on the nature of art, of death, of family, of memory. Of childhood and growing old, opening on a pack of children running through the gardens of a family summer home, following a treasure map up and down trees and along steep winding paths. The house's chatelaine is turning 75. She is determined to see that her late uncle's legacy of art passes on after her death. She takes her unwilling oldest son through her things, the Majorelle desk and cabinet, the Redon panel that is quietly mouldering on the studio wall, the shards of a Degas plaster cast that her sons broke when they were boys. Everything has a memory for her, and she is the last one left.

If it were an American film, this elderly lady would die dramatically clutching her chest as a glass of water spills to the floor and shatters, as shocked family and devoted housekeeper looked on, but thankfully it is a French film, and her death happens offscreen. We move slowly through the seasons, as the three grieving grown-up children sift through the estate and come to terms with what it really means to preserve a legacy. The art goes to the Musée d'Orsay; the house is sold. Two of the grown children live abroad, and to them the house is just a house. "Our children won't care," one of the sons says. They won't remember the stories that come with every piece; for them the Uncle Paul who collected it all is just another ancestor who died before they were born.

Near the end of the movie, Frédéric and his wife walk through the Musée d'Orsay to see his family's collection displayed in the gallery of decorative arts. There is a piercing sense of nostalgia, seeing these antique pieces, the Majorelle desk cleared of papers and the vases arranged on glass shelves under spotlights, instead of on the mantelpiece or filled with summer flowers. The Redon panels have been cleaned and restored; behind the scenes an expert is piecing together the shattered Degas into a dancing girl. But there is also a sense of loss; that human touch of everyday life and its accompanying clutter has been swept away in the climate-controlled rooms of a museum. The line between art and object has blurred; that inlaid mahogany desk was built to be used, to be cherished, in a home. The painting was meant to be hung in defiance of rot. A vase is meant to be filled with flowers, no?

At the end, a teenage girl holds her boyfriend's hand as they walk across the countryside where she and her cousins played at the beginning of the film. She tells him, her grandmother used to bring her here, used to tell her that she in turn would bring her own children here. "Now the house belongs to someone else." But she'll remember it, always. Do you have a place like that in your heart? I do.

jeunes filles en fleur. theater notes.

K. invited me to her daughter's class production of High School Musical last night. Her daughter goes to a private school in my neighborhood, and this was the 7th and 8th grade stage production. Everyone takes part, regardless of talent or experience. I go because this is how the next generation of people who love theater, onstage or in the audience, this is how it begins. I sit with my friend's younger daughter, who's seen the musical twice already. It's a nice theater, with fixed stadium seating and a thrust stage with a simple but professional-looking set. We are reminded to turn off our cell phones - the frequency might interfere with the performer's wireless microphones. What? Wireless mikes? We definitely didn't have those when we were in middle school. How times have changed.

Things I forgot about middle school: in 7th and 8th grade, the boys still look like little boys, some short, some tall. One boy has a Bieber haircut and is so baby-faced as to make the real (and already near-fetal) Justin Bieber look like an octogenarian. The girls are almost young women. They are long-limbed and not quite graceful, but they are definitely jeunes filles en fleurs, young girls in flower. They are all beautiful. Were we all that beautiful, when we were young? Another four years and they will be even more beautiful, like the girls in a high school production of Noises Off we saw a few months back, who ran effortlessly up and down stairs clad in skimpy slips and dangerously high heels.

The singing is not all in tune. Sometimes the mikes fade in and out. But there is energy, poise, love, the kind that might mature into passion. They have pride. They've worked hard for this. They are having fun. And so are we.

love letter.

(to theater).

There was young laughter in the audience at The K of D last Sunday. I'm more aware of it now, seeing young faces in the audience at intermission and hearing their voices as I leave the theater. Often they are students clearly there for a class, maybe for an extra credit paper. But it makes me glad to see them fall in love with the theater as I did, twenty years ago. You can see it in their faces, the excitement, the thrill of it all. It means that a new generation will carry on, will make art, will support art. There is hope, now. A few summers back I sat in half-empty theaters and worried about the future. That's not to say the tide has completely turned; it's still hard for theaters to make money, to keep actors and directors employed, to keep producing works both old and new.

The first play I remember is a production of James and the Giant Peach (based on the novel by Roald Dahl) at Seattle Children's Theatre. Back then it was at the Woodland Park Zoo, the old Poncho Theatre tucked away in a park. We screamed when the giant peach came rolling down and cheered when the ghastly aunts get squashed flat. That was my first memory of the theater. The second came three years later at ACT, with Shadowlands, followed immediately by The Revengers' Comedies. The love and admiration I felt for the actors in these plays has continued unabated for nearly twenty years now, for Michael Winters and Laurence Ballard and R. Hamilton Wright and Suzanne Bouchard. The list is longer now, the list of actors whose names attached to a production guarantees that I will want to see it.

I felt, that recent Sunday afternoon at the Seattle Rep, there will be another generation enthralled by the joy of live theater. That they will remember Renata Friedman's electric performance the same way I recall Suzanne Bouchard's as Karen Knightly 19 years ago. That it will keep them coming back the same way I keep coming back, again and again.

theatre notes. K of D.

I'd noticed Renata Friedman in The Female of the Species at ACT last year, when she played a overwrought student who takes an iconic feminist writer hostage in her English country home. Her gangly energy (one review compared her to Olive Oyl) fueled the physical comedy around the verbal quips that ricocheted back and forth across the stage. It left me looking forward to more. When I saw that Friedman was the sole star of Seattle Repertory Theatre's production of The K of D: An Urban Legend, I knew I had to see it.

The K of D is about the mysterious events that take place in a small town over the course of a summer. A single performer inhabits over a dozen different characters, the various townspeople whose whispers build up a legend around a single, lonely girl, Charlotte McGraw, who stopped speaking the day her twin brother was hit by a car and killed. Even taller and wirier than I remembered, Friedman continuously transformed herself from one character to the next, with nothing but voice, inflection, posture, movement to mark the changes. It was staggering. Those endless arms and legs flung themselves across the stage with an electric, kinetic force, twining themselves around lampposts, gesturing with a sudden, surprising tenderness.

There was something about the play that reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird or other stories about how children - though in this case, they are teenagers - can band together with nothing much to hold them besides, perhaps, propinquity. Or a secret. Or a mystery. And how whispers can grow from a story that passes for truth, and from there, expands into a legend. The things that are clear are how the loss of your twin, your other half, can leave such an aching void in your heart that the silence can wrap itself around you, and that this silence has a kind of unshakable power.

This is the second play I've seen at Seattle Rep this season (the first was Three Tall Women) and both times I've been completely blown away. Everything was perfect - the music, the set, the actors, that intimate connection between the stage and the audience. Extraordinary things are being done here.

on language. (English).

My English and American literature lecturer when I was a freshman in college was an enormously tall British graduate student with an absolutely impenetrable Midlands accent. He once recommended The Buddha of Suburbia as an interesting read, only it sounded more like "Teh Booba ef Suboobeyah." Took me ages to figure it out. Class was always an adventure in twisting my brain around his words, searching for familiar words spoken in his unfamiliar accent.

Language is tricky. The lines between dialect and accent are blurred, as we learn as children when reading The Secret Garden (Martha and Dickon's unfamiliar Yorkshire vocabulary) or Strawberry Girl (the hardscrabble south of Florida with its flat vowels and hard words). My ear can separate the Irish from the Scottish and the English from the Australian, but not pinpoint the region or city. Within what we think of as a generic "accent" there exists another range of variations.

I thought of Mary Lennox and her confusion at the Yorkshire words she didn't know as I was reading Richard Milward's Apples. Set in his native Middlesbrough, it uses language in a way I've never seen. I thought again of Daniel Bye's blog post in The Guardian and how thrilling it was for him to hear his native Tesside accent in the stage adaptation of Apples (and in the novel as well). For me, someone who speaks English as a second language and without any discernible (American) accent, this idea of feeling a connection to the place where you grew up through language is utterly fascinating.

state of the arts. (thoughts on theater).

I found the playwright Oliver Emanuel (@foolisholly) on Twitter via the wonderful actor Samuel West (@exitthelemming), and through Oliver I found Daniel Bye (@danielbye), also a playwright/theatre director. I'm not familiar with Daniel's theatre work, although he is certainly brilliant and hilarious in his tweets and blog posts, but Oliver does a fair amount of radio work, which is occasionally available through BBC radio online. This is a new facet of globalization, one where I can talk to writers in England (sorry, and Scotland; Emanuel is based in Glasgow, I think) in the middle of the night in Seattle (morning there) or vice versa, where I can listen to a radio play that might otherwise go unheard as I live halfway around the world.

I grew up in Seattle amidst what I thought was an intense and intimate theater scene in terms of a passionately connected community of actors and local playwrights. The big names - Pinter, Stoppard, McDonagh, et al., trickled out from London via New York; if it was a hit there it might eventually make it out here. (I leave out the classics - Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, and so forth - the same rules don't apply). You might see someone local working on a project in readings and workshops, but you wouldn't see the powerhouse playwrights except for at the height of their careers, their greatest hits. It wasn't until Frank Corrado's Pinter Fortnightly series of readings that I understood the great beauty of being able to experience the complete arc of an artist's body of work.

What we have here in Seattle is a network of small theatre companies and programs like ACT Theatre's Central Heating Lab, which acts as a sort of incubator for new work. They operate on a shoestring and a prayer and they create art, the next generation of artists. It is a homegrown process. What we don't have is a way to see other young playwrights across the globe, how they are working, how they are coming into their own, creating their own language, creating their own New Wave. When I think about British theatre my frame of reference is off by a generation or four; I came of age reading Stoppard and Pinter and John Osborne. I need to see what's happening right now, to bring my sense of awareness up to date.

What I get to do now, thanks to the Internet, is watch (or rather, listen to) these young playwrights - ferociously intelligent and funny, of my own generation - create a body of work that, years from now, can be looked upon as something extraordinary. Already I have heard four different radio plays by Oliver Emanuel, already I have seen how a distinct voice can develop and evolve from work to work. It is a beautiful thing.

The Chinese mother.

The other night a friend posted this article from the Wall Street Journal, provocatively titled "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior," an excerpt from the upcoming book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. (It is important to note that the title of the article was most likely chosen by the WSJ to be as provocative as possible). The response amongst my American-raised Chinese friends was immediate: some things rang true, but ultimately none of us can remember being called "garbage" by our parents.

There are a lot of things our childhoods had in common, my other Chinese-American friends and I. We spoke Chinese at home. We had a hot-water dispenser with pink or purple flowers on it. We none of us wear shoes indoors. We don't hug each other. All of us washed vegetables and learned to make dumplings at an early age. The fact is, all these little things become insignificant compared to a greater fact: I had an amazing childhood. That my parents' love for me and mine for them is unspoken does not diminish it in any way. At all.

Talking about parenting is tricky. It creates yet another way for people to judge each other, to measure themselves against someone else's standards. In many ways, my parents weren't like other parents I knew, like their friends. It would take too long to explain all of the freedoms I had, all the experiences that make up my childhood. I remember now, why I played piano, why I practiced every day for an hour. I hated practicing. I would prop a book or a magazine against the music and play while reading. But I hated the idea of giving it up even more. It wasn't a chore, a burden, but a privilege, I was told. If I didn't want this privilege it would be taken away.

I cannot look back and say I regret anything about the way I was raised. Praise was rare, and all the more valuable when it was received. Criticism was freely given, and either stung me into apathy or improvement. My father can given a lecture on disappointment that seems to last for days, and my mother has a temper that could frighten Cerberus. There are things I am confident about - making ice cream, photography, finding obscure things on the Internet - and things that I am not - baking with egg whites, my looks, my writing. But I am grateful for all of it, because they are all part of the entirety of my life.

the long goodbye.

A friend was diagnosed with cancer this past fall. I remember getting the email while at another friend's house on Halloween night. We had just eaten a magnificent supper of cornbread and beef stew and caramel-frosted prune cake. We were laughing at Eddie Izzard when I checked my phone and read the news. It is typical of this friend that her main concern was for her three children, all younger than I, the youngest still in college. She wanted to make sure they had a support system. I got into my car to drive home and I cried.

She is a firecracker, this friend of mine, the kind of woman who seems to be moving even when standing still. Like a hummingbird, or that Boccioni sculpture, you know the one I mean. I have seen her talk herself hoarse and keep going in a whisper. I know from experience her hugs are tight and warm, and time slows down when her arms are wrapped around you. I know she loves books more than almost anyone else I know, more than me, even. I know she loves her children with a fierceness that is like a wild thing, and the weight in my heart I feel must be magnified a hundred thousand times for them. Or more. This kind of sadness is incalculable.

Then, suddenly, more sadness was around us. Two friends of friends - people I'd met, but didn't know well - lost their fathers in different traffic accidents, just days after Christmas. I thought of my father's brother, who died of a heart attack when he was barely fifty and my cousin was away at college. There were no good-byes, no warnings. No time. I thought of an interview by Justine Picardie with the luminous English actress Natascha McElhone, whose husband had died unexpectedly while she was pregnant with their third child and working halfway across the world. "I told him I loved him every day, all the time," she said. "Nothing was left unsaid." How many of us are that lucky?

As an only child I don't know what my greatest fear is, coping with aging parents on my own, or losing them, as I know I someday will. I remember sitting in the waiting room of the Delhi airport, reading Julia Reed's beautiful The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story. I wept when I came across this passage: I realized that my biggest fear was of an inevitability far greater than any hurricane: the fact that they too would be gone. I hug my parents a little tighter when I say goodbye to them at the airport now.

How do you say goodbye when you know you have a year to do it?

farewell to the old year, bring in the new.

i made no resolutions last year
or if i did i don't remember them
but i remember all the things i did
people i hugged tight
children who told me stories
and who held my hand at the fair
meals with friends
during which i laughed until i could barely eat
and travels with my family
that led to dusty hills as old as time
under a burning sun
the fragrance of jasmine in the air.
i baked cookies and cakes
planted paperwhite bulbs
that sprang up in the warmth of the dining room
and burst into bloom.
and i took picture after picture
of dogs
and children
and flowers
sunsets and sunrises
the camera and my eye merging into one.
it was a good year.

this is just to say. (with apologies to William Carlos Williams).

(second draft).

(the first draft is here)

this is just to say
i have eaten all the pickles
that you gave me
which filled a tall mason jar
which i had thought to save
for picnics with friends
at the beach
or on the living-room floor
sliced into an egg salad
or guarding a cheese plate
but instead i ate every last one
straight from the jar
they were so cold and crisp
and briny
and delicious.

state of the arts.

I remember listening to the radio, or perhaps watching public television, when I was little. At the end of the program - which one, I can't quite remember - a voice would say something like "This program, and so much more, is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts." It sounded important. Later I understood that this meant it was funded by government money, and that sometimes the government preferred to spend its money on other things besides art, like war.

I grew up with art. We went to museums and plays and dance performances and the symphony. I took ballet and made crooked clay pots and watercolor paintings in art class. This grew into an interest in photography, encouraged by my parents, which continues to this day. Quite recently I came across a poem by the artist Tim Etchells (the entire poem is here) in answer to the question "What can art do?" His response has been echoing in my mind again and again for days now.

'You asked what art can do

I wanted to write you that it

can make a spark flames

and a puddle ocean

a river tears

a room a world

a cry song

....

I meant to write you that art

can close a wound

and open a legal case

that it can stare further than a telescope

go faster than Internet and

beat like a loved one's heart

....

I wanted to tell you that art is loved as a hammer

because of how well it breaks lies and speaks truths

knocks down obstacles

...

And in case anyone is wondering, art is not a servant of any government

nor of any policy, nor of touristicism

nor a servant of money

nor an icing on a cake

...

That's what art can do.

And people should be careful with it.

Otherwise they may wake up one day and have to live alone

With no hammer of change, no truth, no laughs,

No bringing together or wondering apart

With no reflections, no possibility to reflect

Just living alone with only their ghosts and their ideologies muttering at them.'