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.