The Agony and the Ecstasy of Mike Daisey.

Alls I'm saying is, art doesn't require falsehood. In fact, it depends upon perfect honesty. Art doesn't cover lies. It exposes them.*

We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.**

Much has been said about Mike Daisey (liar, fraudster, and "fucking sociopath" are some of the harsher terms) and his stage work The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs after This American Life retracted an excerpt that aired recently. I'm sure all the arguments from differing sides have been put more intelligently than I ever could. I haven't heard the original interview, or the subsequent one explaining the retraction. I haven't read many of the reactions, either. I can only go by my own memories of seeing Agony and Ecstasy last spring at the Seattle Rep, and what I took away from it.

You go into a Mike Daisey monologue knowing that ultimately the story is about Mike Daisey, no matter what else he talks about. I said this last time. You go in knowing some details are altered by memory and time and artistic license and anonymity. Think of Minna Pratt's mother in The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, who has a piece of paper pinned above her desk which says "Facts and fictions are different truths." Think of how Minna's mother once asked her, "Is that the truth?" ("It's one of the truths, Mama!").*** There is the expectation that this is a work of theatre, not journalism, but the line got blurred, or crossed, somewhere along the way.

There are two Mike Daiseys. One is the storyteller, and he is an amazing storyteller, always has been. He talks with his eyes and his hands, and he is funny as all hell when he isn't breaking your heart. The other Mike Daisey is more complicated. This is Daisey the crusader, with the glint of zealotry in his eye, who is willing to make up details and events to drive home an argument that could been made with only the bare facts. Or maybe they wouldn't have. Maybe we wouldn't have woken up to the truth that our electronic toys are made under terrible conditions by actual people who are treated like machines without his stories. Or would we?

I think that The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs became bigger than anything Daisey had done before, and it swallowed him up, Jonah-like. We wanted every detail to be true. We needed it to be true. We wanted the excuse to knock down the juggernaut of Apple, to look down our noses at the shiny beautiful objects that taunted us, gleaming, in their white or black boxes within white or black boxes. (This disdain lasted about two weeks, or until the next iPhone or iPad came out). Our need became his One Ring, and it made him Gollum. Knowing that some of the story we believed so readily was beyond exaggeration and pure invention feels to many people like a kind of betrayal.

A few nights before I saw The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at Seattle Rep last year, Mike Daisey gave a performance of How Theatre Failed America to benefit the recently closed Intiman Theatre. He referred to the Tony Award won by Intiman some years before as the "One Ring," which had brought about their downfall. It is hard not to see that he is currently self-destructing in the same way. I said, last year, that all of Mike Daisey's works are in a way love stories, the kind that are about love and disillusionment. There is a poetic irony in our own disillusionment, now.

*Martha Plimpton, via Twitter, March 16, 2012.
** Pablo Picasso. Epigraph to The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt.
***MacLachlan, Patricia. The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt.  Harper Trophy, 1990. pp. 65-66.

theatre notes. holy days. 

I think I first encountered the New Century Theatre Company through ACT's Central Heating Lab program. I'd missed their first two productions - they only put on one play a year - and found them in their third year, with On the Nature of Dust. Then, last year, came O Lovely Glowworm, which I saw twice because it was so moving and enthralling (and confusing). They are a company of actors, who get together once a month for readings at a bar in Seattle's theatre district. The brevity of their one-play-season is mostly due to economics, probably, and perhaps time - whatever can be fitted in between other projects. But they are very clearly an ensemble, a repertory, a close-knit company within the already-close-knit theatre community that is Seattle.

Holy Days is a quiet story that takes place in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, when you could either leave and face the great unknown, like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, or you could stay on and hope for things to change. Two brothers and their wives are struggling through the dust storms that are sweeping their land, the black dust that seeps through every crack and corner. There is the unbearable weight of grief that comes with the loss of a child, and there is the waiting for a new life to be born. It is a shockingly tender play, and it says something about the closeness of the four actors onstage (two of them are married to each other in real life) that it almost feels like it was written specifically for them.

It's with some surprise I realize that this is the first time I have seen these four members of NCTC together, although I have seen them all so many times before, Amy Thone and Darragh Kennan in particular. They and Hans Altwies and Jen Taylor feel so much like a real family that I can hardly believe it when we are told that Holy Days was produced with just two weeks of rehearsal, tech included. (I gather that this last detail is a big deal). I think this is what happens when you go in with a group of people who really know and love each other and have worked with each other before (and Hans admits that they may have snuck in some reading time beforehand). This is what you get with a repertory company, with a tight circle of people who really love what they do.

There was talk of doing more productions like this, in the future. Sort of "pop-up theatre," with barely any sets or costumes - although they were pretty fully costumed and made-up and the set was pretty detailed - and a very short rehearsal period, with only three performance nights. It is more polished than a staged reading, but with a few bumps and stumbles that might be otherwise smoothed out with more preparation time. It could work, too, with such a intimate theatre company and a more minimalist play. You couldn't have done it with, say, O Lovely Glowworm with its complicated sets and cues, but a simpler work like this one works perfectly. I am so looking forward to more.

theatre notes. Red.

A passage from The English Patient runs through my head during the opening scenes of Red. Almasy was talking about the painter Caravaggio and his painting of David with the head of Goliath. I think he meant this famous painting, a double-self portrait done near the end of Caravaggio's life, showing him in his youth (David) and then in old age (Goliath). Here, too, we have the aging Rothko and his assistant, himself a young artist, in that shifting dance between past, present, and future. The Abstract Expressionist - if we can so describe Rothko, as much as he disdains the label - stands on the bodies of the artists that came before him - the Cubists - planting his paintbrush as if it were a stake marking new territory, or a sword in Picasso's heart. He is not ready to concede that the next wave will do the same in turn.

Red is, like one of Rothko's paintings, more of an abstraction than a play with a clear story. It takes place in a very specific point in time - the years when he was working on a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City - and yet it feels like something fluid and undefined. The two men are like the two Caravaggios in the painting of David and Goliath. It's a wonderful thing to see Connor Toms as the assistant and Denis Arndt as Rothko, both of whom I know from other plays here in Seattle. It's a wonderful to recognize a face, a way of moving and talking, to see someone grow and evolve as an actor, whether they are in the early years of their career or at the height of their powers.

theatre notes. it's a fucking bargain. why don't you go?

I spent about $1200 going to the theatre last year. I saw about 36 plays. This averages out to about $100 a month, three plays a month, spending roughly $33 per play. (Including parking). This is cheap. You'd be hard put to have a nice dinner out for $33 (once you add in tax and tip and, yes, parking), unless you're talking a $6 bowl of pho or a $12 burger at your local pub. I started weighing the cost of things against the price of play tickets. I could get takeout for lunch a couple days a week, or I could see a play. I could try that fancy new restaurant, or I could see two plays. Before I knew it, my dining table was piled high with programs and my dashboard was littered with parking stubs.

Some plays were in tiny converted coffee-house-garage-theatres (seating maybe 35-50 patrons), which might cost $10-$20. The mid-size theatres (200 or so seats) will run you about $25-$35. The large theaters will probably cost you about $35-$50. (I leave out the Paramount or the 5th Ave, because I don't generally go to Broadway musicals). You could do what I do and get an ACTPass from ACT, which lets you see almost everything produced on its four stages, year-round, for $25 a month. You could get a Today Pass from the Seattle Rep, which lets you call up the box office on the day of and grab whatever seats are open; it works out to about $22 per ticket. Live theatre is a fucking bargain. Forget trying to get into the latest hot spot to open in an already crowded neighborhood. Forget ingredients you can't pronounce or indifferent waiters or mediocre food. Go to the theatre.

Sure, the quality of stage productions varied as wildly as any group of restaurants. None were terrible, but some were extraordinary. And I still love going out to eat; that part of me will never go away entirely. But what live theatre gives me is the sense that the people who create it do it out of love. Out of passion. You can't half-ass things when you are swinging from a set of jungle-gyms disguised as Sherwood Forest (as in Robin Hood) or hurling insults like ninja stars, silent but deadly when they hit (anything written by Harold Pinter). You can't anticipate what the audience will be like, night after night, or even what the feeling onstage will be. There's some chemistry between the stage and the audience, as I've said before, which changes every time, which makes or breaks the night.  But oh, what a thrill that is, when the audience finds that energy and just gets it.

We go to the theatre to hear stories. To laugh, or to cry, when some truth hits unbearably close to home.  To rejoice when hope is regained or love is found. To feel a sense of connection to our neighbors in the audience and the actors onstage. This is mostly possible because so many actors in Seattle have been working here for decades. It gives me a jolt of excitement to see a familiar face, whether it's someone I have loved for twenty years or two, which has never gone away. All this keeps me coming back. And so should you.

A few things I am looking forward to this spring:

Holy Days, from New Century Theatre Company

Red, at Seattle Rep

Spring Awakening, from Balagan Theatre

The Pinter Festival at ACT later this summer (although as an ACTPass holder, I am naturally very excited about the entire upcoming season).

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

How many plays has it been, now? Fifteen? Sixteen? I've lost count. It dazzles me just to think about it, and I didn't even make it to all the Pinter Fortnightly evenings. I've seen enough, though, to have a sense of what makes a body of work. How a playwright can have a distinct voice that remains true as he continues to evolve, the way a composer or painter has a distinct sound or way of portraying light. I've loved these staged readings, rehearsed for only a single afternoon. I think this short rehearsal is what gives Pinter's words a sense of realness, an immediacy that might get lost after weeks of preparation. The actors don't have time to over-think the words, which can be fatal. I think Frank Corrado described some performances of Pinter seen in England last year as "suicidally reverential," or something like that.

This is the difficulty with Pinter. It's easy - and catastrophic - to think too much, to over-interpret every phrase, over-emphasize every pause. His words are so precise that all you have to do is say them as naturally as if you were speaking yourself. As the way Pinter himself speaks, if you've seen him in interviews. Which, of course, is also hard. You have to wear the words lightly. The lightness is key. I am reminded of Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millenium, his essays (lectures) titled Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity (Calvino died before writing the sixth, Consistency). These first three - lightness, quickness, and exactitude - are what makes Pinter work. You need all three to lay bare the true, unbearable weight of emotions that run beneath the words. (Here I echo Calvino writing about Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being and how "everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight"*). I can't describe it any other way.

Old Friends is, like Moonlight, or Betrayal, or No Man's Land, about friendship and love and memory and the passing of time. Once again there are repeated motifs, recurring moments and phrases, emphasizing the play's resemblance less to a coherent story than to a piece of music. The same memory is described by different people, slightly differently, which is how it happens in real life. You aren't sure just what happened (at least I am not, which is my usual state of mind after a Pinter play), but as we see recurring moments unfold I hear a murmured catch of breath as the audience around me recognizes the repeated coda. This palpable energy flickers across the room in a wave.

What we have here in the Bullitt Cabaret of ACT Theatre is a precious intimacy, between the actors in Old Friends who are most likely old friends, for the Seattle theatre scene is small and tightly knit - and between the actors and the audience who have been coming to these Pinter Fortnightly readings for three years now. Marianne Owen I remember from my first season attending ACT, in 1992. A few nights later I saw her and her husband, Kurt Beattie (who happens to be Artistic Director at ACT), at Town Hall. I ran up to her to say how much I loved Old Times and how much I was looking forward to the festival coming up this summer. She, too, was struck by the intensity of the audience, and I am again reminded of what I said regarding How to Write a New Book for the Bible: the audience makes or breaks a play. We are here because we love Pinter, because we love ACT, because we love Frank Corrado for putting these Fortnightly readings together, because we love these actors who have been striding our stages for lo these twenty or thirty years, perhaps more. And because we want it, no need it, to go on.

*Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millenium. Vintage, 1993. p. 7.

theatre notes. How to Write a New Book for the Bible.

I remember, vividly, seeing Bill Cain's Equivocation here at Seattle Rep some years back. It was so brilliant and polished that it set a new standard in my mind of what theatre could be, an electric confluence of writing, directing, casting, and audience. Ah, yes, the audience is important. Didn't you know that? The audience can make or break a show. If they love something, if they believe something, if they respond to something in their hearts and minds, that invisible membrane between stage and audience tears away and we all become one single organism. The actors' voices and breath flows out over the audience and back again, their energy coming into our bodies and lifting us all up, up, up.

Bill Cain's latest play, How to Write a New Book for the Bible, is very different from Equivocation, but it drew the same electric response. All around me, people were laughing and sighing and crying and, because it felt like we were coming to know the characters in the play, responding to the actors. Out loud. There are repeated lines and motifs, and some audience members would get so caught up in the language of the play, they would repeat the lines, too. This should have been annoying, but instead, it was transportive. It was a sign of how deeply we connected to the story, how intensely we responded to the human drama onstage.

This is an autobiographical play. If Equivocation was written out of anger (after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001), then this one was written out of love. This is Bill Cain's family. His father, his mother, his brother. It weaves back and forth between the present, during which his mother is dying of cancer (his father had died several years before), leaping back to childhood and forward to his brother's years as a soldier in Vietnam. The scenes between father and sons reminded me, again, of the film Tree of Life, and that line by Kim Stafford, (which I've quoted before), remembering a bike ride with his brother and the touch of his father's hands on their shoulders. How long can you feel a hand, steady on your shoulder, after that hand pulls away? It hits on something so real for all of us, our relationships with our parents and our siblings, how we have our own rules, our own language, our own history, our own...bible.

In memory of Peter Cipra.

I met Peter Cipra when I was five and he was my kindergarten classmate Peter’s father. I knew, vaguely, that he had a restaurant; I wouldn’t understand what that meant until later. Meanwhile I sat in the bright kitchen of his home and made “spaghetti” out of blue Play-Doh with a garlic press (presumably not a garlic press used in his restaurant). His wife, Susan, made spaghetti and meatballs (not out of Play-Doh) for our lunch and told wild stories about Peter (senior) and his career as a chef. How he used to terrorize his cooks, and how once, in a fit of anger, he threw a butcher knife at someone who’d made a mistake (fortunately he missed). As a child, you come to know the mothers of your friends because they pick you up from school and cook you meals; fathers are tall, shadowy figures glimpsed on their way to and from work, around whom legends are spun and myths are made.

Years went by, and our paths did not meet again until Peter (junior) and I were once again classmates in middle school. It’s possible that my parents had been dining at Labuznik all these years without my knowledge, but I only remember the day in 6th grade when my old kindergarten friend Peter came up to me and said, gleefully, “Your dad didn’t finish his carrots last night!” I immediately went home and confronted my father at the dinner table. As a child who had to finish everything on my plate, it gave me a deeply subversive thrill to catch my own father out, and for years I was convinced I had found a chink in his armor, that he didn’t like carrots. (He does). I wouldn’t dine there myself until high school, in that narrow, high-ceilinged restaurant down on 1st Avenue, a few steps away from the Pike Place Market. I remember succulent lamb chops, tender spinach, and yes, those carrots that were my father’s downfall years before.

Labuznik, as I remember it, was formal but not stuffy, warmed by the good humor of Susan Cipra who ran the dining room while her husband ruled the kitchen. You went there if you knew what you wanted, and if what you wanted was Peter Cipra’s uncompromising vision. He used to have this rule: no matter how many were dining at the table, you couldn’t choose more than four of the entrée options. That is to say, if there were six of you, and six entrée options, you couldn’t try all of them. It was maddening, but if you didn’t like his rules, you didn’t eat there. There isn’t anyone who runs a restaurant like that anymore, in these ME ME ME times. That era has passed. The closest successor might have been Lampreia, down the street, which in the nineties and noughties had that same uncompromising attitude, but without the warmth, which made for some interesting dining experiences. But all that is another story. We were talking about Labuznik, where Peter Cipra could do whatever the hell he wanted because he owned the damned building and didn’t have to answer to anyone.

The last time I had dinner at Labuznik was some six months before it closed, on the night of my 18th birthday. We had just returned from Prague, and my mind was full of the addictive pickled red cabbage that came with every meal. It came with our dinner at Labuznik, too, though only recently did a friend tell me that it was from a can. I had the Tournedos Rossini, and Peter explained to me that traditionally, Tournedos Rossini is topped with foie gras, but he made it with a slice of pâté atop each medallion of filet mignon, which would melt into a rich sauce as you ate it. This was followed by a berry Pavlova, which Susan brought to our table lit with a sparkling candle, reed-thin and twinkling with all the promise of the years ahead. I would be leaving for college soon; childhood was at an end. I’ll remember that dinner, though, and those stories, forever.

I was sorry to hear of Peter Cipra’s death last month, all too soon and terribly from cancer. He and his wife were a part of my culinary education, and therefore my life, from a very early age. Food was something beyond a bowl of cereal at breakfast, a PB&J sandwich in my lunchbox, the Chinese food I ate at home. It could be something creative, as creative as “blueberry spaghetti” made from Play-Doh or tender carrots spiced with something from a faraway land. It was part of a wider world that was and continues to be forever expanding, forever changing, and I hope it never ends. How lucky I was to have known him.

youth on fire. theatre notes.

The other night I met up with some friends for Balagan Theatre's first performance in their new home, the Erickson Theatre off Broadway. It had been snowing all day, but the show must go on, and jet-lagged as I was it was all worth it. Having read the Wikipedia summary of both Spring Awakening the musical (which was what we had come to see) and the 19th century German play which inspired the musical, I was somewhat prepared for the twists and turns of the plot. This left me able to concentrate on the unstoppable energy of the cast. They were mostly young - as far as I could tell, several were still in high school - and damn, did they BRING. IT. The singing and dancing was done with a ferocity that nearly blew you out of your seats, although that could have been due to the microphones. The Erickson is a small space, and the amplification was a little overwhelming.

Spring Awakening is about young love, that first flush of awareness, that intensity of feeling that sweeps you away when you are barely old enough to even understand what any of it means. And most often you don't understand it at all. It turned to the darker side, too, of incest and abuse and suicide, addiction, death, loss, betrayal. All themes that occurred throughout Balagan Theatre's previous production, Dog Sees God, which I'd seen last fall. I wonder if there is a pattern there. Either way, Spring Awakening will be back in April, and so will I (not jet-lagged this time).

a few notes on photography.

One of the earliest photographs taken by me is from Christmas, 1985. My mom, dad, and uncle are sitting cross-legged in front of our Christmas tree, and my dad and uncle have been decapitated somewhere around the nose by my 5-year-old photographer's eye. (My mother, being somewhat shorter, is only missing part of her forehead). A decade would pass before I took up photography more seriously, by which time that uncle had died suddenly of a heart attack, at the age of 50. He had been an artist and photographer, with an extraordinary eye, and I wish I had known him longer.

I was in high school when I began studying photography. Mr. Bauer would give us assignments: photograph an egg, to understand shadow and light, photograph an object in motion, to understand shutter speed, try different speeds of film, to understand the texture of different sensitivities. You were given unlimited rolls of film, to help you learn how to shoot, but limited quantities of paper, which taught you how to print with minimal waste. It trained your eye, too, to judge from the contact sheet which frames were worth printing and which were not.

In college, the late Roger Mertin was my professor. For our first assignment, he taped over our viewfinders to help us trust our camera's eye and to gauge exposure without looking at the light meter, but I forget what else we did later on. I do remember that we had to buy our own film and paper; this made you think even more carefully about what you were shooting instead of recklessly burning through roll after roll of film.

I was slow to join the world of digital photography. My uncle gave me a Leica Digilux 3 about four years ago, and it's taken me almost that long to get used to it. My film camera, a Nikon FM2, had been with me since I was 16 years old; with its 50mm lens it was an extension of my left eye.

Photography is like cooking. There are fundamentals and rules, and then there are variables that can't be controlled. You don't really need to go in knowing all the basics, but knowing them is great. Having an understanding of aperture and shutter speed, focus, composition - they're like knife skills, or the ability to roast a chicken or cook an omelet. They give you a foundation that nothing, no one, can take away from you.

Find someone, or several someones, to inspire you. See what they look for through the eye of a camera. Eventually you develop your own eye, your own taste, your own ideas about what you want to portray. You can break all the fundamentals, all the rules you learned so carefully. At the end of the day, the only person whose opinion matters is your own. And who's to know if something didn't come out the way you intended, unless you tell them?

a year at the theatre.

In 2011 I saw something like 36 plays, monologues, readings, musicals, and one opera dress rehearsal. Theatres ranged from tiny 20-seaters in black-box rooms converted from garages to McCaw Hall, which holds thousands. I watched 7th-and-8th graders fling themselves across the stage with the energy of youth, and actors I have loved for twenty years show themselves to be at the top of their game. Some performances were bad. Some were unmemorable. Some will stay with me for the rest of my life. What they all had in common was the sense that people create theatre because they love it, and we go to the theatre because we need it. As long as that love and that need is there, theatre will go on.

Things I will remember about 2011:

Renata Friedman creating dozens of different characters in The K of D with just a change in voice, posture, movement. She was amazing.

Michael Patten, who I saw in three plays and one Pinter Fortnightly reading, and who I loved best during that moment in O Lovely Glowworm when he tells the goat, "You are loved…" It was definitely one of my favorite plays this year, one I saw twice during its run.

Gretchen Krich, who I also saw in three plays and one Pinter Fortnightly. She can be seductive, or crotchety, or maternal, or tender, or heartbroken. I accosted her in the street to tell her how much I'd loved O Lovely Glowworm, while Jerry Manning looked on in some amusement. I wish I had told him how much I was enjoying the Seattle Rep under his artistic direction, but didn't get the chance.

Mike Daisey, who showed us his deep love and anger for both theater (in How Theatre Failed America) and Apple (in The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs). His eyes narrow and widen like a surprised Totoro, and his hands flap around like the little birds in a Disney movie, and I could listen to him for hours. Actually, I did, this year, some four hours altogether in the span of one week.

Suzanne Bouchard and Anne Allgood facing off in Mary Stuart. Another one of this year's favorites, with a perfect cast and an audience who stayed on the very edges of their seats. It was dazzling.

I loved all the Pinter Fortnightly readings this year, but two especially: Moonlight, with the gorgeous Kathleen Chalfont, and Betrayal, with the ridiculously beautiful Billie Wildrick. Both were plays I'd seen before, both revealing things I hadn't noticed before, while still reminding me I could see them again, and learn even more.

It was beyond thrilling to see Liz McCarthy (at Pinter Fortnightly) and Jeff Cummings (in In the Next Room) again after more than a decade. I'd loved their work when I was a teenager, and I've missed them.

I love that the actors I've loved since my first season at ACT in 1992 and later, Intiman in the mid-90's are still going strong, maybe stronger than ever, R. Hamilton Wright, Suzanne Bouchard, Michael Winters, Frank Corrado, and many more. One of these numbers is lost to us, Mark Chamberlin, who died suddenly in the spring and who is sorely missed.

The wonderful, time-traveling, gender-bending cast of Cloud 9. I don't think the play *quite* worked, but the actors were incredible.

Also incredible was Robin Hood at the Seattle Children's Theatre. Basil Harris, Hana Lass, and Hans Altwies are all actors I've seen elsewhere this year, and they seemed to be having so much fun as they swung across a jungle-gym set disguised as Sherwood Forest. The wild appreciation of the young audience made it clear: children are ready to fall in love with live theatre if it is offered to them.

Special notice must be given to Darragh Kennan, gamely wobbling a little on his high heels as he walks across the stage in drag for one of his three roles in Sylvia (I believe the play is written that way).

I went up to Michael Winters after the reading of Moonlight and told him, hyperventilating slightly, that I had loved his work for nearly twenty years, and hope to see more of him soon. He was funny and kind and I tried very hard not to fling myself at his feet.

What a year it was! A year of that "riot in the heart" that is live theatre (to borrow from Tom Stoppard). I can't wait for the year to come.

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

I've seen about sixteen or seventeen plays and sketches by Harold Pinter, now. Two of them I've seen twice - Betrayal (in 1995 and then last month) and Moonlight (in 2009 and then a few weeks ago), and I feel that I could see any of the plays again, each time discovering more. There are recurring motifs, clear from the beginning of Pinter's body of work - a distinct rhythm, a way of repeating words, the use of cricket terms I've never understood. Then there are those eloquent "pauses" that have probably driven many a director to madness. Pinter has his own language, a certain cadence, emphasized for me by seeing many of the same actors in the Fortnightly readings.

This reading of No Man's Land is a little different than all the others. It's more of a workshop, in preparation for the Pinter festival next summer. Theatre director Penny Cherns has come from London to put the actors through their paces, and they've had a week ("24 hours," they tell us) to rehearse instead of the usual single afternoon. There's an actual set, sort of. One of the four actors has come in from Denver to join the cast, and it brings a different energy to the stage. The other three are from Seattle, and I'm familiar with all of them, Frank Corrado most of all. As with many of Pinter's plays, No Man's Land starts out conventionally enough, then sharply veers into a game of wits that is more about language and power than it is about any clear plot. It is a tapestry, a crazy-quilt, patching together Noël-Coward-esque barbs and Laurel-and-Hardy verbal jousts with some deviations into Beckett, reflecting Pinter's own earlier plays and crystallizing into the work of someone at the height of his powers.

I was thinking about Betrayal, how it has been referred to as one of Pinter's most "accessible" plays. It's simpler, to be sure, at least on the surface, and though time is shattered and shifted out of sequence, it is one of his rare plays that has a clearly delineated story line. No Man's Land doesn't, even though time progresses in an orderly fashion. I think it was Penny Cherns who tells us in the post-play discussion that Pinter often started with an image, a memory, or a phrase, and wrote the play around it. There isn't so much a story as the emotions that run beneath the words, which stand out like trees emerging from fog. Here, in No Man's Land, there is the writer's fear of growing old, of being alone, of losing one's grip on fading powers (no chance of that with Pinter, who seemed to intensify with age). The struggle between the characters is almost like a raging against the inevitably fading light...

Reading. Grossman.

David Grossman is a funny man. It takes me by surprise. (Insert joke about how being Jewish is inherently funny). Perhaps this is because the first words I read from him were about grief, in his PEN/Arthur Miller Freedom To Write speech given in the spring of 2007 and reprinted in the New York Times Magazine. Those words so moved me that they have, in the manner of all writers who I have loved, become a part of me, something I can refer to almost without thinking. Many times a day, as I sit at my writing desk, I touch on sorrow and loss like one touching electricity with bare hands, yet it does not kill me. I do not understand how this miracle has come to pass.* He said this the year after the death of his son, Uri, in the war between Israel and Lebanon, just before he was to have finished his army service. Now he is here in Seattle to talk about the novel he began as his second son was entering the army and finished after Uri's death, To the End of the Land.

In the novel, Ora's son Ofer, who is coming to the end of his army service, decides to return to service along with his fellow soldiers. Aghast, Ora fears Ofer's death in the upcoming battles, and decides that if she is not home to receive news of his death, he cannot die. That if she goes on this journey, 'to the end of the land,' this will keep him safe. She drags with her an old friend, Avram, who came back from his own battles years before, broken and scarred, to join her on this journey. Along the way, she begins telling the story of Ofer's life, as if by describing the details of all his years on earth she can make them real to her. It is impossible not to draw a parallel between this story and David Grossman's own life, impossible to think that by writing about Ofer he thought to keep Uri safe, and when he could not, to at least bring him back to life in words. But none of that is spoken of, now, as though by writing this novel Grossman at last pulled tight a veil over his own personal grief.

I can't help but think of Joan Didion's Blue Nights, although it is a memoir, and To the End of the Land is fiction. But both are about conjuring up a lost child, a grown daughter or son brought back to life through memories as fragile as the seafoam that washes up onto the beach and dries into white lace that can be blown away on the wind. Both are about memory and reality, although Didion's California and New York are a distant planet from Grossman's war-scarred Israel. What they share (leaving aside their sharply critical political writings that have no bearing here) is the grief of losing a child, and that understanding about writing as a way to, if not eradicate grief, then to fix it in some permanent place around which life continues to move. I write, and I feel how the correct and precise use of words acts like a medicine. It purifies the air I breathe...*

Grossman, David. Writing in the Dark. Picador, 2008. p67, p65.

theatre notes. Double Indemnity.

I went to see Double Indemnity at ACT the other day, with a friend. I'd never seen the film, or read the book, but I knew what to expect: desire, murder, lies, deceit, double-crossing, set to the staccato snick-snick-snick of a cigarette lighter and the click-click-click of stiletto heels. It would take place in Southern California where the sun shines all day but somehow it always seems to be night. The men wear suits and trench coats and the woman always seems to be wearing a peignoir, even if she is wearing a blouse tucked neatly into a skirt. It must be something about the way she moves. We are in Southern California, in Los Angeles. All the noir stories take place in Southern California, it seems, that hotbed of greed and vice. What else could cast such dark, deep shadows as that brilliant, burning California sunlight? Where else would those doomed creatures, scheming women and greedy men, head except for the far west? Hollywood is a town of illusions, and its smoke and mirrors spreads through all that surrounds it...

It's been a good year at ACT. This is the last play of the mainstage season, with only the classic A Christmas Carol left for the upcoming holidays. It's been a year of gorgeous productions, from the time-shifting rooms of Vanities to the grand fin-de-siècle Upstate New York doctor's house of In the Next Room. The set for Double Indemnity is fascinating, a bare stage with sliding walls that form a V, like the prow of a ship, everything a murky, mottled blue-green that could be the unforgiving ocean waters or the polished granite of a bank vault. The walls slide apart to reveal different rooms - a living room, an office, a hospital room. A revolving stage within a revolving stage swivels back and forth, bringing in various people and furnishings, - beds and chairs and chaise lounges, even cars. The play is an extended flashback, the scenes swirling on and off-stage, the way memories form themselves in your mind and then slip away.

It is an intricate puzzle, both the set and the story, with two main actors and a supporting cast of three who fill the rest of the roles, which is how things are so often done these days. Kurt Beattie, who directed Double Indemnity and who also happens to be the Artistic Director of ACT explains during the post-play discussion that this is not solely for financial reasons, but I forget his other points. It's fun for the actors, they tell us, and fun for the audience as well, I think. Fun to see Jessica Martin switch from the frumpy secretary to the coltish stepdaughter, clumping along awkwardly in shoes that seem just a little too big or twirling in champagne-sparkled moonlight. At the talk-back she is both incredibly young and startlingly self-possessed, with a calm stillness that is in complete contrast to the energy she brings to the stage. Of the five actors in the play she is the one I've seen the most often - in Rock 'n' Roll some years ago, and in several Pinter Fortnightlys - and it always makes me happy to see a familiar face in my program. There have been a lot of plays this year, and a lot of familiar faces. I'm looking forward to next season, and more familiar faces.

reading. Didion.

I read Blue Nights much as I had read The Year of Magical Thinking five years, or was it six years, earlier. Quickly, in one gulp, in one night, racing through the pages as if lingering over them too long would singe my fingers. As I was reading this latest book I remembered sitting cross-legged on the floor at the bottom of the Seattle Public Library auditorium, practically at Joan Didion's feet, as she read aloud and talked about The Year of Magical Thinking, five or six years ago. I can hear her voice, even now, dry and flat like the California desert, like a piercing, dusty wind. I thought about Didion's voice, and the words of her late husband, John Gregory Dunne. He had this to say about their daughter, in the novel that was not really a novel: My only child was adopted and there was no chance that anything produced by my genes could come close to equaling her.* I have occasionally wondered whether my parents ever thought the same about me.

I was born in China in July of 1980 and adopted when I was six months old, perhaps earlier. (I am a little unclear about all the details, which were imparted to me when I was too young to understand them). Then I was raised by my mother's grandmother (and assorted aunts and cousins) in Shanghai until all the immigration paperwork was completed and I could join my parents in the United States. This took another year or so. The first photographs of us as a family are of my parents holding me in the Forbidden City in Beijing when I am about a year and a half old. They must be about 32 or 33. They look startlingly young and a little bit nervous about what the future holds, but then all early photographs of parents with their children look like that, whether the child is one hour old or eighteen months. They are the only parents I have ever known, and the only ones I can remember, and that is all I have to say about that. I rarely think about those two years between my birth and my second birthday party at Clayton Child Center in St. Louis, Missouri, and I even more rarely talk about them. This is not so much out of shame or a life-long identity crisis, but more of a lack of interest. Or inertia.

Blue Nights is, in a way, harder for me to read than The Year of Magical Thinking. It hit too close to the bone, in some places. I did not know, when I read the first book, that Quintana Roo Dunne had been adopted. I did not know that Joan Didion was 31 the year she was born. So were my parents. My mother, like Didion, is a tiny woman, slender-boned and with a sort of careless yet impeccable style, and my parents worked together for nearly 25 of the 37 years they have been married (although they are scientists and not writers). They had - and still have - a relationship that was impenetrable to me; their marriage felt separate from our family. Perhaps this is how it should be, but as an only child the life is sometimes lonely. I am told by people with siblings that for them, it isn't necessarily different, or even less lonely; this is a reminder that you never really understand something unless you've lived it.

The hardest chapters of Blue Nights, for me, are 22 and 23. I never feared or believed that I would be abandoned by my parents the way my birth parents had abandoned me. I never feared or believed that my birth mother would find me; my adoption had been privately arranged - this was the early 1980's, before overseas adoptions were common - and an ocean and continent separated us. My name had been changed, which I didn't know until a few years ago, when I found the documents; the possibility that I had had another identity had never occurred to me. My birth certificate had been re-issued by the state of Missouri. I was not concerned about biological family histories for health reasons; I had some blithe confidence that medical science would be able to determine such things by the time I was old enough to need it. I had none of Quintana's fears or doubts or questions or dreams about The Broken Man, or if I did I have long forgotten them. They were lost to my childhood along with all the monsters that lurked under the bed. Didion reminds me that maybe, they are still there, waiting for me.

*Dunne, John Gregory. Vegas. Warner Paperback Library, 1975. p15.

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

It's the second time I've seen Moonlight, now. The first time was at my first Pinter Fortnightly reading, a little over two years ago. A little over two years and perhaps a dozen plays later, and I have come full circle. The audience has tripled, and the series has moved down into the intimacy of the Bullitt Cabaret, with proper lighting and a better arrangement of seats. I see a lot of familiar faces, ardent fans who come to nearly every reading. Billie Wildrick, who was so lovely in Betrayal, is here, and Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi, who was perfectly hilarious as the waiter that same play (his day job is being the managing director of ACT).

The cast is different this time, save for Frank Corrado, who plays Andy, and Michael Winters, who plays Ralph. Kathleen Chalfant is Andy's wife, Bel; she's flown out from New York to participate, and she gives Bel a kind of unnerving deep serenity, with her beautifully calm face and black-velvet voice. I'm glad to see Suzy Hunt, who has a wide, curling, amused mouth which gives Maria a sort of sensuous humor, and Darragh Kennan and Josh Carter as Bel and Andy's sons, slip easily into the swift rhythm of banter that only happens between siblings who have created a language all their own. The heart of the play is Jessica Martin, who plays Andy and Bel's daughter, Bridget, whose death seems to have split her family into two halves - her parents on one side, her brothers on the other, each locked into their own world.

It goes without saying that Moonlight has its moments of hilarity (lots of them). But still, it's a heartbreaking play, especially once you know that Pinter was completely estranged from his only son. (I said this already, last time). During the discussion afterwards, someone says something to the effect that Pinter never talked about this sadness, this void, but I think of this play as his way of addressing the loss. His former wife, his son's mother, had died from alcoholism; Pinter had remarried and gained six step-children which surrounded him with a new family. I wonder if at the time of writing (1993 or thereabouts) Pinter had already accepted that he would never see his son again; perhaps this was his way of achieving a kind of peace. Certainly Andy never makes peace with his sons, who can't or won't come to his deathbed, nor the nonexistent grandchildren which his dead daughter might have had, if she'd lived. Bel does, though, calling her sons and cutting short their verbal games. I think of it as a way of saying good-bye.

What I love here is the language of Bel and Andy's exchanges, the deep understanding between two people who have known each other for a long time. Who have been married for a long time. Who know all the places to hit where it hurts and who also know how to step aside and avoid the blows. A marriage and a family are two separate things; this is sometimes hard to see and even harder to understand, and Moonlight is about that dance between the two. I love it more this time, after two years and a dozen plays. I could see it again and again, and find something new.

After the play, I go up to tell Michael Winters that I've loved his work since Shadowlands. "But you must have been a wee child at the time!" he says. He is warm and funny, like all the other actors I have accosted over the past year, and I am reminded again of how important it is to go up to people you have loved for a long time and tell them, thank you, thank you, thank you.

ACT and Pinter Fortnightly.

theatre notes. Betrayal.

Betrayal was the first play I'd ever seen by Harold Pinter. It was 1995 at Intiman Theatre; it's the play I associate most with Frank Corrado, even though I've seen him in many other performances over the past nineteen years. It's the play most associated with Harold Pinter, too, his most widely-performed one, the one considered the most "accessible." (This is said with some disgust by Corrado during the post-play discussion tonight). Placed in the context of the other fourteen or so works I've seen in the three years since the Pinter Fortnightly readings began, it still holds strong. I love it as much as I did when I was fifteen years old, maybe more. It's funnier, this time around, but I don't know if that's the actors, the director, or the intimacy between the stage and the audience, that electric bit of chemistry which makes a great play extraordinary.

Betrayal plays with time, moving backwards. It starts after the end of an affair, and takes you back to the beginning. Robert and Jerry are best friends. Emma is married to Robert, and has a seven-year affair with Jerry, who is married to Judith, who is spoken of but not seen. Their affair is one betrayal; Robert's knowledge of the affair is another betrayal, because he doesn't tell Jerry that he knows until much later in time (but earlier in the play). Emma's pregnancy is, too, a betrayal of Jerry, even if the father of her child happens to be her husband. Other betrayals are hinted at, too, those of Robert and Jerry betraying their younger, idealistic selves as they pursue their careers, one as a publisher, and the other as a literary agent, Jerry's wife Judith perhaps betraying him as he is her. Each moment explored illuminates the previous one, stripping away the shells of disillusionment which forced apart these people who were once young and happy, who once loved each other. In the last scene, Jerry drunkenly declares his love for Emma at a party, interrupted by Robert, who leaves them together. Is that when their affair began? Was it something inevitable, something that would have happened anyway, sooner or later? We'll never know for sure.

Now, more than ever, three years and fourteen plays later, or rather, sixteen years later, I can see more clearly how unique Pinter's voice is. He has this way of creating characters who always know where to hit each other where it will hurt with just a few devastating words, with a kind of dialogue of one-upmanship which pops up here and there in so many of his works. It is both emotionally shattering and shatteringly hilarious, and I am reminded for the hundredth time of Simon Callow's comment that "being English is inherently funny."* It is not fair to Pinter's body of work to call Betrayal "more accessible," but at the same time it is not fair to deride it, either. There is something pure about it; there are undercurrents and mysteries and things left unsaid, but it is, on the whole, a more open work than, say, The Room, or The Birthday Party, or Ashes to Ashes, when you aren't quite sure what the hell just happened. I could see it again, and learn something new.

There's so much more left to explore. I can't bloody wait.

Pinter Fortnightly, at ACT.

*This is from the commentary soundtrack from A Room with a View, 1985.

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.