restaurant notes. the neighborhood phenomenon.

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. young playwrights program, I & II

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

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

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

we will leave some traces.

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

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

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

IT WASN’T ANYTHING YOU DID

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

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

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

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

on the edge of farce. theatre notes.

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

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

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

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

(not) waiting for godot.

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

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

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

life and death in the theatre.

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

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

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

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

scar tissue.

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

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

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

theatre and poetry notes.

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

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

A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER

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

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

a death by drowning.

A few weeks ago I read an article on Slate - it was all over Facebook that day - about how drowning doesn't look like drowning. Unlike the wild thrashing you see in movies, it's silent, and motionless, because you are physically unable to cry out (because you're trying to breathe) or wave for help (because you're straining to keep your body upright). When people finally notice your struggle, it's usually too late.

The next day, a friend of friends committed suicide, and the news hit my Facebook with the speed of sound. I'd never met him, but I knew of him, recognized his name and his face. Some friends had seen a status update that alarmed them enough to call his place of work, and then the police, who found him in a local park late that afternoon. A few days later I saw their anguish as they told the story, wishing they'd called the police sooner, wishing they'd reached out to him a day earlier, wishing they could have saved him. They felt that they'd failed him, and it broke my heart.

It came to me quite suddenly that committing suicide must be a lot like drowning, no matter how death is finally achieved. The ones who can still cry out from the pain of the world are the ones who have some hope left to save themselves, or be saved. The silent ones slip away and drown, weighted down by the numbness of a despair so deep it can't even be recognized. I can't begin to imagine what it must feel like, this "fucked-up brain chemistry," as my friend Matthew once called it. That's what it is, brain chemistry, neurons firing and misfiring, a delicate balance that, if broken, sends a person spinning into the darkness. I thought of the writers Virginia Woolf and Elspeth Thompson, who, nearly seventy years apart, filled their pockets with rocks and walked into deep waters. I thought about Mike Daisey, who has talked about trying to kill himself, if I remember correctly, also by drowning. If the thought is unbearable to the rest of us, what must it feel like to those pulled under?

Another friend talked about her late brother-in-law, who had a long history of depression, in and out of hospitals and treatment centers, before finally committing suicide. She told us it was like watching someone dying of cancer. The end was almost a relief. It wasn't like the sudden, shocking death of this friend found in a city park two days before. There wasn't any sense of peace, only the guilt of being unable to stop him in time. I don't honestly think anyone could have stopped him, could have recognized that he was drowning. But it doesn't help. You can only hope that the end brought peace to a man in pain. It is so much harder to find for those left behind.

theatre notes. ACT.

The first play I ever saw at ACT was William Nicholson's Shadowlands, about the writer C. S. Lewis - I was 12, so I had read all the Narnia books - and his relationship with Joy Davidman, who became his wife (then they fell in love, and then she died of cancer). It was witty - all these Oxford dons trading barbed quips back and forth - and heartbreaking - a young boy sobbing over the death of his mother, passing through the other side of the wardrobe where he could not follow. The second play I remember just as vividly, Alan Ayckbourn's The Revenger's Comedies, which is some five hours long and is presented as two plays performed over successive nights or, for those with more stamina, over a weekend afternoon and evening with a dinner break. It is fucking HILARIOUS. Many of the actors I loved in these two plays - Michael Winters, Suzanne Bouchard, Laurence Ballard, R. Hamilton Wright, Marianne Owen, John Aylward, Leslie Law, Katie Forgette - are still making theatre in Seattle.

The ACT I first remember was on a corner lot in Lower Queen Anne near Seattle Center, a smallish theatre with an angled thrust stage. Wikipedia tells me it had 454 seats, so it was clearly bigger than I remember, but to me it had a feeling of cozy intimacy. In the late nineties they moved to their current home, the former Eagles Auditorium in downtown Seattle. Now they had two stages - the thrust Falls Theatre, and the arena Allen Theatre, neither of which could be described as cozy. There was a sense they didn't quite know what to do with all this new space. I remember several plays during this period, mainly the amazing Death of a Salesman, but I was in high school and then away at college. The last play I saw there for quite some time was Dinner with Friends, with John Procaccino and the late Mark Chamberlin. Soon after that ACT crashed and burned, financially, and in a spectacular fashion. In their early years at the corner of 7th and Union they were like a child wobbling around in her mother's high heels, excited but unsteady and unsure. They were one company producing six plays a year in a theater that was far too large. But that they weren't ready to share any of it with anyone else, the way a four-year-old wants ALL the toys even though they aren't actually playing with all of them. This was unsustainable. Even I could have told them that, and I was a teenager who didn't know anything about managing a theater. I still don't.

But ACT regrouped, although during these years I was in my 20s and wasn't really paying attention to Seattle's theatre scene. I wouldn't be back until I was 28 and found myself at the last performance of Steven Dietz's Becky's New Car and saw Suzanne Bouchard and R. Hamilton Wright and Michael Winters together again (as well as Kimberly King and Charles Leggett). I remember thinking, ok. I can come home now. I haven't looked back since. The real game-changer, though, was yet to come. It was the Central Heating Lab that turned ACT from a mere theatre to an actual community of theatre-makers and this, I think, is its most compelling creation. This allows for more new work, for more experimentation, for more creativity. Small companies finding their own voices can come in and make something and have the support of a large infrastructure already in place. They get marketing and a wider audience of people like me, who are ACT Pass members and can see pretty much anything on any of the four stages for the princely sum of $30 a month. Now I walk in on any given night and there is always something going on on at least one stage and often two and sometimes three or four stages. Are you upstairs in the Allen? Downstairs in the Falls? Even farther downstairs in the Bullitt Cabaret? Or in that little black box next to the Bullitt that they've nicknamed the "Lalie"?

Last night I was at the first preview for the second play of ACT's 2013 mainstage season. Assisted Living is written by Katie Forgette, directed by her husband R. Hamilton Wright, and performed by Kurt Beattie (current artistic director of ACT, incidentally), Marianne Owen (who happens to be his wife), Jeff Steitzer (who happens to be former artistic director of ACT), and Laura Kenny. All people whose work I have loved for a long time. (The other two actors, Julie Briskman and Tim Gouran, I don't love them any less, just not nearly as long). Besides being howlingly funny, the play is about fears that are very real - of the indignities of growing old, of not having family, of being trapped in an existence where you are at the mercy of powers beyond your control. And yet there is friendship, and the solace of words and of making theatre. There was the sense that all of these people have known and loved and worked together for a very long time, and I was reminded again why coming to ACT always feels like a homecoming.

I was very lucky to see three wonderful plays in London last month, but what I love most about live theatre is that it is about more than a play or a famous actor. It is about relationships built through time, about how a community develops between theaters and actors and playwrights and the audience. About watching actors evolve over the years, their powers not diminishing or burning out, only growing greater. It is a privilege to experience and to support this.

springtime notes.

I woke up this morning with the sun flooding into my room, and I had an afternoon matinee at the Seattle Rep, so I did what I often do and walked downtown to catch the Monorail. With the spring sunshine there were people everywhere, and I was early, so I sat in the Seattle Center Armory (formerly the Center House) for a little while, reading Twitter on my phone and people-watching.

I saw an old woman at the next table, and realized it was the same woman I used to see outside the Seward Park PCC when I still lived in Mt. Baker. Markedly older now, perhaps, but recognizably her. Sometimes I’d see her at other supermarkets, or at a park. Often she would be selling plush flowers on bendy pipe-cleaner stems, for $1. There was something childlike about her. Today she seemed - as she always has - reasonably happy and cared-for, and I wondered again where she lives or what resources she has available to her. I hope there will always be someone looking out for her, that she won’t get pushed to the margins of society and fall off the edge.

Later, after the play, I ran into my friends Mike and Jenise at the Seattle Center fountain. I hadn’t seen them in a while, and we got to chatting, which meant getting on the Monorail later than I had anticipated. It was full, so I kept walking further and further back, found an empty seat, turned and saw my old neighbor Laura, who still lives across the street from my childhood home. She looked exactly the same as I remember her. She was not young when I was a child; I can’t even guess how old she must be now.

It’s getting hard for her, living in that light-filled house perched on a steep cliff. “I’m going to give it one more year,” she tells me of rattling around alone, but she still takes the Light Rail downtown and then the Monorail over to Seattle Center to see plays at the Rep and Seattle Shakespeare. I hope to be that active when I am her age.

London days.

I got back from London Wednesday night, four whole days and five nights at the end of a trip that included a few nights in Bath and four in Cornwall. I hadn’t been to London since the end of 1996, a terrible year for my family in which one uncle had been diagnosed with liver cancer, another uncle died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 50, and my own father was recovering from cancer.

Sixteen years went by. I wasn’t a teenager anymore. I found myself walking from Victoria Station to Sloane Square last Saturday night, almost-but-not-quite lost, eventually finding my way through the dimly lit cobbled streets and avenues to the Royal Court Theatre. I looked across Sloane Square; we had stayed near here the last time, and the Peter Jones at one corner of the square was as I remembered it.

The biting cold wind was as I remembered it, too. I’d walk out from the Pimlico station and pull my jacket closer against the cold, every day, walking the few blocks to our hotel. The path became familiar, past the curry shop, the pub, the stone hulk of St. Saviour’s, the long green park of St. George’s Square. Five nights is long enough to make a place feel like it belongs to you, even if it is only a fleeting moment in the passage of time.

My last day in London I spent on my own, invisible amongst the crowds. I wanted it this way. I got lost, turned around, found my way to a familiar place, kept moving. London, indeed England as a whole, was as warm and friendly as the weather was cold and windy. Shop assistants helped me count out my change; the VAT agent at the airport addressed me as “my love” (G. had told me this would happen). Even as I packed my suitcases to return home I was thinking, how soon can I return?

theatre notes. Pinter, again. London edition.

A few nights ago, two friends and I headed to the Harold Pinter Theatre in London to see Pinter's Old Times. It was the long-awaited highlight of a much-anticipated trip, several months in the planning. Pinter is one of my favorite playwrights, and this is one of my favorite of his plays, and when I heard that its run coincided with our trip, naturally I had to see it. That two of my favorite actors, Rufus Sewell and Kristin Scott Thomas, were starring, was of course only a minor factor.

Old Times is one of Pinter's 'memory' plays, and I can't pretend to understand it any more upon the third viewing than I did the first time around. The one thing I see more clearly is how much depends on vision and interpretation. The choices made by this director and these actors are subtly different from those made by the previous directors and actors; this is how it should be. The playwright can only give so many clues to what he intends, and the rest is up to us. What *really* is happening in this story between Kate, Deely, and Anna is never clear to me. Perhaps it never will be, no matter how many times I see this play.

Memory, as Pinter shows us time and time again in his plays, is a trickster, a fickle, ephemeral creature. It is something created, imagined, imposed, reinvented according to our desires. No two people ever remember the same thing in the same way; we can't even be sure that our own memories are real or made up. This time around I began to wonder if one or two or all three characters were dead, and they were locked in the afterlife as in Sartre's No Exit. It could be true, couldn't it?

Maybe I need to see it again.

theatre notes. London edition.

 Yesterday afternoon, G. and I went to see Macbeth at the Trafalgar Studios, the former Whitehall Theatre near Trafalgar Square. Somehow I had managed to book our seats in the middle of the second row, which was honestly quite terrifying. Against the raw industrial space the Scottish play had been reimagined as something almost post-apocalyptic, with everyone in combat trousers and boots and tattered sweaters. The three witches came bursting out from trapdoors - there was a lot of bursting out from trapdoors - wearing giant aviator goggles, and for once everyone sounded (or was) Scottish. It was shockingly violent and transcendentally beautiful and, like that time I saw Amy Thone play Titus in an all-female version last year, I kind of wanted to throw up at the end.

Later that evening I went to the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square to see a play my Twitter friend Daniel Bye (himself a playwright) had recommended, If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep. It is hard to explain what it was all about - the current economic crisis in Britain, the sense of anger and rebellion and despair, the recklessness of being pushed to your limit. A series of short, linked vignettes leads to a final moment when all the threads come together, as a band of protestors squat in a disused courthouse. It wasn't perfect, yet I loved it anyway. As with Macbeth earlier that afternoon it was like holding electricity in my bare hands.

I hadn't meant to see any plays in London, but somehow it just happened - these two, and then Harold Pinter's Old Times tomorrow night. What I love most about theatre is the sense of community that we have in Seattle, the relationship and love that has built up over more than twenty years now. It is about the people as much as it is about the plays. And yet I realize now I need this, this jolt of electricity, this experience of something that is unfamiliar and new and exciting. To see what other people are thinking and creating and feeling on this other side of the world. I feel like the Little Prince who has left his own little planet for a much larger one, for the unknown, and while the new world is an extraordinary place it still it diminishes not his love and desire for home.

theatre notes.

In the spring of 2011 Mike Daisey, in town for his Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, gave a benefit performance of an earlier work, How Theatre Failed America. The Rep, who was producing Agony, let him take over the stage for an extra night to raise money for all the people who had lost jobs next door when Intiman closed down, barely into their 2011 season. It was a beautiful, heartbreaking work, which I've talked about before, but what I remember more clearly was the fury I felt when I walked back to my car that night. There had been a roundtable discussion after the performance, between local actors and directors and producers and us, the audience. People stood up and shouted. There was anger and despair and disgust. "I want to get better at acting," said Hans Altwies, then finishing up a run of This, also at the Rep. "But I have to make enough money building cabinets so I can afford to 'lose money' by acting." I could see from my seat in the second row that the director Allison Narver was still pained by the closure of the Empty Space Theater, five years earlier. I thought to myself, I am not seeing enough theatre. I am not doing enough. I am not pushing myself and my mind and my heart enough.

That was eighteen months and seventy plays ago.

It started slowly. I already had an ACT pass, which lets you see just about everything produced at ACT Theatre for a piddling $25 a month. I got a Today Pass from the Seattle Rep, which gives you a subscription of day-of seats for $22 each. I kept my eye on Strawberry Theatre Workshop, which produces two or three plays a year, and New Century Theatre Company, which usually puts on one production a year. I found the New City Theatre, in that hinterland between Capitol Hill and the Central District, tucked away in what looks like an old coffeehouse. News came that Balagan would be moving from their basement space over to the Erickson, three blocks from my apartment. I discovered that the Hugo House had a theater attached to it, that tucked away behind an auto-body shop on my way home from work was the Odd Duck. The Central Heating Lab at ACT brought in a couple of intensely brilliant productions by smaller companies - A Lie of the Mind, from Collekter, and Dog Sees God, from Balagan. The Pinter Fortnightly series continued apace, picking up speed for the festival to come.

The new year, this year, brought with it an explosion of energy that has continued unabated. I found the Washington Ensemble Theatre, a crazy little space wedged into a narrow storefront. Besides all the theaters I had loved for years there were now new things to explore. The Annex, also on my way home from work. West of Lenin, which turned out to be a little farther west and perhaps a bit more north than I expected, which left me sprinting, panting, five minutes late into a performance of Maldoror. ACT kept bringing more things into their lineup - or perhaps they were there all along - readings and one-man-shows and musical nights. Murmurs reached me of The Seagull Project, who would be spending almost a year working up to a production of The Seagull, set for next January. Some weekends I see two or three plays. One record week contained five performances, four of them at ACT. This was at the height of the Pinter Festival (more on that later). The Fringe Fest came back to Seattle after a nearly decade-long absence. Ticket stubs and programs littered my pockets and piled up on the seat of my car.

Quite recently I found myself at an all-female production of Titus Andronicus, led by the glorious Amy Thone. Four or five years ago I saw her in nearly back-to-back performances as Anne Frank's mother and then as Leni Riefenstahl. This production was so cleanly stripped down and purely done that I was ready to throw up from the intensity of it all. Some weeks later I saw Thone in the audience at Superior Donuts at what used to be the Bathhouse Theater on Greenlake, now reborn as Seattle Public Theater. Onstage was Jena Cane, and her voice sent a shiver up my spine. It was strangely familiar to me. And then I realized that at How Theatre Failed America eighteen months ago hers was one of the voices that stood up and shouted.

The other night I walked home after The Skriker, my third play in a row after the Ramayana, ACT's 2012 season closer, and A Mouse Who Knows Me, up the hill at the Annex. The Ramayana was a lush, romantic epic, with demons and demigods and otherworldly beings; three hours passed in a flash. A Mouse Who Knows Me is a new musical about genetically engineered mice, laboratory intrigue, and a touch of romance, vividly funny. And The Skriker was mesmerizing, difficult, fascinating, fluid, moving between story and dark fairytale and dance and back again, circling round and round like a windmill...The burning anger I felt in the spring of 2011 has given away to a fierce pride and joy in my Seattle, where art is being created every night in every corner of this city. Art is made by people who do it out of love and more than that, out of a compulsion, a need that is almost an ache. To be a part of this, if only for a few hours, is a gift, a privilege, a touch of grace.

you must live until you die.

“He remembered her words: “You are a good man.”/He did not quite believe it. Lyric poets/Usually have - as he knew - cold hearts./It is like a medical condition. Perfection in art/Is given in exchange for such an affliction.”*

The poems of Czeslaw Milosz kept echoing in my head as I read Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, Joseph Anton. ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ repeated itself, like the swishing of waves against the shore, as Rushdie talked about his four wives, his two sons, all the friends who helped him hide in plain sight during the years of the fatwa.

I was not quite nine when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in February of 1989. Later that year would be the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the trial and execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu, all events that remain vivid in my mind, standing out against the insular worlds of school and home. For a man in hiding Rushdie was constantly photographed in the years that followed, at the heart of the literary scene, a celebrity who partied with Martin Amis and Nigella Lawson and who became so famous he had a cameo in one of the Bridget Jones’ Diary movies.

Meanwhile he was married four times, the last time to the then-model Padma Lakshmi who did not want to be in his shadow and was determined find a place in the world for herself, which she did, as a cookbook author and then as the host of Top Chef. His ex-wives painted him as a selfish monster who had affairs and cared only of himself. Probably all this is true. I remember asking my mother, years ago, when talking about a poet friend who liked to believe the world revolved around him, as perhaps it did; “I suppose we must make allowances for poets.” She laughed so much she had to pull over to the side of the road.

Marriage to someone whose life and work are all-consuming and intertwined - not necessarily confined to artists and writers, but mostly so - requires a superhuman strength, patience, confidence, and yet a lack of ego. The tunnel vision of creation builds a vacuum of selfishness around the creator. It must be a lonely kind of life, intensified by the unpredictable claustrophobia of constant security and frequent moving around from house to house, always wondering if the snipers would find you somehow.

I read Joseph Anton in a ravenous gulp spanning two days. As with Umberto Eco, who became friends with Rushdie after the latter wrote a terrible review of Foucalt’s Pendulum, I find his nonfiction easier to read than his fiction. But there is something otherworldly about his story, written in the third person. Joseph Anton is the name Rushdie chose when he went into hiding, so he could open bank accounts and credit cards without revealing his true identity. The third-person voice gives the story a sense of unreality, of inhabiting a netherworld between Salman Rushdie the man and Salman Rushdie the heretic who must be assassinated for the greater good and Salman Rushdie the writer who would become such a celebrity that his invisible face became as recognizable as Ronald MacDonald, perhaps, or Mickey Mouse.

Throughout the story is a single thread: love - love for his sons, which warmed and humanized him, the way the faceless Eurydice does in Milosz’s poem, the need for love which drew him to all sorts of women even when he was married or otherwise entangled with other women, love for and from his friends who surrounded him in a protective circle more impenetrable than any security shield. This is a story about love, about truth, about the nature of history and literature and writing. About the choices we have to make when there seems to be no choice at all. “You must live until you die,” says Joseph Conrad, from whom Joseph Anton takes his name. It is a repeated refrain.

*Milosz, Czeslaw. Orpheus and Euryidice. Second Space. Ecco, 2005. p99.

theatre notes. the hometown boys.

Quite recently I found myself at ACT six times in nine days, mostly due to the Pinter Festival (more on that later), but also for a couple of other events backed by the Central Heating Lab. The first night was another reading by The Seagull Project (more on that later, too), this time led by John Bogar, who read a stunningly heartbreaking short story by Gogol, I think it was. Another story was read by Kurt Beattie, who happens to be the artistic director of ACT, but has also been acting and directing around Seattle for nearly forty years. A few nights later I stumbled - accidentally, it turned out, because I had shown up on the wrong night - into ‘99 LAYOFFS’ only to find myself sitting next to Kurt and his wife, the sublime actress Marianne Owen.

Radial Theatre’s ‘99 LAYOFFS,’ like The Seagull Project’s ‘GREAT SOUL OF RUSSIA’ readings, like the Pinter Fortnightly series that blossomed into a full-on, mainstage festival this summer, were all backed by ACT’s Central Heating Lab. The plays I’ve seen through them - A Lie of the Mind last fall, Jesus Hopped the A Train a few months ago, and countless more - are electric and compelling, amplified by the intimacy of a smaller theater, either the Bullitt Cabaret or the Eulalie Scandiuzzi space. This last one - it only seats about 80 people - was funded last year by Gian-Carlo and Eulalie Scandiuzzi; he happens to be the managing director of ACT. You see their names pop up as arts donors all over Seattle, from the tiniest of shoe-string budget productions to the grand stages of our city.

I think of Kurt Beattie and Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi as the Hometown Boys, having lived and worked in Seattle for decades. The Central Heating Lab will be one of the great legacies that they will leave behind during their tenure at ACT. I don’t know who started it all, but it has created something extraordinary - a space for small theater groups like Collektor or Azeotrope or The Seagull Project, to make art. And this is two-fold: it gives these fledgling companies a stage as well as the full marketing power of a big theatre company, and it introduces a core audience to something new. The theatre is no longer merely a theatre but an artistic ecosystem - I think it was John Bogar who referred to it as a “great reef” - and it creates a community of people who are there because they love it. This is what keeps me coming back, again and again, that keeps me experiencing that ‘riot in the heart’ that is theatre.

the island of lost children.

In the photograph the three of them look slightly nervous. It is 1982, and the parents seem impossibly young. They are in summer clothes but the child, not quite two, is wearing a blue velveteen dress that must be far too hot. There are tear-stains on her face. They are still strangers. None of them know this yet, but the child has a tapeworm, which explains the skinny arms and legs. In another year the arms and legs will be chubbier, her hair longer and in pigtails; the three of them will be a family. A little while later, after the social worker visits and the untangling of more red tape, the state of Missouri will rewrite her past, erasing the name she was given at birth and changing the parents on her birth certificate. She will be among the first wave of Chinese adoptions, that first generation of lost children swept across the sea. She will not remember anything before the little red-brick house in Ladue, outside St. Louis. Not the first few months in Zhejiang, where she was born, or the year or more afterwards, in Shanghai.

I rarely talk about it but it is impossible to pretend I never think about being adopted. Having Taiwanese parents - we do not look alike, but we are the same race - has made it easier to assimilate, although assimilate isn't quite the right word. It will never be the first thing you assume about me when you see us together. I have been profoundly grateful all my life for being raised in a Chinese-speaking household, although I did not always understand this. But to ask me how I feel about being adopted is like asking me how I feel about having brown hair; it is a part of me that I can’t ever remember being any different, and it is not anything I would ever change. I do not need to see the place I was born to complete my sense of identity. I do not need to ask the woman who gave birth to me why she gave me up. I am complete. I am not wholly Chinese, Taiwanese, or American, but this cultural confusion is not confined to adopted children; it extends to all people raised by immigrants in a foreign land.

To ask someone about being adopted as if it were something strange or exotic is often well-meant but also, I don’t mean insulting, exactly. I remember, when I was quite young, reading a John Steinbeck story about a boy who didn’t understand he was poor and that he should somehow be ashamed of being poor until his teacher came to his home and pointed out to his father all the ways in which he had been failing his son. I don’t mean that there is anything ever to be ashamed of about being adopted or adopting a child, but when I was younger I felt that talking about it somehow gave it more weight, more importance, than it deserved. This was my family, all the family I would ever remember, all the family I had ever known. That is all I have ever had to say about being adopted.

As a child I would sometimes dream about an island of lost children. I had been told that I'd had another older sister, who was also given up for adoption. In my mind she would look like me, only taller and prettier and smarter. I thought I could find her on this strange island. It would be our country, created for those who were born without one of their own, for the other lost children who were like us. I think this idea came from a passage in Roald Dahl’s FLYING SOLO, when Dahl meets a strange bearded man on a strip of desert which would later become Israel. He turns out to be leading a group of Jewish refugees, who have been given permission to live there by a Palestinian farmer. “We need a homeland…we need a country of our own. Even the Zulus have Zululand,” says the man. Somehow these words have stayed with me all my life. I have never had a homeland of my own. During the Olympics I cheered for the athletes that were the cutest or had the prettiest costumes.

What nobody tells you is that biology is not a guarantee of love, of family, of identity, of a sense of belonging. You have to learn this on your own. The truth is, we are all the same. We are all cast upon a strange shore from the very beginning, by birth or by chance, and we must find our way from there. This is the first journey of our lives, searching for a place in our families. This longing, this search, it stays with us all our lives and follows us into the outside world.

theatre notes. hedda gabler

 I gave up on Intiman Theatre a few years before they collapsed in on themselves early in 2011. This made me sad, because I had loved them when I was a teenager. Intiman introduced me to so many things - Shaw, Ibsen, Pinter, Mike Daisey. But they had won a Tony some years back; the running joke was that the artistic director was hardly ever in Seattle, having taken his “One Ring” (as Mike Daisey referred to his Tony award) and gone to New York. There were fewer local faces onstage now. There was that one play which was so unfinished that a (minor) character mentioned in the review and listed in the credits didn’t actually appear during the performance. A new artistic director arrived, hand-picked by the previous one; it felt to me that while her body was here her heart was still back in New York with her husband and child. To be a SEATTLE THEATRE you have to commit, full-on, and that wasn't happening. I was done; I had moved on.

ACT across town had gotten itself back on track after a rocky few years of their own; with Steven Dietz’s BECKY’S NEW CAR in 2008 I found myself at home there again. A friend had introduced me to Strawberry Theatre Workshop; through my ACT subscription I discovered the New Century Theatre Company. The Seattle Rep seduced me with Bill Cain’s EQUIVOCATION in the winter of 2009, a co-production with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. People were making beautiful theatre, mostly with local talent, and my attention stayed on them. Intiman, with its New York actors and Hollywood progeny, lost me completely. Still, I regretted their loss.

Then rumblings came about of a four-play summer festival, lead by a new artistic director, Andrew Russell. Young and ridiculously adorable, like a Labrador puppy but with a longer attention span, he seemed to be onto something good. I was intrigued, but not ready to commit to anything. I was not eager for ROMEO & JULIET (which I hated as a teenager), or a couple of yet-to-be-confirmed works (this turned out out be DIRTY STORY and Dan Savage’s MIRACLE!). But HEDDA GABLER had distinct possibilities, especially after I saw Marya Sea Kaminski’s Bonnie-and-Clyde-influenced theatre piece, RIDDLED, at the Hugo House back in June. She is mesmerizing, beautiful, with a face that opens up with joy and anticipation or draws in on itself with disappointment, fear, anger, or all of the above. Her eyes widen, then narrow; her mouth splits into a dazzling smile, then pulls tight into a bitter line, like a buttonhole stitched with black thread. A chameleon’s face.

Intiman’s HEDDA GABLER is like a huge table-cut emerald; sharp-cornered, the polished surface turns one way to reflect light back at you, turns another to open up its richly colored depths. Like the emerald, it is not unflawed, but it is still something to behold. The murky language of a previous century has been cut to the bone, perhaps not all of it necessary, but it moves more swiftly than I had anticipated. Our lives seem to turn on one moment, it seems to tell us. A world can change in 48 hours. A lost notebook, a misplaced gun, a night’s drinking with the boys, it can change everything. The things which you could or should have said or done, the pages you burned or did not burn, the truths you did not say. This is life, all the turns you made or did not make leading you, inevitably, to the end…