Reading. Mary Oliver.

The other day, a friend wrote about the mother of her son's classmate, who was scheduled for some upcoming surgery. It brought to mind her own two battles with cancer, now in remission. She'd written of her experiences before, the first when she was 28, the second several years later, when her sons were 3 and 1. I had read her blog before we even met, and I was a little in awe of her. It was clear that L. is the kind of woman who makes everything around her beautiful, who seems to take pause and drink in all the moments that we should all stop and treasure. It felt like those months of illness and recovery, especially when her children were so small, were what made L. so determined to live with such awareness.

The anger and fear that she wrote about, of her own mortality and the body and life that would never be the same, of missing precious months of her sons' toddlerhoods, reminded me of the journalist Ruth Picardie. She died of breast cancer at the age of 33, leaving behind a husband and twin babies. For them her absence was not merely for the months of treatment, pain and anguish and hope, but for the rest of their lives. I knew of Ruth from her sister, the writer Justine Picardie, and from the late Elspeth Thompson, who gave us this poem. This was read at Ruth's memorial service:

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

- Mary Oliver, American Primitive.

I've always loved Mary Oliver for her clear way of writing about love and loss, of the fleeting moments of sadness interleaved with splashes of happiness that make up life. This poem is pinned to the wall above my desk at work, along with several others. It never fails to break my heart and then put it back together.

School lunch.

This is re-posted from my other blog because I think each one reaches a different audience. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but never mind. This is about food. Later I will write about art; the two are connected.

I have been reading and re-reading this post in reference to the current battle over school budget cuts in Great Britain and alternately weeping from rage and heartbreak.

I grew up in the south end of Seattle. We lived on a nice street, the highest in the neighborhood, with sweeping views of Lake Washington and the mountains beyond. But the local elementary school and high school were down in the valley below, in one of the city's poorer neighborhoods. I had tested into what was then called the Horizon program, which meant that our math and writing skills were one grade ahead of the average. Four grades - 1st through 4th - shared a vast space which contained three open classrooms, one central common area, and a small lab; we were in a newer wing of the building, separated from the rest of the school. Our paths rarely crossed those of other students, save for one day when an older boy tried to beat me up on my way home from school. I escaped with a scraped knee, and was never allowed to walk home alone again.

It was an interesting time, the mid-to-late-80's. M. told me the other night that she had been bussed into our school district because of the Horizon program but also because of "forced integration." That I don't remember. What I remember is that we spoke in hushed tones on the playground about the supposed drug house down the street and joked that classmates who wore red were "Bloods" and those who wore blue were "Crips" (rival gangs). I don't know if there were any actual gang wars going on but I remember used needles and condoms ("Eeeewwww!!" we said) on the playground and a drive-by shooting late one summer, before school started. Then I left for the manicured grounds of the city's most expensive private school, in fifth grade, and never looked back.

But this is all irrelevant, or perhaps it isn't. We were talking about school lunch. Our elementary school served breakfast and lunch, every day. I usually ate breakfast at home - whole wheat toast, English muffins, oatmeal, cold cereal, congee, or fruit and yogurt - but I also dimly remember school cafeteria pancakes, or perhaps it was French toast, with sausage, maybe some fruit, maybe orange juice in a plastic foil-sealed cup, like the ones they give you on airplanes. It was cheap, like the lunches, which I also occasionally ate (flabby pizzas, corn dogs, Salisbury steak), washed down with plain or chocolate milk (a rare treat). I think it cost a dollar. And for many kids, it was free or otherwise discounted. I wasn't really conscious of it at the time; I led a happy, sheltered, middle-class life that I later came to understand was incredibly privileged. I remember being shocked that some kids ate their lunches as if it were the best thing they'd ever tasted. I think about it now, and it breaks my heart.

People - like Jamie Oliver, and others who, like this friend, are following his example - who are trying to change the way children eat are doing an amazing, incredible thing. In one sense, the system (as it stood 20 years ago) was doing one good thing: it made sure that children got fed, twice a day. In another sense, it wasn't: the food was crap, except for those for whom it was the best thing they had. It is part of a larger problem - where does the responsibility lie? On the school system which can't afford it, or on the parents who can't afford it? The more I think about it - and I say this as someone who is single and childless and doesn't see that changing anytime soon - the more it makes my heart ache. I don't have any understanding of what it must be like to have to send my child to school hungry. I hope I never do.

Twenty years have passed since I last ate in that elementary school cafeteria. I still remember the flimsy partitioned foil trays and the plastic sporks, the crates of half-pint milk cartons. We have to do better.

Pinter Fortnightly. Madagascar (JT Rogers).

And now for something different.

To shake things up a little bit after a dozen or so readings of Harold Pinter's expansive body of work, tonight's reading is of a work by a different playwright, JT Rogers. To keep things connected, Madagascar won the 2005 Pinter Prize for Drama, but I will leave aside any comparisons to Pinter. It isn't fair to Rogers, or his play, or my understanding of it, to hold up this single work against the vast landscape that makes up my experiences with Harold Pinter. There isn't a history, a memory; I walk in the door with no expectations, except from the actors, who are, as always, perfect.

Madagascar is about secrets and mysteries. It is about memory, and how memories and family histories are made. It plays with time, as three people at three different points of time unravel their interconnecting stories. A character's place in time shifts their memory of what happened in the past. A mother and daughter, Lilian and June, are locked in an emotional triangle with their son and twin brother (respectively), who is not a part of the play and yet is spoken of so vividly it seems that he appears before you, along with their also unseen husband and father. The third character onstage, the mother's lover, adds his own dimension to these unseen characters.

At the heart of the story is the son's disappearance. The mother's story takes place in that moment before he was supposed to arrive; his sister's retraces the five years after that. His twin spends two or three years searching the world for him, before finally accepting that he is gone forever. But is he? In her last days, a mysterious postcard arrives, with the words "I'm still here." But we never know what it means. There are too many questions unanswered. Lilian slips away and drowns in a lake; June takes the perfect combination of pills in that same Roman hotel room where they stayed in her childhood. There is a kind of terrible symmetry to their deaths: the mother, when she feels that her son is gone forever, and the daughter, when her brother comes back from the dead. (Or does he?).

In the end, it is the lover, Nathan, who is left behind in that Roman hotel room in the present day. June has died, as has her mother, years before. Like the rest of us in the audience, he is full of unanswered questions. Such is life, without clear-cut answers.

Pinter Fortnightly. The Hothouse.

By now the memories of all the Pinter readings and performances I've seen are piled high in a corner of my mind, tangled together like fallen leaves. Two full plays - Betrayal (at Intiman in 1995) and last night's The Hothouse - countless one-acts, a handful of revue sketches, all have gradually coalesced together into a single body of work. At first sight, The Hothouse seems apart from the others, a broadly-drawn comedy which reminds me of Simon Callow's comment that "being British is inherently funny." But the physical, almost slapstick humor evolves, slowly, and darker elements creep in, as with Pinter's early works, such as The Room and The Dumb-waiter. There are explosions of temper and electric shock experiments and drinks thrown in faces and a sudden, violent end (which, of course, occurs off-stage).

The Hothouse comes from that earlier time, the late 1950's, the era of Pinter's "comedies of menace." I believe it was left unfinished and shelved, although one scene where a hapless institution employee undergoes testing by two other employees appeared as a revue sketch around the same time. This brief sketch was performed at an earlier Pinter Fortnightly reading, and the familiar words made me give a little jump of recognition in my seat. The Hothouse in its earlier incarnation then disappeared for twenty years, before it was resurrected and expanded, picking up undercurrents of political commentary along the way. (By now Pinter had passed through his period of "memory" plays - Betrayal, A Kind of Alaska - and had moved onto more overtly political plays).

What becomes clear across these different thematic eras is that a visible thread holds together this body of work: a fiercely beautiful mastery of language, a sharp intelligence, a black sense of humor. It creates a sense of cohesion between these fortnightly readings, helped in (a very great) part by a somewhat rotating repertory of actors who come together on their days off, who do these (free) readings out of love. It couldn't be done without a group of people who have chops, and boy do they ever have chops. The kind of skill and experience that allows this ever-changing crew to pull together a smoothly polished reading from a single afternoon of rehearsal. There is a sort of perfect alchemy between the staggeringly precise language of Pinter and the tremendous emotional and intellectual chemistry of the actors. Comedy is timing. Drama is trust. Here we have both, apparent with every word, every moment and movement, every look.

ACT Theatre (which hosts these Pinter Fortnightly readings) and I, we go way back. 1992. I was still in sixth grade when the season began. (I was not allowed to see the first play of the season, Steven Dietz's Trust, because of "mature thematic elements"). I remember the old theater near Seattle Center, in lower Queen Anne. There would be a crush of people at the snack bar during intermission and leaving at the end of the evening felt like being a salmon swimming upstream. I remember the parking lot where subscribers got to fit their cars into some kind of Tetris-like puzzle. I remember the first play I saw there, Shadowlands. The new theater downtown felt like another world. It still does, a little, even though it is now second nature to park my car at the Convention Center and make my way down the escalators. But the familiar faces remind me, again and again, that this will always be the theater I remember.

www.acttheatre.org
www.pinterfortnightly.com

Pinter Fortnightly.

In an interview from 1964*, Louis Malle spoke about being a part of the French New Wave, saying that "The good fortune that the directors of the new wave had is this: they made their first films the way others write their first novels, injecting into it the sincerity and emotional power of youth...the problem is to create the second or third films, and then a body of work." Malle himself did create a beautiful body of work, shifting and evolving from film to film, some of the later ones building on an idea first touched on in an earlier work.

The idea of developing a body of work after an explosive starting point of the first work has stayed with me since I first watched this interview, and echoes in my mind with each Harold Pinter reading I attend. This is what I am most grateful to Frank Corrado and the Central Heating Lab at ACT Theatre for providing: the opportunity to see a body of work unfold before me, making connections in my mind even as I enjoy them as individual plays.

First we see John Aylward and R. Hamilton Wright in The Dumbwaiter, which is alternately hilarious and menacing as two assassins await their assignment in a basement room. It owes much to Waiting for Godot, and Laurel and Hardy, the comedic pull between two men, and in this case the chemistry between Aylward and Wright, conveyed by a mere sideways glance or fierce glare. Unlike the Pinter plays that twist and invert our sense of time, it moves in a logical progression: prologue, dialogue, anticipation, suspense, climax, ending. Wright loses his shit, as he always does (I can't put it any other way, and nobody does it better). It is a little like The Room, Pinter's first play, with the same shifting sense of laughter and fear.

The second play is actually a radio play from the early 1980's, Family Voices, and while equally hilarious, it is actually more emotionally devastating, when you consider that it was written at the end of a personally turbulent time in Pinter's life; he had divorced his first wife, who was falling apart (not long afterward, she died of alcoholism), and married his second wife. In the process he became estranged from his only child, a son, which was echoed in Moonlight, a decade later. A mother, a father, and a son read their letters to each other aloud. But are the letters real or imaginary? It is funny, as only Pinter can be funny, but beneath the humor is a bleak expanse of emptiness, of distance, the kind of distance that you only see between a parent and child, and it is heartbreaking.

I thought again, looking at the faces of these actors I have loved and admired for nearly twenty years, R. Hamilton Wright and John Aylward and Clayton Corzatte and, of course, Frank Corrado, how lucky Seattle is to have this kind of theater community. How lucky I was to grow up with it. How glad I am that it is still going. A new generation of actors is continuously emerging, but the previous one more than matches them, their polished experience standing ground against this new wave. This year I chose to support two theaters: ACT, with a monthly membership that allows me to watch pretty much everything, and Strawberry Workshop, whose next works I look forward to even before the lights fall at the end of the play. I hope to do more, in the future.

*This interview with Louis Malle is included on the Criterion Collection edition of Les Amants.

Strawberry Workshop. Breaking the Code.

I always walk into the Strawberry Workshop theater knowing that my heart is about to be broken. The plays I have seen so far are full of unbearable things, either brutal acts we humans inflict on each other, or choices we have to make. (The exception is Gutenberg! The Musical during which I laughed so hard tears poured down my face and snot ran from my nose as though from a faucet). I look at my program, recognize the actors, feel a thrill at the thought of seeing them again. When the stage lights illuminate their faces I see the ghosts of previous characters, for a moment, and then the present story takes over and the memories fade away.

Breaking the Code is about the mathematician Alan Turing, whose efforts in code-breaking during World War II helped defend Great Britain from the German forces. He was rewarded with an OBE for his wartime work. Then he was charged with homosexuality, illegal at the time, in the early 1950's, and treated with female hormones to reduce his sex drive as part of his parole. A few years later, he committed suicide. That someone could be treated as a criminal for his sexuality only sixty years ago is mind-boggling. Heart-breaking. That many preferred to live a lie is equally so. And sixty years on, the world is only a little better. Matthew Shepard died twelve years ago next month. He would have been 34 years old this December.

The play shifts back and forth in time, between schoolboy days and wartime interludes and the events leading up to and after his arrest for "gross indecency." I still don't understand how something you do in the privacy of your own home, not even out on the front lawn in view of the neighbors, can be considered "gross indecency." I probably never will. The law itself is grossly indecent, because it presumes that a higher authority - the law - can pass judgment on the most intimate of acts that should remain unwitnessed by others. If Turing had remained silent, if he had not called the police about an unimportant burglary that took place because his lover had told an untrustworthy acquaintance his address, then perhaps his life would have continued on with his research, with his computers, with his mathematical theorems.

But he didn't keep silent, any more than he could marry a woman and pretend not to be a homosexual. He makes the ultimately devastating choice to not ignore the petty thefts of a few pairs of shoes and trousers. It would be tantamount to paying blackmail, he tells the inspector, who is forced to turn him in. Why can't you just let it go, he cries. The inspector gives him a long look, which I can see clearly from the second row. There is something like pity in that look. The inspector cannot turn away, and let him go, any more than Turing could remain silent, and live a lie.

The set is a spare black space, with a carpet incised with a diagram of the Golden Mean, motherboards dangling from the ceiling, a nod to the early computers that Turing developed. Between scenes the actors carried furniture in and out to delineate different times and places. You are so close you can see the actors' faces clearly, watch the play of emotions across their faces. Inspiration. Love. Guilt. Heartbreak. Anger. Shame. It is not an ensemble piece, for the whole of the story rests on Alan Turing (and the actor who plays him, Bradford Farwell), but the emotional weight of the story comes from his interactions with the people in his life - his boyhood love, his mother, his superior at Bletchley Park, a co-worker who loved him and whom he might have married, his lovers, the inspector who eventually arrests him.

The heartbreak comes from watching the intellectual brilliance of a man become eclipsed by his inability to control his emotions. Inability is the wrong word. It is more like a defiance, arrogance. His world is centered around himself, his work, his desires. He cannot be bothered to lie to save anyone's feelings, nor, in the end, to save himself.

Let me tell you a story about love. a wedding.

B. and A. got married on Vashon Island last weekend. When I say "got married" I mean they stood up in front of a crowd of family and friends and spoke vows that were written from the heart and exchanged rings that had been tied around the necks of their two dogs. B. fed A. a piece of chocolate on a wooden spoon, and A. poured B. a sip of her favorite wine, traditions whose origins I forget. In the fine Jewish fashion, they threw a glass on the ground and stomped it to smithereens. That their marriage is not recognized by the state of Washington or indeed forty-four other states in the United States of America is deeply and profoundly unfair. What difference does it make if it is two women or two men instead of a man and a woman, promising each other their enduring love?

I have been to many weddings in my life, especially in recent years as friends and colleagues and the children of my parents' friends are getting married, in waves, it seems. They are always fun. You get dressed up, and there is cake. There are speeches, some awkward, some funny. Often there is dancing. Sometimes there is more tequila than you have drunk in your entire life up to that point (or so it seems), but that is another story. This was something special. Everyone who was there - most of the guests in 1920's garb, the theme of the wedding, and lots of women, including the brides, were in beaded flapper dresses - was there out of love. Not out of obligation. Only love. Only because they wanted to be there, to see two beautiful, loving women pledge to a life together.

It was a beautiful day, a beautiful wedding, perhaps the most beautiful one I've ever attended. There were wildflowers in vintage tins and a vast buffet of potluck offerings. The glamorous guests floated around a meadow fringed with blackberry brambles and Madrona trees, like glittering butterflies. There were women dressed as flappers and women dressed as men and men dressed as gangsters, and Amelia Earhart. I felt lucky to be a part of it, lucky to be with my friends, lucky that they have come into my life and become a part of it, over the past year. What a thrilling, wonderful year it's been.

The Laramie Project. Strawberry Theatre Workshop.

I was a freshman in college in the fall of 1998. I had the hand-me-down Mac laptop that had gotten me through high school and a narrow single room in a suite of five girls (there should have been six of us, but one never arrived). I wore my hair in a long braid down my back. I had spent the summer studying Italian, and had now moved on to Russian. I was 18 years old and 3,000 miles from home. I cried when I said goodbye to my father in Seattle and again when my mother left me in Rochester, New York with a brand-new down comforter that still covers my bed, twelve years later. These are the things I remember.

Sitting in the audience at the Strawberry Workshop's production of The Laramie Project I remembered other things, too, things I didn't remember I had known at the time. The description of the wounds on Matthew Shepard's body. The statement his father gave at the trial of one of the two young men who beat his first-born son to a bloody mess and left him tied to a fence to die. I had remembered the part about the beating and the tying to a fence but I had forgotten, or thought I had forgotten, the fractured skull, the lacerations around his head. And I wept.

The Laramie Project is an ensemble piece in the truest sense of the word, and it was seamlessly performed by the eight actors on stage, shifting between interviewers and interviewees, between past and present, memory and truth. It is the fourth production I have had the privilege to experience here at the Erickson Theatre off Broadway, the present home of Strawberry Theatre Workshop. Some of these actors I know from previous plays at other theaters, which is what I love most about Seattle and its closely-knit theater scene. Again and again I am reminded about how lucky I am to live here, to witness the closeness and creativity that we have here.

On the back of the program is this note: "How many times have you been encouraged to buy locally grown food whenever possible? By doing so you'll be helping preserve the environment, and you'll be strengthening your community by investing your food dollar close to home. The same thing is true for the arts."

I'll be coming back.

http://www.strawshop.org/

the lost art of writing letters.

I don't write very much, anymore. My life has been swallowed up by Facebook, by Twitter, by photography. By weekly breakfasts with friends and impromptu dinners with these same friends, meals where I can barely eat for laughing. There are bookclubs and plays and field trips to strawberry fields. My circle of friends has grown, split into different groups that nonetheless bump against each other and intersect, the way they do in a small town dressed as a big city, which is what Seattle is. Last year M. found me on Twitter, after 20 years apart. We had not seen each other since fourth grade. Then I found A. again, who I have not seen since we were 11 or 12 and I was visiting her grandparents one summer, in Massachusetts.

A. and I used to be pen pals. Her grandmother was a dear friend of my mother, and as I had no grandmother of my own I felt lucky to have her in my life. We wrote letters back and forth, me on a succession of girly stationery (I recall one was pale blue paper printed with a teddy bear with a heart and flowers) in my childish scrawl, and Gigi in her impeccable handwriting on cream paper. I still have some of her letters. I still remember her address. She died early last year, and I miss her, even though we did not communicate in recent years. Now I see A. often. We are grown-ups in the city of my childhood. We are friends by choice now, because we love so many of the same things and not because her grandmother is a friend of my mother.

Lately I have been writing letters to friends again, inspired in part by The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, which is a lovely epistolary novel that I read about a year and a half ago. A. and I had not met up yet, we had only been exchanging emails. M. had not yet found me on Twitter. My world was about to change, was already changing, and I didn't even know it. How lucky I feel to know these people, who I talk to every day, on Twitter, on Facebook, on the phone, at the farmer's markets, at parties and dinners and breakfasts. How lucky I feel to find a perfect card in my enormous stash of stationery, and curl up on my bed with a book for a writing desk and a pen in hand, to tell them, I love you for being here.

The Passion of Frank Corrado.

I am a few minutes early for this week's Pinter Fortnightly reading; the room is still half-empty. There seem to be more chairs, this time. The stage runs parallel to one long side of the room instead of sitting squarely at the end. There are more props; chairs and round café tables with bottles of wine and mineral water. The actors are milling about, disappearing and reappearing behind a partition at the end of the room, and I wonder (not for the first time) just what exactly is back there and how many people could possibly fit in what cannot be a very large space. I chat with an elderly lady who agrees with me: we are lucky to have a theater community as rich and intimate as this one. I tell her I grew up in this town, with these actors. The room fills with more theater-lovers, and we begin.

At the heart of it all is Frank Corrado (who reads the stage directions in a voice that can only be described as "mellifluous"), whose passion for Harold Pinter is what brought us all here tonight, has been bringing us all together over a series of readings that began last summer, and, I hope, will continue. Bit by bit, with each play, the separate pieces of Pinter's ouevre have been assembling themselves in my mind into one cohesive body of work, anchored by the now fifteen-year-old memory of Betrayal, which I saw at Intiman in 1995. Pinter's last play, The Celebration, is entirely different, and yet not. It is pure comedy, but with that occasional sharp jab that Pinter does so well, those verbal spears that people stick in all those places they know will hurt you the most.

In The Celebration (which Pinter wrote after a disastrous restaurant dinner), two tables of diners are having dinner in a posh London restaurant. Their raucous conversation grows progressively rowdier as the evening goes on, interrupted intermittently by a historically (and hysterically) name-dropping waiter, an imperturbable maître 'd, and an emotionally oversharing maîtresse 'd. As an audience, we grow progressively rowdier to match the verbal antics onstage, whooping and laughing along. The energy in the room is something else. We are a community of theater lovers, of Pinter-lovers. The actors are enjoying themselves as much as we are, and I am wiping away tears (of laughter).

A series of three short sketches follows, each funnier than the next, each depending on that complex mastery of inflection, expression, and timing that breathes life into comedy. We roar with laughter at the innuendo of Trouble in the Works, howl at the painful job interview in Applicant, and explode when Frank Corrado and Kurt Beattie end things with the hysterical Victoria Station. Again and again I am blown away by the chemistry between the actors, their ability to hit upon that comedic alchemy that is all the more extraordinary given that they are reading from a script, having had almost no time at all to rehearse.

The pure, electric excitement of being in the theater is like nothing else.

There is one more reading scheduled for the Pinter Fortnightly series. I won't be here, unfortunately, but I know it will be as wonderful as all the others have been.

Last week the gardener/writer Elspeth Thompson died, at the too-young age of 48. She was a wonderful writer, with a gift for seeing beauty and possibility in everything. Everything she touched was transformed into something extraordinary. Her blog chronicled her rehabilitation of two dilapidated Victorian railway carriages on the coast of Sussex into a cozy, charming home nestled into a Paradise-like garden. Elspeth's latest project was about "gardening against the odds," creating glorious Edens in the most unlikely of places, in tiny London balconies or in the barren soil of her own seaside garden.

Elspeth often wrote about fragrant white flowers; in the wintertime she had vessels of narcissus bulbs everywhere, and one of the photographs from her last post showed pots of blooming hyacinths, one of my favorite flowers. Earlier today I walked to Marigold & Mint, a new flower shop several blocks away, and returned with my arms full of sweet-scented hyacinths and heirloom daffodils, as well as a stalk of flowering rhubarb and a bundle of pink jasmine. At least I think it’s pink jasmine. These flowers are for Elspeth.

I don’t know the whole story - most likely I never will - but her obituary tells of a dark depression that descended in recent weeks, and in the end, she took her own life. My heart breaks for her young daughter, and her husband. That someone who looked and sounded so happy, who saw the beautiful in the ordinary, who could conjure up small patches of Paradise in the bleakest of surroundings, could be overcome by such despair that nothing could bring her back from the brink is beyond comprehension. The sadness I feel must be magnified a hundred thousand times for her family.

What I understand now is that the people who rage and storm and speak of their grief, who stand on cliffs and howl at the wind, who write about the black despair that leaves them shaking, unable to get out of bed, these are the people who give you the chance to talk them back into the world of the living. These are the people who are asking for help. Not the ones who slip away silently and leave you with a million questions left unanswered.

Pinter Fortnightly. The Room and The Collection.

I remember clearly, as I've said before, seeing a performance of Harold Pinter's Betrayal at Intiman Theatre in 1995. That was fifteen years ago. That was all the experience I had with Pinter until last summer, when the actor Frank Corrado channeled a life-long passion for Pinter into a series of fortnightly readings at A Contemporary Theater. I caught the last one, Moonlight, and it left me eager for more. My eagerness was rewarded by a new company, Shadow and Light Theatre (founded by the aforementioned Frank Corrado and the sublime Suzanne Bouchard), and a production of two one-act plays, Ashes to Ashes and A Kind of Alaska a few months ago. Then the Pinter Fortnightly series started up again, and although I missed the first one, I made it to the second.

This time around I recognize some of the players: Anne Allgood, from Rock 'n' Roll last fall, and Elise Hunt, from last summer's Moonlight. There are six actors, besides Frank Corrado (who presents the plays and gives the stage directions), some of whom are in current productions and are here on their night off. We start off with The Room, Pinter's first play, and suddenly I realize that now I have seen more Pinter than I have any other playwright, save for Shakespeare. (Though Shaw, Stoppard, Chekhov, Ackbourn, and Steven Dietz are close behind). The Room is, like his other works, by turns sharp, funny, somewhat unnerving and suspenseful, rising unexpectedly in a shattering crescendo that causes me to jump about a foot in the air at its climax. (In this last part it is unlike the other plays I have seen).

The Collection is different. It is more like a Noel-Coward-like drawing-room farce, entertaining, but still with something unsettling about it, the way Pinter is always unsettling. The more details you know, the more truths you hear, the less you understand. As it draws to a close I finally realize that I can imagine all the plays I've seen so far as one cohesive body of work, that Pinter, as a playwright, hit the ground running with The Room and just kept going, creating a language, a sense of atmosphere that remains entirely his own. I can hardly wait for more.

Pinter, again. (more thoughts).

It struck me early on in Ashes to Ashes that one thing Pinter understands more than anyone is how people know each other so well, as siblings (in Moonlight and, in a way, in A Kind of Alaska) or friends, lovers and spouses (Betrayal and Ashes to Ashes, and Moonlight as well). You know the other person's weak points, what gets under their skin, how to hit them where it will hurt most. That is the uncomfortable part of watching his plays, catching people when their defenses are down, when their innermost feelings and thoughts are dragged out, laid bare. There's something real happening on stage, something you see in yourself or in others, things you have done to people you love or that they have done to you. That kind of savage honesty became clear to me with the first time I saw Pinter onstage, in a 1995 production of Betrayal, and has stayed with me ever since.

After yesterday's performance of A Kind of Alaska and Ashes to Ashes the director, Victor Pappas, made a comment about the evolution of regional theater, beginning as a repertory of actors and growing into something quite different. After 18 years of theater-going in Seattle I've come to think of the local theater scene as almost a repertory of local actors, some of whom have been fighting the good fight in the name of art for more than twenty or thirty years. What then develops between these wonderful actors is an intimacy, a rapport, an emotional chemistry that communicates itself in a level of trust onstage that could never happen in three weeks of rehearsals between perfect strangers. The kind of brutally emotional honesty that Pinter demands needs that kind of trust, that tenderness which keeps his lacerating truths from becoming unbearable. This is what I love most about Pinter, that clarity, that sharpness, just softened by a touch, a wry twist of the mouth that is almost a smile.

Pinter x 2.

I had been eagerly awaiting Shadow and Light Theatre's production of two one-act plays by Harold Pinter since I first heard about them a few months ago. Last summer there had been a series of readings of Pinter one-acts, and I was lucky to catch the last one, Moonlight. It brought together some of my favorite actors from the 18 years I have spent in Seattle theaters, and reminded me all over again of the starkly, emotionally devastating beauty of Pinter. It was the first time I had seen Pinter performed since Betrayal, at Intiman Theatre in 1995, which remains one of my most enduring theatrical experiences.

A Kind of Alaska and Ashes to Ashes brought together the director (Victor Pappas) and one of the actors (Frank Corrado) from that 1995 production of Betrayal, and added one of my most favorite actresses since the very first play I ever saw at ACT (Suzanne Bouchard), as well as Kimberly King, who played the title role in the play which was solely responsible for bringing me back to ACT after nearly a decade's absence (Becky's New Car, by Steven Dietz, 2008). Corrado, Pappas, and Bouchard are the three founders of Shadow and Light Theatre, a new company devoted to the works of Harold Pinter. The energy and passion of Mr. Corrado (the Pinter Fortnightly series was his creation) and Ms. Bouchard that was so apparent in the Moonlight reading last summer crystallized into two polished gems of plays, in the intimacy of ACT's smallest theater, the 92-seat Bullitt Cabaret.

Pinter is about memory; it is the common thread that twists through the four works I have seen so far. In Betrayal, it is about a friendship, a marriage, and an affair, unraveling backwards in time. Moonlight is about grief, jumping back and forth from past to present as its characters deal with a past loss and an impending one, the death of a daughter (past) and father/husband (future). In A Kind of Alaska, a woman awakes after 29 years asleep, and she, her sister, and her doctor each struggle with all they have lost with those years. And Ashes to Ashes turns a husband's questions about a wife's former lover into a game where the landscape of memory remains murky and shadowed, shifting like mountains of sand that give you no solid footing.

The thing about Pinter is that the beauty of the language is balanced by the brutality of the emotions they convey, that the sharpness of every word that the characters throw at each other, like knives, is leavened by an unexpected tenderness, that the bleakness that wraps around the stage like a dark cloud is lifted by jolts of black humor. I walk away feeling drained and confused and yet thrilled by what I have seen. I look forward to more with the greediness of a small child who tastes something wonderful for the very first time.

Theater. Seattle Repertory Theater.

The other day J. mentioned an interesting play was finishing up its run at the Seattle Rep. I hadn't been there in years, and even during the time we held season tickets at Intiman or ACT we had rarely set foot in the Rep, mere yards away from Intiman on the northern edge of Seattle Center. I looked it up, and then noticed that it was a production that had originated at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, down in Ashland, Oregon, and that its star was Anthony Heald, whom I remembered from my first trip to the Shakespeare festival my sophomore year of high school.

The festival is like nothing I've ever seen, a tight company of actors who return - or base themselves in Ashland - year after year, playing multiple roles in multiple plays in one of three theaters. One theater is a minimalist black box - this is how I remember Anthony Heald, playing a mysterious, brutish man in an adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, a classic theater with a proscenium stage, and an open theater modeled, of course, on Shakespeare's Globe. The plays I saw at in Ashland are among some of the best I have ever seen in my life, and when I saw that Equivocation had first been produced there I knew I had to go.

The theater was nearly full, on the last night. There was a certain energy; people were eager to laugh, quickly and loudly, so much so that I even missed a few lines here and there. The production was slick. Costumes, sets (however minimal), lighting, everything was dead-on. Everything was tight, in a way only a production rehearsed and performed over and over again, with the resources of community that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has, can produce. The actors became so completely woven together that it came together into one single, seamless performance.

It is an angry play, written out of anger after the playwright watched the World Trade Center towers collapse eight years ago. It is an imaginary story of what happens when Shakespeare tries to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot, and becomes mired in a murky tangle of truth, lies, and conspiracy theories. There is his sorrow and grief over the death of his son, his alienation with his daughter, his despair at trying to write a play that will not get him hanged. Sir Robert Cecil, the power behind the throne, attempts to split apart their theater company with his secret machinations, but he cannot. The community of a theater is too strong. When the actors tell Cecil that he cannot break them, they are not just talking about the characters; they mean what they say: they are a company in life as on stage.

I leave with my mind on fire, every nerve in my brain electrified.

Pinter Fortnightly.

Some weeks ago I became aware that ACT hosted a twice-monthly reading of Harold Pinter plays. It seemed interesting, but I never actually made it downtown until the very last reading. Two of my most favorite actors - Michael Winters and Suzanne Bouchard - would be participating, and several others I was familiar with. And, it was the last one. I had to go. I ran into the theater, and guided by someone in the lobby headed towards the Buster's Special Events Room, a long, airy space with gilded chandeliers and rows of chairs. About thirty or forty people were there, students and theater-lovers and a few familiar faces that turned out to be other actors I have seen onstage here and there, during the sixteen-odd years I have been experiencing theater in Seattle.

Frank Corrado - who I am also long familiar with - takes the stage, and it immediately becomes clear that these Pinter readings are his passion, that it is his energy and drive that brings these fortnightly occasions together. Such is the community of actors in Seattle that he has pulled other longtime friends and colleagues in on their night off - Matthew Boston has two more nights of A Thousand Clowns to go - to join in. Can you imagine loving your work, your art, so much that you want to do it on your day off? The actors take their seats, all familiar faces to me, even if I can't quite place two of them, and the play begins. Tonight's work is Moonlight, one of Pinter's last plays, about a dying man, his wife, and his estranged sons, haunted by the memory of a long-dead daughter. Without staging and props I must confess I get confused at times, and have trouble following along.

But it is a fascinating play, biting and sarcastic, unexpectedly gentle, using commonplace cliché to mask deeper emotions. It is funny and sharp, exactly what I expect from Pinter, and heartbreaking, too, even if you didn't know that Pinter was estranged from his own son. And seeing the actors I have loved since childhood up close and in person is so exciting I bounce a little in my seat, find myself sitting up a little taller. What makes it all so exciting is the energy between the actors and the audience, many of whom seem to be old friends. As long as there are people like this, actors with enough passion and love for their work, and theater-goers who appreciate it, then the theater will survive. It will grow. It must.

Theater night. Intiman.

Still high off the hilarity of Below the Belt the night before, I head down to Intiman for A Thousand Clowns. The usher warns me that the play is almost three hours long, but then the lights go down and the laughs begin, and the time slips by. The center of the play is Murray Burns, a grumpy, curmudgeonly iconoclast who quit his job working for a children's television show and yells at his neighbors and plans trips to the Statue of Liberty. That he hates the world is obvious; equally obvious is his love for his nephew, Nick, who lives with him in a one-room apartment but spends the night with a neighbor whenever Murray has to "work." Your "work" left behind her gloves, points out Nick in the morning.

Reality crashes in when two social workers come to inspect their living situation and decide whether Murray is an acceptable guardian for his nephew. Murray confounds their every question, their every examination into his and Nick's life, until the investigation ends somewhat explosively, with the male half of the couple leaving, the female half staying...ending in one of the most hilarious mornings-after I have ever seen (with a rendition of "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" involving both uncle and nephew on ukeleles somewhere in between).

Beneath the humor there is still a burning anger that causes Murray to rage against everything, everyone, makes him yell at his neighbors from the open window. He can't make allowances, he can't make the changes that will help him keep Nick from being taken away. He can't force himself to accept a job, any job, especially not his old job writing jokes for a desperately unfunny man who has a children's show in which he performs while costumed as a giant squirrel dressed as a clown. (It is terrifying). He can't accept Sandra, the social worker, as a steady presence in his life, while she redecorates his one-room apartment with flowers and cushions and purple curtains. He can't be what Nick needs him to be, because that means that he would have to change, to grow up, to compromise. He can't. Or can he? Can any of us?

Theater Night. ACT.

From my seat all I could see was the back of R. Hamilton Wright, and I recognized him immediately - the shape of his head, the tilt of his shoulders. He is older, now, of course, but then so am I. The Revenger's Comedies was back in 1992, the very first play I ever saw at ACT, as a sixth-grader. Now it is 2009 and I am at the theater on my own, glad that I made the choice to go for season tickets, glad that I have a reason to head out one Tuesday night a month and go to the theater. I make my way through the parking garage and down the silent escalators of the Convention Center to the passageway that leads to one of my favorite theaters. ACT stands for A Contemporary Theater, and most of its works are modern plays, or modern interpretations of classic plays, such as a Tennessee Williams reworking of Chekov, or a twenty-first-century adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, last month's play.

Below the Belt is about three men marooned in the company compound of an unnamed corporation who produces parts for something - we aren't told what - in some far-off corner of the world, which is unidentified. Certainly it is some part of the world which requires Americans to live and work in a walled "compound" patrolled by armed guards to protect them from whatever is beyond those walls. Two of the men - R. Hamilton Wright and Judd Hirsch - are inspectors, and a third man, John Procaccino, who is their boss. It is brutally funny - for all that we say that women are cruel to each other, men are no different, only they do it differently - and nobody loses his shit onstage better than R. Hamilton Wright. I hurt from laughing. The theater is full, and we all hurt from laughing.

Readings. Mary Oliver.

The crowd at Benaroya Hall is not the usual symphony crowd. Here is a sea of silver-haired women, natural fibers, neutral colors, ethnic shawls and scarves and jewelry, very little makeup. Not sleek and black and gleaming gold, glittering diamonds. They are clutching volumes of poetry, hoping for an autograph at the end of an evening of poetry. The hall is nearly full, 2,500 Mary Oliver fans. E. is here, with her friends, and it was she who introduced me to the poetry of Mary Oliver a year or two ago, as she introduced me to Donald Hall more recently, just this year. I can see her, a few rows behind and to the left, a halo of curly grey-blonde hair. I wave, but she does not see me, on the far right of the auditorium.

Mary Oliver is a small woman, or appears to be, behind the podium. She introduces her sign-language translator, a handsome man wearing all black. She is sharp and funny - unbelievably funny - and every word seemed to captivate the entire audience. We were spellbound, laughing and sighing in turn, like one giant, single organism of 2,500 souls. When she announced that she would read, by request, the poem Wild Geese, a collective murmur swept over the crowd like a wave. There were twenty-five poems in all, several of them brief haikus written while a broken arm made typing difficult, one long poem that was a single, fractured sentence lengthened by pauses and dashes. But this is the poem that everyone knows.

Wild Geese.

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

I first encountered this poem in A Book of Luminous Things, a poetry anthology collected by Czeslaw Milosz, and it never fails to capture my attention.

SAVE THEATER.

Last night I went to ACT to see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. On a Tuesday night, the theater was about two-thirds full, much as it was at Intiman a few weeks ago, at Crime and Punishment. I get the sense that the theater scene in Seattle is dying, and it breaks my heart. I grew up in Seattle, going to the theater every month during the season, which runs from late Spring to Fall, interspersed with the symphony and modern dance performances by visiting artists. Art is about passion, and you walk away touched by someone else's emotions, hurled across the stage, sending itself in waves through the audience.

This is the first year that I have committed myself to season tickets for two theaters, even if it means I have to go alone. Now when I sit in the darkened theater watching four Mr. Hydes converge on a stricken Dr. Jekyll and feel a trickle of anticipation run up my spine, or when I watch the hapless Raskolnikov hurl himself across the stage, I know I have made the right choice. When I watch actors I have seen onstage since I was in middle school, I feel something electric in my brain, in my heart. I grew up with these faces, these voices; I want this sense of continuation to go on, I want my children (not that I have any children, or even a prospective father for them) to have this same experience. I want theater to live.

You have to have a passion for what you do, my father tells me. It is enough to be able to experience other people's, if only for a few hours, two nights a month.