a year at the theatre.

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

Things I will remember about 2011:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

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

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

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

Reading. Grossman.

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. Double Indemnity.

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

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

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

reading. Didion.

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

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

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

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

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

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

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

ACT and Pinter Fortnightly.

theatre notes. Betrayal.

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

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

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

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

Pinter Fortnightly, at ACT.

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

theatre notes. september skies.

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. two queens, one throne.

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

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

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

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

Mary Stuart is at A Contemporary Theatre through October 9.

theatre notes. inherit the wind.

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

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

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

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

a few thoughts on regional theatre.

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

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

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

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

part four.

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

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

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

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

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

part three.

(Read part one and part two).

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

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

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

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

to be continued...

*from The Master and Margarita.

part two.

(Read part one first).

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

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

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

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

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

part one.

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

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

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

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

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

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

www.pinterfortnightly.com

movie notes. the tree of life.

(contains spoilers).

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

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

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

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

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

draft 3.

(for whit).

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

theatre notes. brownie points.

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

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

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

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

theater notes. mike daisey. (x2).

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

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

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

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

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