movie notes.

Two films from SIFF stand out for me particularly, and it's no coincidence that they are both about childhood. The first is Hirokazu Koreeda's 'I Wish,' and the second is Wes Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom.' I understand now that I am particularly drawn to stories about childhood, about hopes and dreams and journeys, first loves and young sorrows, adventures and homecomings. Movies like 'Hope and Glory,' 'Au Revoir Les Enfants' and 'The 400 Blows' have stayed with me for most of my life, and what I look for now in a film is that same understanding of what it means to be young. There is an innocence and freedom and yet not a care-freeness. There is divorce and separation and being orphaned and being misunderstood by one's parents. There are wars and volcanoes and hurricanes. The gaze is a direct one, and it forces you to look inward.

Koreeda is perhaps a direct heir to Ozu's 'Good Morning,' with that same candidness of purpose in the two young brothers. Planning to bring their parents back together, running through their respective cities like the boys in Truffaut's '400 Blows,' ultimately coming to understand that even if their family is apart, there will always be that tie of brotherhood between them.


Anderson has of course his own visual language, verging on twee and yet for me not too overwhelming so. I have loved his work for a long time, and I will always remember what he said when he won an MTV Movie Award for 'Bottle Rocket.' He said something about how a bottle rocket was a little firecracker that didn't get very high off the ground, but it got as high as it was meant to go. His film named for that little firecracker did exactly that; it went as high as he intended it to go. There is always a sense of meticulous attention to every detail, every gesture, every word. Every film is like a perfectly timed firework that goes exactly where he wants it to go.

THE CASTAWAYS (NOTES FOR A NOVEL IN PROGRESS)

FACTS AND FICTIONS ARE DIFFERENT TRUTHS.

When I was a child I envied the sisters who lived at the other end of my street. They had been given up for adoption by their birth mother when one was an infant and the other was a toddler. They were black and their parents were white. I was Chinese and my parents were Taiwanese, and if I didn’t tell you you wouldn’t immediately guess that I was adopted. My whole life I have been grateful for this. Still, I envied the two sisters. They had each other, and they would always have each other.

I have always known, even before I could understand what this meant, that I was the youngest of five girls. Both I and the next youngest sister were given up for adoption some time in 1980, the year I was born, or perhaps 1981. She would be a year older than me, maybe two. I have never asked my parents if they tried to take both of us, or if they had even considered it. For more than thirty years I have been an only child, except for in my mind when I turn out the light before I go to sleep. With my eyes shut I try to imagine her face in the dark. Would we know each other if we came face to face on the street?

Sometimes when walking down the street I catch the reflection of my own face in a shop window. Against the gleam of plate-glass my face is reduced to pale curves and soft shadows, a rounded cheekbone, dark eyes, dark hair. My eyebrows are thick and black but my hair is definitely brown, glowing red when the sun hits it, light and fine as it escapes my ponytail. I wonder if my sister shares this same curiously un-Chinese hair, the same nose, those stubby-lashed eyes. What could I ask her if we ever met? How could I imagine any life other than the one I was given?

I look at friends who have sisters, whose sisterhood is stamped firmly in the lines of their faces, in the shorthanded language they have between themselves, in the fierce protectiveness the elder feels towards the younger. A shiver of longing runs up my neck when my friend tells me of how her older sister would carry her down the hall to their parents’ room when she had nightmares and couldn’t sleep. As an only child our family was a solid, balanced triangle; I never imagined it could be any other way. Except for those brief moments, watching my friends and their sisters, the same eyes in different faces, the same features in different shades. I wonder sometimes, what it would have been like, if we’d been castaways upon the same shore.

a few theatre notes.

Just about a year ago I saw Mike Daisey’s How Theatre Failed America at the Seattle Rep and stayed afterward for the accompanying roundtable discussion. This roundtable brought together actors, directors, people who worked in arts funding, and the artistic director of the Rep, Jerry Manning. There was a sadness and disillusionment that night, from both the people who make theatre in Seattle - people who love what they do so much they are willing to pour their souls out to you night after night, for a lot of time and energy and very little money - and from people who go to the theatre but don’t always feel that what is being produced is necessarily speaking to them as an audience. I walked out of the theatre with a flickering sense of rage touched with despair. A few nights before I had seen THIS at the Rep and O LOVELY GLOWWORM at the Erickson, produced by the New Century Theatre Company. By the end of the year I would see about three dozen plays from several different theatre companies around Seattle. Some of it was terrible. Some of it was amazing. It still wasn’t enough. Next year, I thought to myself, I would do more.

It is the end of May and I’ve seen somewhere between twenty-five to thirty plays since mid-January. Here are the last three:

I still have no idea what Beckett’s HAPPY DAYS is about. There is a sense of the end of civilization, of being as stuck in the past as Winnie is stuck in her mountain of sand. As produced by New City Theatre it was beautiful and intimate and desperately confusing, at least to me, more like a piece of music than a story. You see this echoed in Pinter, too, but that is another story for another time.

BED SNAKE at Washington Ensemble Theatre was a confusion of a different sort. Even with a slightly bigger space than New City’s - it has about forty seats to the latter’s thirty or so - it was still like being crammed into a shoebox. It wasn’t so much a play as a Faustian love story spliced with a rap video, all set to a hip-hop beat. There isn’t any other way to describe it.

The New Century Theatre Company does a monthly reading at a bar near the Seattle Center. Intiman and the Rep are a block away; On the Boards (the old ACT space) is up the street. This time it was Abi Morgan’s TINY DYNAMITE, which is kind of a love story wrapped in the threads of friendship, grief, repentance, longing, and the hum of electricity, interspersed with stories about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Again I am happy to see actors I know and love; again I feel a wave of gratitude for this group of artists who love what they do so much they gather together on their nights off to make more art. This is what draws me to the theatre, again and again, this sense of community, this sense of interaction and collaboration. May it continue, like a ‘riot in the heart.’

this is how we roll. cookbook club.

My cookbook club meets every other month, usually 12-15 of us from a mailing list of about 20. All women. Husbands and partners are not invited, although occasionally one will amble through the dining room or kitchen, collecting themselves a plate along the way. Often there are children, babies, and dogs. But it's really just us, carving out a day of cooking and then an afternoon of eating with a group of friends at the end of a busy week. In a life that is crammed with other things - work, family, the cares and worries that wake you in the middle of the night - you have to take some time that's just for being around other people who make you happy.

It's an organized group. There's the email list and a Google spreadsheet for dishes. Membership is limited, due to space issues. ("Do we talk about Cookbook Club?" "It's not FIGHT CLUB, people!"). We decide on a cookbook together; someone offers up their home for the gathering. At each meeting we talk about what we made, how the cookbook worked for us or didn't, and what we'll do next time. Everyone can cook, except for the few who don't cook and therefore bring the good wine or interesting cocktails. These are women who have *chops,* who aren't interested in making things complicated, only things that taste good. We know if a recipe is or isn't going to work, and how to tweak it so it suits our tastes. There is no molecular gastronomy here. There is, inevitably, too much food. This is how we roll.


Most of us are roughly the same age, in our thirties, with a few outliers. ("I'm old enough to be your mother." "BARELY. Maybe if you'd been a COMPLETE SLUT in high school"). Some of us are closer friends than others, and hang out more frequently. Others I only see every few months, and this gives us a chance to catch up. What keeps the club going is our love of food, of course, but also our love of being together. We talk about our childhoods, the play we saw last week, the dream I had about Martine and I being in Rome, our love for British television. We make time for this. It isn't just about the food.

theatre notes.

I was reading a speech made by the playwright Dennis Kelly this morning, which left me stunned by its clarity. I must confess I am not familiar with his work, but his words kept running through my head all day long. It opens with this: "…political theatre is a complete fucking waste of time." This isn't really true, at least in my mind. The idea of art as political protest goes back thousands of years, starting with the Ancient Greeks. It has existed for as long as we have had anything to protest, often shrouded in hidden symbols or cloaked with history. Think of the Soviets, of Mikhail Bulgakov's play The Days of the Turbins, or Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide. Skip ahead a few generations to Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, which leaps from Victorian colonialism in Africa and its collapse, to sexual repression and its release in 1970's London. Think of Pinter in his last few decades, like the roaring of a lion who cannot rest.

Kelly mentions the AIDS plays of twenty years ago - like Angels in America, specifically, or the ones I knew from the mid-90's - Love! Valour! Compassion! and Lonely Planet. The latter, written specifically for its two actors by a local playwright, had a quiet wistfulness that reminds me of Adam Mars-Jones' short stories from the height of the AIDS crisis. These plays were all born out of a wild grief and anger at this scourge that was cutting a wide swath through the gay community - I am just barely old enough to remember this - but I wonder how they will play out for the next generation, or the one after, or a hundred years from now. Will they take their places next to Shakespeare as something eternal?

The thing about a political play, like any other art of protest, is that is can't just be about the protest. If you strip away the skin and the flesh of political rhetoric, there has to be something of substance beneath it, the bones of story and emotions. It has to stand on its own merits as a work of art. It has to connect with the audience, move them, open their heart and their minds to what's being said. For one night a sea of strangers are waiting to spend two hours inside your head. It has to be beautiful. No, beautiful is the wrong word. It has to mean something.

an autobiography. notes for a novel-in-progress.

This is a true story.

Facts and fictions are different truths.*

I was born in China in the summer of 1980 and adopted shortly thereafter by a young Taiwanese couple. They were living in St. Louis at this time, newly American citizens, and it took a few years for all the red tape to be sorted out so I could join them. It is entirely possible that I was the first international adoption in the state of Missouri. Meanwhile I lived in Shanghai with my maternal great-grandmother and various aunts and cousins. I learned to speak Shanghainese, my first language, which I quickly forgot in exchange for Mandarin Chinese and then English.

I have no memories of the time before I came to St. Louis at the age of two. No memories before the American government placed a stamp on a piece of paper that erased the name given to me at birth. No memories before the night I found myself sitting on a blanket on the banks of the Mississippi River, watching fireworks explode over the St. Louis Arch as I held my mother’s hand. I wore glow-in-the-dark necklaces bought from a park vendor and stuffed earplugs like soft marshmallows into my ears against the booming fireworks.

The passport and birth certificate issued by the state of Missouri with my new name and my new parents gives my place of birth as China, but the country where I was born will not claim me. Nor will Taiwan, where my parents were born and raised and where they returned after three decades in America. A birth certificate recently reissued came back from Jefferson City stating my place of birth as “REST OF WORLD.” I am American by citizenship and education but the rest is and always will be a bit of a muddle. I remember my mother telling me, years ago, “You were born without a country.” Later I realized: I would have to be my own country.

Sometimes I see middle-aged Caucasian couples with young Asian daughters and I feel my heart crack a little along fault lines I didn’t realize existed. I turn and look at families with children that are miniature replicas, or distinct combinations, of their parents, and feel that same sharp crack going in a different direction. And yet my parents and our family is all I can remember, all I have ever known. Any other thoughts and questions and doubts lay tucked away somewhere and forgotten, like the monsters in the closet you hid from as a child.

What they don’t tell you is that all of us are thrown into our families like castaways on a foreign shore, by birth or by chance. You have to learn this on your own. We are all the same. The first journey we take is finding the way to our place in our family, and then onwards into the outside world. This longing, this search, it stays with us all our lives. This is the beauty and the pain of our existence.

*This line comes from The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, by Patricia MacLachlan. I read this when I was about 10 years old, and it is one of my favorite books of all time. I know it by heart. Everyone should read it.

theatre notes. (not really in order).

Spring Awakening (Balagan)
The Bells (Strawberry Workshop)
Old Times (Pinter Fortnightly/ACT) (reading)
Abundant Acreage Available (ACT) (reading)
How to Write a New Book for the Bible (Seattle Rep)
A Shade of Green (Theatre 9/12)
Red (Seattle Rep)
I Am My Own Wife (Seattle Rep)
A Fool's Paradise (Seattle Rep)
Holy Days (New Century)
First Date (ACT)
Night and Her Stars (New Century) (reading)
Or, (Seattle Rep)
The Lucky Chance (Seattle Rep) (reading)
A Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem (Hugo House)
Twilight Zone (Theater Schmeater/ACT)
Torso (Printer's Devil/Theatre Off Jackson)
Happy Days (New City Theatre)
Stuck (Washington Ensemble Theatre)
Freud's Last Session (Taproot)
Pitmen Painters (ACT)
Clybourne Park (Seattle Rep)
{title of show} (Balagan)

theatre notes. the pitmen painters.


It was about ten minutes into the first act of The Pitmen Painters when I started crying and I didn't stop until the intermission. I don't mean full-on sorrowful, heartbroken weeping, or tears of laughter, although it is a funny play and I did cry tears of laughter. I mean the kind of tears that well up when you see something that sweeps a wave of recognition over your heart and mind as the drama plays out across the stage. Like Red at Seattle Rep a few months ago, it's a play about art, the meaning of art, how and why we create it, and why it matters. "Art isn't about answers," says Mr. Lyons, the art lecturer, "it's about asking questions." It's about creating something that wasn't there before, something that only you can see or imagine, and then share with the rest of the world. It doesn't matter than none of these men have ever seen a painting before, spending their days as they do in the dark pits of the coal mines. They paint what they see - the houses of the town, the darkness of the pits, the people in the streets walking against a deluge of rain, a vase of flowers on a table - and it becomes art. This is one side of the play.

The other side of the play is about identity and longing. These men, they know who they are, absolutely. They're miners, except for the one who was gassed in the Somme twenty years before and is now a dental assistant, and another one who is unemployed. Their life is difficult and painful, leaving school at the age of 11 or thereabouts, spending ten hours or more a day crammed deep into the mines, always the fear that a beam will crush you or the earth will suffocate you. In the morning they put on their one-and-only striped suits and walk to work, strip down for the heat of the underground, come back up hours later to shower and put their suits back on and then spend an evening at the pub or perhaps learning about art. The art changes everything. They could be something different besides the identity they were born into, and it opens a world of possibility and at the same time a fear of the unknown. This is the inescapable human condition: our never-ending search for who we are and what we might become.

coda: R. Hamilton Wright has this one line, near the end of the play: "Twenty years, they go by in a flash." It was twenty years ago this summer I saw him for the first time, in The Revenger's Comedies at ACT Theatre. It feels like yesterday. I hope to see him again and again, for twenty years more.

Orpheus and Eurydice.

This is one of my favorite poems of all time, by Czeslaw Milosz. I was 26. I was in love with the writing of Charles Bukowski, and platonically in love with the man who had introduced me to poetry the year before. The latter would end, as these things do; the former has stayed with me and always will. Milosz I stumbled upon, accidentally, first his prose and then his poetry. This poem is the last one in his last book, Second Space. He died around the time it was published, and the poems are a farewell to old friends, old loves, all earthly life and its travels.

It's a long poem. I think it's one of the most beautiful poems ever written.

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

Standing on flagstones of the sidewalk at the entrance to Hades

Orpheus hunched in a gust of wind

That tore at his coat, rolled past in waves of fog,

Tossed the leaves of the trees.  The headlights of cars

Flared and dimmed in each succeeding wave.

He stopped at the glass-paneled door, uncertain

Whether he was strong enough for that ultimate trial.

He remembered her words: “You are a good man.”

He did not quite believe it.  Lyric poets

Usually have – as he knew – cold hearts.

It is like a medical condition.  Perfection in art

Is given in exchange for such an affliction.

Only her love warmed him, humanized him.

When he was with her, he thought differently about himself.

He could not fail her now, when she was dead.

He pushed open the door and found himself walking in a labyrinth,

Corridors, elevators.  The livid light was not light but the dark

of the earth.

Electronic dogs passed him noiselessly.

He descended many floors, a hundred, three hundred, down.

He was cold, aware that he was Nowhere.

Under thousands of frozen centuries,

On an ashy trace where generations had moldered,

In a kingdom that seemed to have no bottom and no end.

Thronging shadows surrounded him.

He recognized some of the faces.

He felt the rhythm of his blood.

He felt strongly his life with its guilt

And he was afraid to meet those to whom he had done harm.

But they had lost the ability to remember

And gave him only a glance, indifferent to all that.

For his defense he had a nine-stringed lyre.

He carried in it the music of the earth, against the abyss

That buries all of sound in silence.

He submitted to the music, yielded

To the dictation of a song, listening with rapt attention,

Became, like his lyre, its instrument.

Thus he arrived at the palace of the rulers of that land.

Persephone, in her garden of withered pear and apple trees,

Black, with naked branches and verrucose twigs,

Listened from the funereal amethyst of her throne.

He sang the brightness of mornings and green rivers,

He sang of smoking water in the rose-colored daybreaks,

Of colors: cinnabar, carmine, burnt sienna, blue,

Of the delight of swimming in the sea under marble cliffs,

Of feasting on a terrace above the tumult of a fishing port,

Of tastes of wine, olive oil, almonds, mustard, salt.

Of the flight of the swallow, the falcon,

Of a dignified flock of pelicans above the bay,

Of the scent of an armful of lilacs in summer rain,

Of his having composed his words always against death

And of having made no rhyme in praise of nothingness.

I don’t know – said the goddess – whether you loved her or not.

Yet you have come here to rescue her.

She will be returned to you.  But there are conditions:

You are not permitted to speak to her, or on the journey back

To turn your head, even once, to assure yourself that she is

behind you.

And so Hermes brought forth Eurydice.

Her face no longer hers, utterly gray,

Her eyelids lowered beneath the shade of her lashes.

She stepped rigidly, directed by the hand

Of her guide.  Orpheus wanted so much

To call her name, to wake her from that sleep.

But he refrained, for he had accepted the conditions.

And so they set out.  He first, and then, not right away,

The slap of the god’s sandals and the light patter

Of her feet fettered by her robe, as if by a shroud.

A steep climbing path phosphorized

Out of darkness like the walls of a tunnel.

He would stop and listen.  But then

They stopped, too, and the echo faded.

And when he began to walk the double tapping commenced again.

Sometimes it seemed closer, sometimes more distant.

Under his faith a doubt sprang up

And entwined him like cold bindweed.

Unable to weep, he wept at the loss

Of the human hope for the resurrection of the dead,

Because he was, now, like every other mortal.

His lyre was silent, yet he dreamed, defenseless.

He knew he must have faith and he could not have faith.

And so he would persist for a very long time,

Counting his steps in half-wakeful torpor.

Day was breaking.  Shapes of rock loomed up

Under the luminous eye of the exit from underground.

It happened as he expected.  He turned his head

And behind him on the path was no one.

Sun.  And sky.  And in the sky white clouds.

Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!

How will I live without you, my consoling one!

But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,

And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.

theatre notes. garage theaters.

I thought of Mike Daisey talking about garage theaters when I went to see Stuck at the Washington Ensemble Theatre a few weeks back. This is Seattle, so it's not so much a garage theater as a coffee-house theater, like the New City a couple miles away. WET is wedged into a storefront next to Fuel Coffee - a door from the café leads directly into the hallway of the theater - and it has about forty seats squished together in front of a slightly elevated stage. I'm really hoping it wasn't in this theater that Daisey portrayed a masturbating bishop in a performance of Jean Genet's The Balcony many years ago; it's a pretty intimate space. The first three rows would've gotten an eyeful.

Seattle is full of these theaters, including WET, the aforementioned New City Theatre, and The Odd Duck, housed in a former garage. Balagan was in the basement of a trendy loft building before decamping to the Erickson, and Theater Simple used to have a black box in a now-shabby downtown mall. Theater Simple was where I saw The Master and Margarita some fifteen years ago, with a bare-bones, gender-bending, role-switching cast, and lots of equal-opportunity nudity. (Margarita, after all, spends most of her part of the story naked or barely clothed. It must make it a difficult novel to adapt to the stage).

I've been spending more and more time in all kinds of theaters in the year since seeing Mike Daisey's How Theatre Failed America at the Seattle Rep last spring. From big houses (ACT, Seattle Rep), to middle-sized ones (Taproot), smaller ones (Theatre Off Jackson, Strawshop, New Century Theatre Company), and tiny coffehouse theaters (WET, New City, Odd Duck). The big theaters have more money and time, and produce something altogether more polished, but they also have more expectations. They have subscribers to please and board members to keep happy and a budget that must be balanced at year's end. They need to make art, but they also need to make money.

The small theaters don't have any of that. There's a kind of freedom, instead. The freedom to try anything, even if it doesn't quite work. The freedom to take more risks, produce new work, or put on something considered too 'difficult' by the larger theaters, like Genet's The Balcony. It must be so liberating to find your footing as a writer or an actor in a space that's the size of a shoebox with a set built by the cast from a few bits of plywood and curtains from the Goodwill. This is why I go to so many plays, even if they aren't necessarily very good.

Rarely do I actually think a play isn't very good. It isn't that I have no taste (though some might disagree), but rather, there is nearly always something good to be found. If they can communicate to me, somehow, that this is a project all the people involved clearly believe in, rightly or wrongly, then it justifies itself. And theatre can be made anywhere. In a coffeehouse, in a bar, in the park, in a deconsecrated church hall. You just have to make it.

a few brief notes about photography.

I had dinner tonight with two friends and their toddler son. The husband half of the couple had just acquired a new camera, and he handed it to me to try out. It was heavy and complicated and focused itself much more quickly than my dinosaur (my beloved dinosaur camera, 5 years old in human years, 2000 in digital years). Through the viewfinder I watched the toddler concentrating on his edamame at the opposite corner of the table. I waited. As though in a dream I saw a bean pop out of its pod and perform a neat, gliding leap, and this moment was caught on film, or rather on the SD card of my friend's digital camera.

A few thoughts I have about photography.

One: Often a great photograph is about waiting for the right moment. You have to be patient.

Two: Conversely, you also have to move fast. This moment won't ever happen again, so you have to be ready for it.

Three: That said, if you miss the moment, don't dwell on it. Move on. There will be other moments and other photographs.

theatre notes. torso.

It was impulse, an impromptu night at the theatre, the second-to-last showing of Printer's Devil Theatre's Torso, at Theatre Off Jackson. It's a small space tucked into the basement of what used to be the old Wing Luke Museum, down in the International District. In the early 90's we had season tickets there; I remember most clearly the production of The Skin of Our Teeth, and another play about the Japanese internment camps during World War II. Some years ago the theatre was resurrected, and I had been hearing good things about them and about this latest production. The deciding factor was the presence of Sarah Rudinoff, who I loved in Cloud 9 last summer.

Torso surprised me. It was so much funnier than I had expected. (You could tell which members of the audience were theater people by when and how loudly they laughed). I had expected the searing anger of loss, but a thread of comedy runs through it, springing from a bad blind date told in flashback, which continues on as the relationship grows. The story splits into two jaggedly parallel lines, leaping back and forth in time, four of the five cast members switching characters and costumes in a blink of an eye. The heart of the play is Daphne, crippled by the grief of her sister's death, four years before, and struggling with the news that her childhood friend, Marlo, has been charged with the murder of her own brother. One thing about Sarah Rudinoff, who plays Daphne: she is quite extraordinarily beautiful, especially when a fleeting moment of joy lights up her face, like the last bright glow of sunset before nightfall. She has this openness of expression, of anger or fear or pain or disgust or laughter, the emotions passing as swiftly as the dialogue.

I can't stop thinking about Torso, about whether Daphne will cross that same line as Marlo and Dom have done, whether her need for justice will lead her to her brother-in-law's door, gun in hand. Whether killing her sister's lame-ass husband who let her die will give her any kind of peace, or only haunt her more. These questions remain unanswered, as they do in real life. The questions that remain are: how do our lives spiral so quickly out of control, and what separates those who have murder in their hearts from those who cross into action? I walk away with these human stories and turmoils going round and round in my head.

make art.

A poem by the artist Tim Etchells in answer to the question "What can art do?" has been circling around and around in my mind for well over a year now. It says, in part, "I wanted to tell you that art is loved as a hammer/because of how well it breaks lies and speaks truths/knocks down obstacles/the Incredible Hulk it is or the Superman, a good thing to have on your side…"

That poem came into my mind as I was thinking about why I chose to support Jessica Martin's short film For Patrick through Kickstarter last week. The reasons are many and yet simple at the same time. I thought about what a joy it is to watch young actors grow over the years, evolving, learning and stretching themselves, daring to do things ever more new and different and difficult. I thought about what brings me to live theatre, the passion of it, the electric thrill of watching people doing what they love, night after night. For a moderate bit of money you get to spend a few hours inside someone else's head, inside a world that has been weeks or months or years in the making. I thought about a note tucked into my program at a play produced a few summers back at Strawberry Theatre Workshop that said something like "You eat local food. Why not support local theatre?" If I support local theatre, why not support local film?

For Patrick, as Jessica tells us, is a local film, made here in Washington state by homegrown talent. For twenty years I've watched recent graduates from the acting programs at the University of Washington or Cornish College of the Arts find their footing on Seattle stages before heading off elsewhere. It is a continuing joy to see some of them stick around and make art here. Jessica Martin I've seen several times in the past year, in some of the Pinter Fortnightly readings and in Double Indemnity at ACT. Her costar Aaron Blakely was in Seattle Rep's production of How to Write a New Book for the Bible a few months back (a co-production with the Berkeley Rep, who premiered it last fall). Their short film was made last winter, I think, with barely any money. Not so much a shoestring as a piece of thread and a bent safety-pin, I reckon. Here is a chance to give them this encouragement: keep making art. I took it. Wouldn't you?

The Kickstarter page for For Patrick is here.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Mike Daisey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. holy days. 

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. Red.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few things I am looking forward to this spring:

Holy Days, from New Century Theatre Company

Red, at Seattle Rep

Spring Awakening, from Balagan Theatre

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

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In memory of Peter Cipra.

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

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

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

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

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