theatre notes.

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

That was eighteen months and seventy plays ago.

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

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

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

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

you must live until you die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. the hometown boys.

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

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

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

the island of lost children.

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

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. hedda gabler

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. chekhov: vanya and the seagull.

Quite recently I watched Louis Malle's VANYA ON 42ND again for the first time in over a decade. I'd seen it when it first came out, in 1994 or perhaps on video in 1995, and again in college, when I was 20 and studying Russian literature. What I didn't know until I saw the accompanying documentary included with the Criterion edition (released earlier this year) was that the film was really the culmination of a continuous, long-running rehearsal. The director André Gregory had been gathering together a group of actors to workshop Chekhov's UNCLE VANYA over a period of three years, without any intention of actually performing it before an audience.

The idea, for Gregory, was for the actors to keep working on a play, this masterpiece, so intently that its language, every breath and every emotion, would become a part of themselves. It would never be produced in a theatre (although they did, eventually, perform it for a series of very small audiences of "loved ones"). It would be for them alone, for the sake of dismantling the text down to the last molecule, until it came alive in a way you don't ever achieve with the few weeks of rehearsal you normally have. Instead of marks and directions that must be hit the same way every night for the month of a theatrical run, VANYA would become something organic, something that changed each time they met. The filming of this is unforgettable, because it captures a moment in time, and the extraordinary intimacy and beauty of both the language and the emotional connection between the actors.

VANYA ON 42ND was very much on my mind as I have been gearing up for The Seagull Project, which kicked off recently with the first of a series of readings at ACT Theatre. Unlike André Gregory's VANYA, THE SEAGULL is working towards a theatrical run at ACT next January. This months-long rehearsal they have committed to - fitted in between other projects as many of the actors are in current productions around Seattle - will ideally give them that same profound connection to Chekhov and his characters. They won't be words on a page anymore, but real, living, breathing people, who pull us into their world for a single night.

a theatrical memory.

In the program notes for the wonderful ONE SLIGHT HITCH at ACT Theatre some weeks back there was a conversation with the playwright Lewis Black and Marianne Owen, who starred. They'd been in New Haven, at Yale, in the late 70's and early 80's, and it recalled to me an era of my parents' life, from before I was born. Lewis and Marianne mentioned another member of their group, the playwright/director Bob Sandberg, and here our stories overlap. Bob knew my parents, as his wife Ginger Zakian was a colleague of my father at Yale in the mid-70's. Ginger and my parents were and are scientists, but in the late 70's my parents left New Haven for St. Louis, where I spent my early years. By the mid-80's we were all in Seattle, and this is where my story takes place.

I remember vividly a Thanksgiving dinner at the Sandberg-Zakian house in 1987. It had to have been that year because I recall intently describing a film I had just seen to Megan, the eldest daughter of the house. This film was Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants. I was embarrassed to look up from discussing this film to realize that the grownups had fallen silent and were listening to us, too. I was also mortified to be the only girl wearing pants, or rather black jeans, and my favorite dress-up sweater with the pattern like jewel-toned stained glass. All the other girls were in skirts and dresses, but my pants-wearing turned out to be rather handy when we started rehearsing our Thanksgiving play.

Ah, yes, the Thanksgiving play. As this was a theatrical household, of course there would be a Thanksgiving play, rehearsed before dinner and performed before dessert. Megan, dark-haired and pretty, about four years older than I, scripted and directed our skit. Some 25 years later she looks much the same and is still, like her father, a playwright and director. As I recall our play was about a village invaded by a giant monster turkey which gobbled up everything in its path and was eventually blown up by the remaining villagers who daringly threw sticks of lighted dynamite down its greedy throat. I played the monster turkey, swallowing up villagers who crawled between my legs (remember those pants!) and then ran off to plot my demise.

My ventures onto the stage were few and far between, ending altogether by the time I was in 7th grade. Perhaps that's why I remember them so vividly. But the love of the theater, of what happens in a room of people who have a grand passion for what they do, who give their souls over to art for a precious few hours so that you, too, can step inside their heads and hearts, this has stayed with me all my life. It always will.

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.