scar tissue.

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

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

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

theatre and poetry notes.

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

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

A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER

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

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

a death by drowning.

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. ACT.

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

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

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

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

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

springtime notes.

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

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

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

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

London days.

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. Pinter, again. London edition.

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

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

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

Maybe I need to see it again.

theatre notes. London edition.

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

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

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

theatre notes.

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

That was eighteen months and seventy plays ago.

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

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

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

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

you must live until you die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. the hometown boys.

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

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

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

the island of lost children.

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

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

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

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

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

theatre notes. hedda gabler

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

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

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

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

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.