Kittens in a Cage at Annex Theatre
We’ll get to the vagina jokes, the lesbian obsessions, the greaser language, and the revealing costumes. These elements of Kelleen Conway Blanchard’s Kittens in a Cage, while varyingly successful in flagging attention, are not the soul of the play.
Macha Monkey’s Sweet Nothing, a (grim) fairytale at Annex Theatre
John Allis returns with an in-depth look at Macha Monkey’s latest production.
boom! theater’s New Works Festival: Over: Exposed & boatcanoetubfloaty
The boom! theater company is one of Seattle’s more adventuresome young theater companies who recently concluded a six month New Works Festival, selections of which the company will take on tour later in the year. John Allis discusses two of the pieces: Gesamtkunstwerk!’s Over: Exposed and boom!’s own boatcanoetubfloaty
Book-It Rep’s The Art of Racing in the Rain
One of Seattle’s bigger theater production companies stages a play centered around a talking dog. No, the Rep hasn’t brought back Sylvia; instead Book-It Repertory has mounted The Art of Racing In The Rain, based on the novel by Northwest author, Garth Stein. John Allis weighs in with his experience.
boom! theater company, New Works Festival, Phase II
The offerings of the New Works Festival, varying drastically in tone and form, are matched in a number of combinations throughout it, making for continuously-changing playbills. So that while Mountain of Dreams, for example, goes up one evening alongside Vitruvius and Fight, it’ll share a bill the next week with Over: exposed. As a result, performances compliment and/or clash with one another to varying degrees from night to night, and each evening is by design unique.
Seattle Public Theater’s Back Back Back
In order to review Back Back Back, a play about three baseball players who struggle with the decision to use steroids, we appropriately sent a baseball fan with some knowledge of the issues at hand. That baseball fan also happened to be Star theater critic, John Allis.
Death, Sex: Election Season
In an espoused effort to direct attention to the talents of playwrights, the nine ten-minute plays that comprise Balagan Theatre’s shorts festival, Death, Sex: Election Season, draw from one pool of eleven actors, each of whom portrays several roles in the evening. Similarly, in further textual emphasis, all shows are directed by either Shawn Belyea or Jake Groshong, reining the evening’s offerings into a shared sensibility.
Taproot’s Freud’s Last Session: Philosophical Jousting In A Fictionalized Setting
The West Coast Premiere of Freud’s Last Session, Taproot Theatre’s latest production, theorizes the conversation held between C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud; John Allis found much to ponder in the performance.
Stuck: the Right to Atrophy
Is the pursuit of the right to atrophy a dramatically compelling one? This is the question that continues to occur to me as I reflect on playwright Jessica Hatlo’s Stuck, up now at Washington Ensemble Theatre.
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