Category: Performing Arts

Directors are responsible for choosing an interpretation about what the play means and removing obstacles so that the actors can do their work. Particularly in text-based classic theater, the director must make a convincing argument what this play means and, to some degree, why it is being done at all. Book-It’s Anna Karenina fails to convince because it fails to argue.

If there was a lesson to be learned from ACT’s regrettable 2011 production of Lieutenant of Inishmore it was simply that performing Martin McDonagh’s material isn’t as easy as it looks. José Amador views Theater Schmeater’s latest attempt at McDonagh and finds that they come tantalizingly close to nailing it.

Why haven’t we institutionalized the act of getting a divorce? Seems a simple enough question, one with a ready enough answer, if a bit glib: Divorces are fraught with so many emotions we’d rather not be confronted with in public, that the idea of making it a formal thing just seems a bit…gauche. But what if, at the same time that marriage turned from being a business transaction into the ultimate institutional act of love, divorce became an officially sanctioned ending of that love? This is the question that Holly Arsenault’s Undo asks.

Beating Up Bachman is playwright Wayne Rawley’s latest offering, which is another of his characteristic explorations of small town life in the Pacific Northwest which is at turns exceedingly humorous, well observed, touching and more than a little dark at its core. José Amador has the scoop.

Having already sung the praises of the nature of the programming at On the Boards (an endeavor I am likely to pick up again in the future), let us turn our attention to the organization’s latest offering, She She Pop’s Testament.

The production is three-quarters pure genius and one-quarter excellence. One can hardly complain about that mixture. The whole production gives me an optimism about the stage that maybe other companies will finally try to make a break from the petrifying effects of “seasons” and “shows” and rediscover what the San Francisco Actors Workshop under Herbert Blau and Jules Irving knew back in the 1950s: the play is the thing, and it is ready when it is ready.

Another day, another award ceremony. The Seattle Theater Writers Critics’ Circle reveal their winners’ slate for the second annual Gypsy Rose Lee Awards.