Theatre: Rocky Revival

 Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks, Directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton, Arts West, in co-production with the Hansberry Project, Through March 1.

It has been rerun sort of season this year. We've already had Come From Away return to the Rep, and now here's another play the Lovely Bride and I saw at the Rep all the way back in 2003. The LB and I didn't really care much for it. Here's the review I posted at the time. And we STILL feel that way after the new production. The only difference is that I know more about plays now than I did then. 

Topdog/Underdog is about two impoverished African-American brothers living together in a single room. Lincoln plays President Lincoln at an arcade where people pay to assassinate him (was this ever a thing?). He used to run 3-card monte but swore off it. Booth, his younger brother has no steady job, but gets by boosting stuff and dealing with his girlfriend. The two spend the two and a half hour runtime in their small apartment, squabbling and trying to exert dominance over each other. Lots of cursing. Lots of yelling. Lots of violence just bubbling beneath the surface. Stuff escalate to 11 regularly, then ratchets back half a notch, then cranks up again. 

The characters are pretty irredeemable, in that you are just yearning for some Save the Cat moment, when they reveal they have heart and affection for each other and a glimmer of hope in their lives. No dice, here. Chekov's Gun checks in early, and hangs about for the duration, and the characters' moods flash back and forth erratically. 

The characters are petty and venal, not even evil enough to merit our anger or pity. The actors, on the other hand, are really, really good, which they need to be to handle their personalities. You see flashes of humanity, understanding, and pathos before it all gets buried in one more escalating argument. I'd love to see ML Roberts and Yusef Seevers in something else, in part because they do not give up on their characters, and try to bring some nuance to them.

One thing that is better with this revival is the set. As opposed to a bare-ish stage with hints of the world around them, their apartment at Arts West is a cluttered mess that reflects their lives. There is even a curtain installed of a bleached American Flag, hung upside down. Not subtle, but then play isn't as well. 

Back twenty-plus years ago, I asked the question "Pulitzer? This won a Pulitzer?" Yes it did, and a whole bunch of other awards as well. And the revival a few years back won more. This is definitely a case where my viewpoint does not line up with others who are experts on the craft. And to be honest, it was a full house that evening, the stage manager counting all the full seats before the performance. The side wings were filled with what seemed like high school seniors - maybe an English class? I'd love to sit on the post-play discussions about this one.

OK, enough belly-aching. It was a frustrating play that has not aged well with the passing years. The most positive thing I can say is that it shows glimmers of possibility for those involved. In the meantime, I'd recommend you check out Here There Are Blueberries at the Rep. 

More later,

Theatre: Memorial

 Here There Are Blueberries by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich Conceived and Directed by Moises Kaufman, Seattle Rep through 15 February.

Yes, here's another review for the Rep. And a big part of it is that we were late attending The Heartsellers (see next entry), so this one is next in queue. And the comparison is pretty darn amazing, showing the huge range of what theatre can do.

So. Nazis. 

Here There Are Blueberries is about a photo album sent to the Holocaust Museum in 2007. The photo album, a relic of WWII, has photos of Auschwitz. But not photos of the prisoners, but instead of the guards and administrators. Julia Cohen (Barbara Pitts) is a junior curator who gets the initial offer of the album and follows it through, unpeeling the onion of who had the album made (an officer at the camp) and what the album showed. 

And what the album showed was the banality of evil. It did not show the prisoners, the showers, the crematoriums. It did not show the dead, the victims, or the survivors. Instead it showed the guards in their everyday lives of picnics and visits from the top brass. Posed pictures and candid shots, captured with the Leica cameras that were coming into vogue at the time and made affordable for most Germans (in America, the Kodak cameras were much the same). The photos are of the type that show up on the social media these days, of people laughing and enjoying themselves IN THE CAMPS THEMSELVES.

The album poses questions - who are the people in the photos and how could they condone the extermination of others? Plus, what to do with the photos from a group dedicated to commemorating the victims, not the oppressors? We follow not only the discoveries in the albums (like size of the Auschwitz complex and the lodge on the far end, used to reward the guards and workers with days off from their monstrous tasks). And the post-war effects of the individuals and descendants of the criminals - the silence about the war years, and the denial of the participants. "How were we to know that the crematorium right next to our living quarters was used to incinerate people? That the air we breathed was the carbonized remains of our prisoners?".

The play touches on the mechanization and compartmentalization of the Holocaust. It was a genocide made possible by the technology of railroads and record-keeping and modern poisons. It was a crime against humanity of which each individual person in the chain had but a small part and as such could not consider themselves completely culpable. It was very similar to people talking about lynching here in this country. "I didn't kill him, your honor. I just held the rope for a little while, and sometime in a the confusion, the victim just died". These people held the rope.

So yeah, it a sobering, stunning play. The presentation is matter of fact, aided by the pictures themselves presented in multimedia. The stagecraft supports but does not overwhelm. The ensemble switch from museum workers to descendants to the victims themselves. Against the current background of ICE, authoritarianism, detention centers and Nazis once more marching in the streets, it hits harder. The only change is that the Leica cameras and Kodaks are replaced by the cameras are on our phones, recording atrocities in real time, giving us no excuse to say "How were we to know" when the butchers bill finally comes due. 

A tough play. Go see it. More later,

Theatre: Strangers In A Strange Land

 The Heart Sellers by Lloyd Suh, Directed by Sunum Ellis, Seattle Rep the 1 February.

Usually the Lovely Bride and I have tickets early in a show's run, but this time we didn't. We returned from one of the Lovely B's Tax seminars in Bellingham for our first chosen Sunday afternoon, and were completely wiped out, so we swapped our tickets in for a later date two weeks later, which proved fortuitous because the LB pulled a muscle and was on crutches for the next week (she's recovered nicely, thanks for asking). But its late in the run when we got to Rep for this one.

And it's a split decision. The Lovely Bride loved it. I was more neutral on it. I didn't hate it, but didn't connect as much for me. Let me give you the basics.

The Heart Sellers is about two women having a conversation. Becca Q.Co is Luna, an excited, chatty Filipino with a non-stop patter and little in the way of a filter. Seoyoung Park is Jane, a quiet, timid Korean still coming to grips with the English language. Neither Luna, nor Jane are their birth names, which is part of the challenges they're facing in this new world. Both are married to medical students, and are left to their own devices while their husbands pull long shifts. Both are outside traditional American society, and are lonely. Luna encounters Jane in a local grocery and invites her home. The play is about that evening of two women from different cultures uniting in the shadow of a larger third culture, and what they are a changing, giving up, and not surrendering in the process.

Like I said, it's a split decision. It didn't connect for me, and felt like an extended SNL skit with Gilda Radner and Loraine Newman. The stakes were low and the pacing sometimes difficult as conversations would start and stop in a natural fashion, and the two women had a lot of physical business to cover over the bare spots (both actors are excellent physical comics). Plus, the characters got drunk over the course of the play. The actors, though, were absolutely brilliant, and held the audience through those blank spots and delivered meaningful and authentic performances. So I ended up neutral.

The Lovely Bride loved it because it connected with her own personal experiences, where she uprooted her life in Pittsburgh after we were married and moved to Wisconsin, where she had to cash in her Susan B. Anthony dollars to do laundry, a glass lasagna pan fell out of a cabinet and smashed her Wonder Woman glass, and a Phyllis Schlafly was on Public Radio that same morning. So yeah, that culture shift hit her hard at the time, and as a result, the play resonated strongly with her. 

The play is set in 1973 (They name-check Nixon's "I am not a crook" speech), which increases the distance between me and the characters. The set, however, was pure vintage (I think we had a refrigerator that shade of brown-green), and the music is on-spec - they were playing Elton John and Carole King in the pre-show and the LB and I were singing along. 

But I understand where the Lovely B is coming from, and appreciate what she went through all those years ago (Happy 43rd Anniversary, dear), and while I was not moved by the play, I can recognize is a heartfelt presentation about home and hearth and where one's ultimate heart lies. Worth seeing.

More later, 

At Home in the Storm

Yes, there was some flooding. We're doing OK. Thanks for asking. 

 I don't talk that much about my neighborhood in the blog these days. Grubb Street is located on the East Hill of Kent, in the most northernly part near Panther Lake. When we moved in (years and years ago), the area was a mix of small farms, orchards, and houses with big yards and a lot of trees. Since then we've seen much more development. The horse farm at the corner became a huge development, and smaller developments have shown up on a lot of the side roads. Next door was when we moved in a wooded lot with a small cottage, but that plot is being developed into 13 huge houses with very small yards.

And despite the neighborhood disruptions, that development has been doing generally OK by us. We have a lot more sunlight in the yard for the gardens. The developers hooked up to our water main badly and we got some nasty water bills (which they offered to cover, which is nice). And at one point they cut my internet connection (Wire from the house across the street to a main line) with a backhoe as they were re-digging the sewer line, and again, put it back in working order by the end of the day. They did take down two huge pine trees on the properly line, which provided shade for the house during the summer. Those, I really miss. 

Anyway,

We have a horseshoe driveway in the front of the house, which is good for access and parking when friends come over. And in the center of that horseshoe, we have a couple more big pines and a dead/dying maple. The maple has been dead/dying for years, had split into two large trunks, and one of the two looks like it had be struck by lightning somewhere along the way. At the base we have a number of rhododendrons (the property two lots over was a rhododendron garden, and these are descendants). But we like the level of separation between the house and that street the maple and the other trees in the front provides. 

Cue the atmospheric river. 

The atmospheric river (A term that thrown around a lot out here these days) is a steady, heavy stream of water-laden air that starts in the Philippines, crosses Hawaii (gaining another title of "Pineapple Express") and then makes landfall between Alaska and California. Usually we don't get hit that hard. This past month, the Seattle area got hit hard. Our rivers in King County tend to be short and shallow, and our valleys steep and narrow, so that when we get hit with rains, the rivers swell quickly, to flood stage and beyond.

You've seen the pictures. The Skagit and Snoqualmie Rivers in the northern parts of the county overtopped their banks with the first wave of storms, swamping farms and communities.  Then the Cedar River, which runs down Maple Valley and through Renton itself, hit well over flood stage. And then the Green and White Rivers, which broke levees and flooded entire housing developments and warehouses. Pumpkins from an inundated farm upstream have been spotted floating down the Green. Roads through the passes have been closed due the flooded streams undercutting and collapsing the road surfaces. So, yeah, that's pretty bad.

As I say, we're OK from the flooding, being on a hill. The nearby Panther lake overflowed, flooding the local fields but not coming up over the road (there was work on the drainage system there about ten years back). But we were hammered by the wind coming through with the variety of storm fronts. 

And one of the massive trunks of the dead/dying maple snapped about 20 feet up and toppled. The good news is that it did not take out the power line. The bad news is that it blocked one of the entrances to the horseshoe driveway and took out our Internet connection and the mailboxes.

Oh, I haven't mentioned the mailboxes. We had three mailboxes out front, which, like everything else out here, have a history. The original post was put in by the neighbor's father-in-law in the 60s, and was fashioned by convicts guilty of drunk and disorderly charges (the neighbor's father-in-law was a local sheriff). When we moved in, we had to adjust it, and the Lovely Bride and the neighbor built a flower box support for the three boxes, using tools the neighbor had gotten under the GI Bill. Like I said, everything here has a story. And this is what was splintered and crushed by the falling tree, the mailboxes smashed and buried under a tangle of branches.

And we recovered. I managed to hack away most of the medium-sized branches, and was pleased to discover that my electric chainsaw worked after all these years, and that I had enough extension cords to reach from the garage to the front. We called a tree service that hauled away the huge main trunk and got a bid to take down the rest of the dying/dead maple. I spent a week cyber-crashing at a friend's house, mooching his Internet to do the day job. Eventually we got the Internet service restored (after long discussions about which corner of the house they needed to hook it up to). The Lovely Bride purchased new mailboxes, built a new support for the boxes (using a perfectly good piece of cedar planking we had in the garage), and restored the mail service (which will need to be adjusted and cemented in once the rain finally stops). 

And like I said, we're doing OK. It was a bit more eventful than we would have liked, but a way to end the old year and begin the new. And we're just waiting for the next big storm.

More later, 

Happy Holidays from Grubb Street

 We wish you all a happy, safe, and secure Holiday Season.

Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Luc Olivier Merson (1879), MFA, Boston.

More later,

Theatre: Woman, Waiting

Penelope, based on the writings in the Odyssey by Homer, Music, Lyrics & Arrangements by Alex Bechtel, Book by Alex Bechtel, Grace McLean, and Eva Steinmetz, Directed by Kelly Kitchens, Arts West, through December 19.

A second musical in a mere matter of days, but Penelope serves other ends than the big-ticket Come From Away. It is small, intimate, and personal, a one-woman performance based on Penelope, wife of Odysseus. Penelope is the one left behind when Odysseus goes off, first to war, then on his adventurous perambulations to get back home. Homer presents her as the prize at the end of the journey, but she is also just as cunning as her husband. Most notable is her putting off her would-be suitors by weaving her mourning shroud in the day, and unraveling it again in the evening. But she is all that and more. 

Chelsea LeValley is Penelope, and Penelope waits. She worries, fusses, prays, runs the city, bats away the oafish suitors, rages, raises a son, longs for her lost mate, and sustains. LeValley pulls it all off not only with an incredibly strong voice but through her physical actions - weaving, prostrating herself before the gods, and ranging from angry challenges to residing in the single chair in the center of the stage, a small table with a decanter of whiskey and a single glass. LeValley is one of the most gifted singers I've heard at the Arts West, which regularly does musical shows, and she dominates her material and her character's emotions.

She is literally backed up by on-stage musicians at the back of the stage, dressed in black, that serve as the Greek (of course) chorus and the voice of the goddess when she confronts the deities that have denied her news of her husband. Consisting of violin (Amanda Spires), Viola (Lauren Hall), Cello (Kumiko Chiba) and Drums (Mitchell Beck), and led by Music Director/Artistic Director Matthew Wright on the keyboards, they are ever-present and but reserved, letting LeValley take command of the proceedings. 

The songs themselves are clear, emotional and emotive. They have a folk-pop quality to them that verges on country, and LaValley's delivery feels grounded and midwestern. Accessible. She rolls through her emotions and uncertainties in every song, as she makes her way to her own fulfillment. The songs vary through the spectrum of emotions, an LaValley delivers every note perfectly. 

Penelope's domain is a raised circular stage in the center of the room, with stairs leading off at the third-points. The theatre put small tables around it, creating a cabaret feel as LeValley descends and wanders among the audience. There's a problem there, in that the tables (and their occupants) blocked the front rows of the audience, a lot. A small woman sitting next to me was totally stage-blocked by a very tall man at a table in front of her. I offered the woman my seat and clambered over the back of the seats to a higher, empty perch (The Lovely Bride, seated next to my original position, had a perfect seat, front row center with no one in front of her). 

The stage was relatively bare, giving LaValley the space she uses to the fullest, the musicians lined against a backdrop that both reminded me of a Maxfield Parish print and a Jeff Easley underpainting. Her gown matched the rich copperish browns of the backdrop, signifying it as Penelope's land. Before the performance, there is the audio of the waves crashing on the rocks beneath Penelope's home, reminding us both of the proximity of her husband and his distance. 

The plot does not follow the plot of the Odyssey save in its initial situation - this is Penelope's story, not her husband's. She is no prize to be won, but rather her own fully-formed character. Her story is about the emptiness of loneliness and the unknown fate of a loved one. It reminded of me when I have, twice now, left the Lovely Bride to join a company far away from her, leaving her to manage everything behind me as I went off to new adventures. Kate loved the performance, and I liked it a lot.

Penelope is about a woman, waiting, but also about a woman, sustaining, and discovering her inner strength against the fates and the gods and the emptiness in her bed and her life. Well worth attending.

More later, 

Play: Revival of the Fittest

 Come From Away by Irene Sankoff & David Hein, Directed by Brian Ivie Seattle Rep through Jan 4

So in the face of the atmospheric river pummeling the Seattle area, the Lovely Bride and I bundled ourselves out to the second performance for the Seattle Rep season, a revival of a musical we saw way back in 2015. OK, its a revival, I thought, I've seen more than enough versions of the same Shakespeare play, or works by August Wilson, so I thought I could manage a new version of a feel-good musical about 9/11. I can do this fairly dispassionately.

Not really. I was in tears after the first five minutes, and kept quietly weeping at points throughout the play. Looking at my original review, I had been emotionally touched, but it felt harder this time. Maybe its post-tramatic stress, maybe it was old memories being excavated, maybe it was just some things going on in my personal life, but I tired of trying to surreptitiously wipe the tears from my eyes and just let them run down my cheeks. The heck with it.

Everyone has their own 9/11 stories, like my parents had Pearl Harbor stories (coming home from church and hearing about it on the radio in the living room). And seeing the performance on Pearl Harbor Day may have had something to with my reaction as well. The one thing I haven't mentioned before about it in this space was the silence in the skies in the week that followed. We are on the opposite hill in the Green River valley from SeaTac, and just south of both the Renton airport and Boeing Field, so while we don't get a lot of airplane noise, there is enough of a background rumbling from time to time to make us aware of its existence. But in the week that followed 9/11, there was nothing. And oppressive silence. It was a ghost in my memory until the play brought it all back to me.

Anyway,

Come From Away is a feel-good musical about 9/11. After the four passenger jets hit, all air traffic was grounded, and planes in the air had to land ASAP. A lot of the transatlantic flights, like 38 planes, include jumbos, had to come down in Newfoundland, in a small airport near the town of Gander (back in the day before jet travel, planes would fly to Newfoundland, refuel, and make the jump across the Atlantic. My father went to war on a bomber that refueled there). So the airfield was larger than was then-needed for the present day, until 38 planes had to touch down and 9000 passengers were grounded for the better part of the week.

The musical is about those passengers and the nearby towns (Gander and others) who suddenly had to take care of the new arrivals. It is a normal day until all hell breaks loose as the passengers worry, panic, try to get in touch with loved ones, and find out what happened, while the townies struggle to get basic support for the new arrivals, with no idea how long the emergency would last. There are all sorts of stories spinning out of the situation - the pilot that can no longer fly, the mother whose son is fireman in NYC, a couple gets together, another couple breaks up, a rabbi has to set up a kosher kitchen, the local ASPCA has to deal with all the animals trapped in the luggage compartments (including a couple chimps). 

And the actors pull it off incredibly well. The cast - a massive (for modern theater) dozen actors, plus a six-member band are on stage for the duration of the performance, and move effortless between characters, such that I did not recognize them when they transformed. Accents and mannerisms are added and dropped with each costume changes. And a lot of the folk on stage are locals that I have seen at other performances in the Seattle Area, though even many of them are making "Their Seattle Rep debuts".  And that's something I love about local theatre, particularly if they create such strong performances.

And the performances are strong, the songs are excellent, and the action moves swiftly from beginning to end. There is not any dead spots here - most of the scenes are frenetic and even the slow songs have an emotional weight that pushes them through. There are strong Celtic/Irish/Nor'easter flavor to the music, including a lot of stomping and dancing. And the actors play their own instruments on-stage, which is something I don't remember from the original. It is a conceit that works incredibly well.

Is there one actor to single out? Not really, because they are ALL that good, and put everything out on the stage to a packed house. It was really an ensemble job, and all of them were frankly amazing. 

Can I quibble about anything? Sure. The revival felt over-produced as far as stagecraft. The original we saw (pre-Broadway) worked from a mostly-empty stage, with chairs and boxes brought on from the periphery. This version set up the framing device of a 10-year reunion by physically setting it in the Gander high school gym, complete with basketball hoops folded up along the walls. I don't know if all that was needed, since the action at the center quickly took hold and dominated the space.

So, is there a moral here? People pull together in times of stress and heartbreak? Canadians are basically nice? I can't exactly say, but this is revival that you should attend. It is more than worth it. Good job, mates. 

More later,