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,