Just Wrought

Recovering playwright, once won a STRANGER Genius Award for theater. Now writing a bloated novel about… G-d help me! Theatre.

Tag: Annex Theatre

  • Boiled Frogs

    Boiled Frogs

    Josh Parks is a fellow veteran from Annex Theatre’s golden years in the early to mid 90’s.  Josh starred in my favorite Annex show of all time, Bessemer’s Spectacles by Glen Berger.  Nowadays it is wisest not to mention the show to anyone involved with it if you don’t want to hear an earful.  Apparently it was a clusterfuck to produce, but produced it was, and beautifully, devastatingly so.  When the house lights came up after the curtain call everyone but me filed out of the theatre. I had to stay where I sat.  Couldn’t get myself zipped back together.  My was heart pulled open and sore and I couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down my face.  Josh also did a few other turns across the Annex stage, including Faith Healer.  A production still is provided below.  Josh stands to the far right alongside the incomparable Susanna Burney, left, and some guy named Paul Giamatti, center.  (Wonder what ever happened to him.)

    I can claim zero credit for what Josh says below, beyond cutting and pasting it with permission from his Facebook page, and maybe suggesting the title.  While many of us have sat stuck in these ever warming waters of theatrical ineffectuality, Josh has been living his life, raising his family, working his jobs.  The essay describes his experiences jumping briefly back into our pond. 

    Clybourne Park is the first equity house (non Christmas) production I can remember seeing in at least 10 years. Maybe 15. That was a big part of what pushed me from “That play sounds interesting,” to actually being willing to shell out $116 for two tickets (more on that later). I was not only interested in what the play had to say, I was very interested in what the experience of an evening of theater had to say. The world has changed so much on so many fronts over the past 10 to 15 years, I felt like I had a unique opportunity to see how theater had evolved over the same period of time, having very few intervening reference points to color my thinking.

    You may have an idea where this going.

    But before we get there, one of the striking things about the experience was that the most memorable line did not come from the play, it came from the preshow ask, delivered by a board member. I believe he said something like, “As you probably don’t know, the price of your ticket only covers about half of the cost of production.”

    Really? In the 10+ years since I’ve been to a show has the Rep really done such a poor job of educating its patrons on this issue? Are there any regular Seattle arts patrons who don’t know this? I am the opposite of a regular, and I knew it. “For those who may not know…” or something that didn’t insult the intelligence of what I imagine to be a big chunk of the audience would have made a surprisingly big difference. To me anyway.

    Even more memorable was the impression, having shelled out over $100 for my tickets, that the Rep was trying to make me feel — even before having seen the show — like I had received what I should regard as a temporary discount. I found that off-putting. There seemed to be very little appreciation for the fact that we had already given them our money, and a lot of appreciation for the fact that, “little did I know,” I had actually come up a little short in their eyes.

    OK, so now that I’ve been made to feel like I’m not doing enough to support the arts (even though every dollar is “meaningful”), on with the show!

    The production was serviceable. The playwriting was really not as good as I had hoped, nor was the direction, which seemed to be trying (but failed) to make a lot of the dialogue come across as Aaron Sorkin-esque line-chopping rapid-fire banter. The acting was good enough.

    But what’s the word to encapsulate the experience, the energy in the room, the aftertaste? “Quaint” seems to be the most persistent answer. As the play unfolded I found myself amazed at how little things had changed since I last saw an Equity house production, and I have been pondering that ever since. When I think about what the world was like in 1998 and where we are now, how so many industries, and governments, and lives have been transformed in that time, the experience of going to the theater seemed to have stood still. The production I saw was certainly no worse than any quality production I could have seen years ago. But much more important (and surprising), it was absolutely not a single bit better. And suddenly it occurred to me, could this be at the heart of theater’s “decline” (LORT theaters anyway)?

    I was expecting some progress, some innovation, some sign that what the Rep and similar establishments offer does in fact track the change/progress going on in the real world. Certainly the subject matter of the play was “relevant” and “topical” to a degree, and it was connected to a famous play and film in an ostensibly interesting way. But the actual production itself, including the means by which it was staged, struck me as really no different from anything I have ever seen on any stage anywhere. And that surprised me. I was not expecting virtual reality goggles, but I realized as it was happening (or not happening) that I was expecting something. I understand there are limitations on what can change about a play and still have it be a play, but I was stunned to feel like I had stepped out of a time machine.

    Thus, my Colonial Williamsburg comment. Was this really creativity? Or was it about recreating a notional idea of theater. Playing the experience out into the future, I can imagine some day that the experience of going to a play at an Equity house could become more and more like attending a concert of Baroque music on the original instruments. Quaint. A bit odd. And — no offense to anyone who has mastered the sackbut — just as relevant to the human condition.

    I imagine in the days of O’Neill and Williams and Miller and Shaw and Coward and even Neil Simon for God’s sake, that theater thrived because it was one of the places people went to see something cool, something current. It wasn’t a place where ideas were rehashed — be they about politics, society, design, lighting, or acting — it was a place where they were born.

    Unfortunately, I find I don’t have many answers, just questions. Where is the surprise, the creativity, the unexpected, the brilliance? If there isn’t some in every element of the show, why should anyone bother? I see you and like-minded folks trying that with This Not Just In. I can think of exceptions to a lot of my ranting, but dare I say most of them are from the fringe element in Seattle, where the quality index is a lot more volatile, but it also doesn’t cost as much to get in the game. There are people who are trying to create theater they wouldn’t have seen 15 years ago, certainly, but the impression I have is that isn’t what gets a lot of established theater people out of bed in the morning, and that baffles me. Maybe it shouldn’t, but I’m glad it does.

    Posted at 1:23 PM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

    Tags: 21st Century Theatre, Annex Theatre, Clybourne Park, Josh Parks, Paul Giamatti, Paul Mullin, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle Theatre, Susanna Burney

  • Bookmark THE SEATTLE STAR

    Bookmark THE SEATTLE STAR

    Here’s the link.  Just go bookmark it.  Then come back and I’ll tell you why, okay?… Okay, go! . . .

    . . . . There.  All bookmarked? 

    Good.

    Living up to the promise publisher Omar Willey made when he kicked it off at the beginning of this year, The Seattle Star has consistently provided cogent, in-depth criticism (no flip, self-regarding drive-bys here) of Seattle’s arts offerings, including but not limited to Cole Hornaday’s piece on Sandbox Radio IV: The Chase which details not only that most recent episode, but also how it fit into the on-going series.  Witness as well, José Amador’s latest critique of Annex Theatre’s Team of Heroes: Behind Closed Doors, offering a similarly thoughtful big-picture approach.

    What’s more, like icing on an already yummy and healthy cake, The Star also provides unprecedented access to a variety of Seattle’s unsung poets, including some of my all-time favorites like Pamela Hobart Carter and David Penn.  (Full disclosure: they also published one of mine once.  Hey, nobody’s perfect.)

    So now that you’ve bookmarked The Seattle Star, you might also considering liking them on Facebook and following them on Twitter.  You won’t be sorry.  Of that I’m sure.

    Posted at 1:23 PM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

    Tags: 21st Century Theatre, Annex Theatre, Clybourne Park, Josh Parks, Paul Giamatti, Paul Mullin, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle Theatre, Susanna Burney

  • Seattle Artists Lose an Unsung Support

    Seattle Artists Lose an Unsung Support

    When I first came to Seattle in 1990 I had only one decent paying trade to my name: I knew how to clean glass. The problem was I was spoiled. In New York I had worked mostly high-rise residential units and got paid three dollars a window by my boss/friend Patrick Shields who worked next to me and also happened to be an actor/writer himself. In Seattle the only window work I could find was with a large outfit that did commercial properties and offered a flat ten dollars an hour. Instead of a bon vivant, polymath, small business-owner working next to me, I had ex-cons, two-bit bigots and pot-smoking thugs tying my ropes. (Literally.  One guy told me getting high beforehand made him concentrate harder on the knots.) I quit after a week and took a job dishing at a breakfast cafe in Green Lake, but the money from that, barely above minimum wage, just wasn’t enough.

    The advice I got at the 1911, the dive-bar de facto headquarters of 90’s Seattle fringe theatre, situated directly across Fourth Avenue from Annex Theatre, was simple: “go to Woods.” Woods and Associates was a small, locally owned temporary and permanent placement service located in the Galland Building downtown. I protested that I had zero office experience. The advice was reiterated: “Go to Woods. They’ll take care of you.  You can even tell them you’re an actor. They like actors.”

    “They like actors!?”  What kind of outfit was this?

    An outfit, as it turns out, that I would have an ongoing professional relationship with for the next two decades. My fellow Annexers were right.  After my initial interview I was paraded around the office to meet owner Sarah Woods, Sarah’s brother Will, Sarah’s business partner Sam Hunter, plus all the rest of the folks in the placement bullpen.  It didn’t matter that I was an actor or that I had never worked in an office.  I would start out slow and simple, they told me.  First gig: the microfilm department of Northern Life Insurance, where I captured images of old annuities documents on their way to the shredder. To tame the boredom I listened to Rush Limbaugh and KPLU jazz on my Sony Walkman. Aldrich Allen, another Annexer, now dead, worked beside me.  A few years later, when I came back from shooting a movie in Maryland to find my first marriage disintegrating, I needed a job desperately. So Woods put me back at “No Life”, this time in the licensing department. It’s where I got to know William Salyers and began to hatch my plan to write a role that only an actor of his talents could pull off.  A few years later we premiered Tuesday at AHA! Theatre.

    As time went on, I even found myself temping  in the Woods office itself. I called these gigs “meta-temping”. I used to love Fridays, not only because Sarah ordered in lunch and a masseuse every week, but also because Woods, unlike any other temp service I knew, paid every week,  on the week.  Many temps came into to pick up their checks personally, giving me a chance to do a quick gossip swap with my fellow show folk, like Chris Jeffries or Josh List.

    It is not an exaggeration to say Woods was a big part of why my wife and I came back to Seattle from New York City after 9/11.  Temp work in Manhattan had completely dried up.  My unemployment was running out and I had literally no idea how I was going to support our new-born baby boy.  I was certain, however, that if we went back to Seattle, Woods would find work for either Heather or me, so that the other could stay home with the baby.  As it turned out, Heather landed the more lucrative gig—she always could stand working for lawyers more than me.  On nice days I would roll my son in his stroller downtown from Capitol Hill and often visit the folks at Woods after having lunch with Heather.  Bottom line:  after a very tough year, Woods gave us options in another city where theatre thrived.

    Woods and Associates will be closing their offices for good today.  When I spoke with Sarah yesterday she sounded upbeat: “I don’t regret the decision at all, but it I’m the one making it so I understand it’s hard for others.”  I nearly choked up when I told her what Woods had meant to me and my family over the years.  “That’s the sad part,” she replied.  “We’ve all been there for each other: the folks that work for us, the client companies.”  Certainly Woods has always been there for me.  No matter how bad a particular day gig might get, I could always think to myself, “Well, I can quit and Woods’ll take care of me: find me something.”  Now, I guess I’m on my own.  My only solace is that I’m not alone in feeling that way.

    * * *

    So here’s my request.  If you are an artist, theatre or otherwise, and Woods has helped you at some point, please chime in down in the comments section below.  Share a story if you’d like, but chime in, regardless, even with just your name.  I’d love to share a sense of how many creative folks Woods and Associates has helped over the years.

    Posted at 1:23 PM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

    Tags: 21st Century Theatre, Annex Theatre, Clybourne Park, Josh Parks, Paul Giamatti, Paul Mullin, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle Theatre, Susanna Burney

  • Joining Averroës’ Search

    Joining Averroës’ Search

    One of my favorite stories by Jorge Luis Borges is “Averroës’ Search”.  It’s not a very good story— Borges himself admits as much in a rather tortured apology that he tacks on at the end—but it’s a story about theatre—at least in part—and since it’s one of the only times Borges, a favorite of mine, touches on the art form that I have sunk so much of myself into, the short piece has become special to me.  I can approximate how many times I have read it by counting the different colors of pencils I have used to mark it up: dark blue, light blue, purple, green.

    The story opens with the great Islamic annotator of Aristotle lamenting the frequent appearance in the Poetics of two words  that, to a devout Muslim of the 12th Century, seem to have no meaning at all: “tragedy” and “comedy”. 

    He had come across them years earlier in the third book of the Rhetoric; no one in all of Islam could guess as to their meaning….  Yet the two arcane words were everywhere in the text of the Poetics—it was impossible to avoid them.

    In the very next paragraph Averroës takes a break from his work and looks down from his balcony. 

    …  There below, in the narrow earthen courtyard, half-naked children were at play.  One of them standing on the shoulders of another, was clearly playing at being a muezzin: his eyes tightly closed, he was chanting the muezzin’s monotonous cry,  There is no God but Allah.  The boy standing motionless and holding him on his shoulders was the turret from which he sang; another kneeling, bowing low in the dirt, was the congregation of the faithful.  The game did not last long— they all wanted to be the muezzin, no one wanted to be the worshippers or the minaret.

    For me, this is Borges at his best and most loveable: a great thinker imagining a great thinker struggling to imagine a concept that, in fact, palpably surrounds him.  As many of my friends who like to argue with me point out, theatre will always survive.  You literally cannot not have theatre.  But as Borges might counter, you can certainly have it without knowing you have it.  Perhaps that’s where we are heading.  The great Argentine did foretell the internet after all.

    Recently, in a fit of frustration that so many people seemed to miss the point of my recent post about playwrights not making a living from their plays while plenty of folks make one making theatre, I recently wrote the following self-pitying status on Face Book. 

    I somehow need to find a way to harness the average Seattle theatre artist’s endless enthusiasm for arguing into an actual force for change.

    Yes, we’re all smart. We’re all well read. We all know how to attack a straw man and cleverly defend the indefensible, but at what point do we decide we can do better and then take steps to do it?

    It’s a cliché, but it always applies: if not us, who? If not now, when?

    Maybe self pitying isn’t the right description.  Maudlin?  Mawkish?  In any case, a good friend and theatre colleague blithely chimed in: “Shut up and do a show.”  It’s good advice.  Well, again, advice isn’t really the right word.  No one telling you to shut up is giving you advice so much as dictating a directive, and a rather ironic one at that, since it’s impossible to tell someone to shut up without opening your mouth.  Still though, the person who said this has a largely gentle heart, and I know he would not want me to do anything I did not really want to do. 

    With the understanding that I did not have a lot of room to talk about Seattle theatre unless I was actually making Seattle theatre, I have been pushing pretty hard on producing over the last few years.  This spring I wrote and served as executive producer for The New New News: A Living Newspaper; a little over a year before that I served in the same capacities for It’s Not the the P-I: A Living Newspaper About a Dying Newspaper.  And before that there was The Ten Thousand Things at Washington Ensemble Theatre, The Don Juan Cult Concerto at NSCC, Tuesday and An American Book of the Dead- The Game Show at Annex Theatre.  Just listing those shows makes me smile and feel tired at the same time.  Boy, have I done some shows since coming back to Seattle in 2002!

    Now it’s 2011 and I have foundered on a fact that frightens me a bit and that I need to share with you.  I don’t want to put on another show.  Even if I did, I don’t have one.  It’s just not in me at the moment.  And I don’t know if it ever will be again.  (It feels like a long moment, frankly.)  I believe this is something that every theatre artist has to face at some point.  A future with no shows.  But just like Averroës, I will be surrounded by theatre whether I know it or not, whether I want it or not.  After all, isn’t the Intiman’s colossal failure a tragedy in the truest sense?

    So, with the understanding that one earns one’s right to speak about Seattle theatre by making Seattle theatre, I need to cash in for a while and keep my mouth shut.  I will still keep Just Wrought active, and still post here, but my advocacy for Seattle becoming a World Class theatre town, and all the kvetching and posturing that goes with it, is hereby retired indefinitely.

    It is time for me to shut up, sit back, and watch the show… as produced by others.

    Posted at 1:23 PM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

    Tags: 21st Century Theatre, Annex Theatre, Clybourne Park, Josh Parks, Paul Giamatti, Paul Mullin, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle Theatre, Susanna Burney

  • NewsWrights Reads WikiLeaks

    NewsWrights Reads WikiLeaks

    If this be treason, make the most of it!
    Patrick Henry

    A couple weeks ago— though it seems like half a year in this hyper-speed news cycle that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have helped spin even faster— incoming Tea Party Congressman, Allen West stated publically that he not only considered Assange’s decision to leak classified State Department cables to be an act of treason, but equally treasonous the  further dissemination of  the leaks by any news agency in the country.  He baldly called for American news outlets to be censored for running stories based on the WikiLeaks’ cable dump.  [Read more here.]  Then later Allen back-tracked and said, “I didn’t say ‘censored.’  I said ‘censured.’”

    Last Sunday evening, while the Seahawks staggered to their NFC West Championship win, NewsWrights United’s Wes Andrews led five other theatre artists: Jose Amador, Llysa Holland, Spike Friedman, Ramon Esquivel and Josh Parks, in publically reading excerpts of the leaked cables at Annex Theatre in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.  Personally, I was proud to be in the audience participating at least vicariously in what the blow-hard Tea Bagging demagogic moron, Allen West, considers sedition.

    The excerpts the actors chose to share originated from consulates spanning the globe from Venezuela to Iran, and included both inspiring stories of personal heroism to gossip about absurdly profligate parties thrown by quasi-governmental gangsters in the Caucasus [see here].  Perhaps the most striking feature of these communiqués is the remarkably consistent quality of writing: far better, far more cleanly evocative than most of what passes for journalism these days.  Apparently the authors, diplomats spread across the globe, all consider themselves members of a secret elite club who compete to impress each other with their wry yarns spun from foreign adventure.

    While the events described vary widely, one theme came clearly through each of the cables read Sunday night.  People in other countries care deeply about the United States of America.  No, they don’t love us, perhaps don’t even respect us.  But they care what we do and what we think.  A lot.  And those of them that hate and/or fear us don’t do so because of our aggression and our imperialism.  These crass aspects of Americanism are the ones they actually understand and abide, and even hope to emulate.  No, it is our blithe and breezy free-thinking, our defiance of authority, our belief in the individual and his or her right to express themselves openly— in a word our liberalism—  that that they fear, as these cables give evidence time and time again.

    One of the notes I jotted to myself while listening to these classified cables being read was “Theatre is inherently subversive.”  In a digital world, the simple act of consuming your art or your journalism off the electron grid qualifies as low-grade sedition.  Adding leaked classified documents as source material serves to spike the punch to an intoxicating level.  Tom Paine would recognize this work as what it plainly is: a tiny tune-up of world democracy.  It was theatre like this that gave birth to the Czech Republic.  No one person can ever fully comprehend or appreciate the enormity and the pervasiveness of its power.  But you can catch a glimpse.  And so I did, Sunday night.  NewsWrights United  currently plans to stage more of these WikiLeaks offerings, I’ll be sure to let you know so you can catch one too, and share the delicious sedition-steeped fun.  (Thought to be certain you keep current on NewsWright United’s doings, you should “like” us at Face Book.)

    Long live the United States of America.  And long live the blend of art and the treason that makes her rise, often against her own mendacious, mediocre volition, to her best.

    Posted at 1:23 PM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

    Tags: 21st Century Theatre, Annex Theatre, Clybourne Park, Josh Parks, Paul Giamatti, Paul Mullin, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle Theatre, Susanna Burney

  • Jose Amador and a Damned Good Argument for the Solo Show

    Jose Amador and a Damned Good Argument for the Solo Show

    It’s a strange and wonderful world.  The very day I post my screed on solo shows and how Seattle’s Big Houses are leaning too heavily on them, my good friend and colleague publishes a completely different point of view on why the solo show serves a vital purpose in his creative life, and in the larger creative life of our theatre community.

    http://thesunbreak.com/2010/04/27/jos-amador-on-solo-performance-and-being-an-ethnic-theatre-artist-in-seattle

    Go see this show.  Lord knows, for all my bitching, I’ll sure as hell be there.  I’m thinking of going next Wednesday.  If you go that night and can prove you paid full price to get in, I’ll buy you a drink.

    Jose Amador, people!  One more reason Seattle is already World Class!

    Posted at 1:23 PM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

    Tags: 21st Century Theatre, Annex Theatre, Clybourne Park, Josh Parks, Paul Giamatti, Paul Mullin, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle Theatre, Susanna Burney