Old Times and No Man's Land - A Theater Review and a Festival Wrap Up

Harold Pinter

The Pinter Festival at ACT has been everything a theater festival should be:

• It was grand in scale : producing three full main stage productions almost simultaneously; hosting numerous auxiliary events including readings, classes and film screenings. 
• It was focused : if you didn't know what Pinter was about at the start of the festival, you certainly did by the end. 
• It was courageous : produced with all local talent; taking on a serious often misunderstood playwright and producing his plays for an indoor festival in Seattle's warmest time of the year.
• It was uneven : the  productions were extremely varied in their effectiveness. 
• It was addictive : even after the most disatisfying of the shows, you wanted to come back and see the rest; you even hoped that this will be only the first of possibly a few Pinter Festival's that may come over the next handful of years.

Overall, the festival felt like a gift to the city, and I was thrilled to be able to witness it unfold.

I saw The Dumb Waiter and Celebration at the beginning of the festival and wrote about them here. This past week I was able to catch performances of No Man's Land  and Old Times.

Jeffery Frace, Cheyenne Casebier and Anne Allgood in Old Times

Old Times might be my new favorite Pinter play. A married couple, Deeley and Kate, entertain an old friend of Kate's, Anna, in their country house. Soon, however, Deeley and Anna's efforts to each claim Kate as their own escalate the evening's visit into a desperate and brutal journey into all the characters' pasts that leaves no one unscathed. I had read it before but never had seen it performed. I always loved the wonderfully obscure tension that bounced back and forth between the characters like a diabolical three way tennis match. But never had I imagined the breadth of humor that could be mined from the power plays amongst the characters. Under Victor Pappas' ultra-focused and confident direction the three extremely talented performers  (Jeffery Frace (Deeley), Cheyenne Casebier (Kate) and Anne Allgood (Anna)) deliver a surprisingly laugh out loud funny take on the script that manages to hit so much unexpected comedy in the play while still slowly building the extreme discomfort that rests at the core of the piece.

Frace brings just the right combination of casual aloofness and barbed sarcasm to Deeley that allows him to embody both the simplistic empathy and haunting unreliability that makes him the perfect host to this most unusual of evenings. Casebier as Kate is almost Zen-like in her stillness and silence during Anna and Deeley's power struggle which keeps her an important and well heard character even in long stretches where she has no lines (many an actor fail miserably in such a role where they seemingly have nothing active to do). Allgood is both poised charm and striking venom as the evening's questionably intentioned guest from the past. There was a brief glimpse of Allgood's range and affinity for Pinter in Celebration, but here we really get to see an assured, multilayered and memorable performance. 

With these strong performances at its center, what works so well in this production is it ability to take Pinter off the page and deliver it in a lively, unexpected and unsettling way to its audience. Director Pappas, with his actors and design team (Robert Dahlstrom's set is flawless in its simplicity, utilitarianism and elegance, and Rick Paulsen's lighting assists in producing some unforgettable images on the stage), make many subtle but bold choices with the script that give it a broad, tangible and recognizable life that many Pinter productions are too reverential or too intimidated to ever reach. If the Pinter Festival was a great success, Old Times was its crowning achievement (The Dumb Waiter was excellent as well, but I believe Old Times to be a richer and more nuanced play to begin with).

Moore, Crook, Corrado and Harris in No Man's Land

While Old Times surprised in its life off the page, No Man's Land never seemed to get far from a table reading. In this play we have two men, Hirst and Spooner, visiting at the home of the wealthier of the two, Hirst, after having met earlier in the evening at a local pub.Supposed strangers, these men soon find some odd common ground. Their relationship is further strained by two young men, Briggs and Foster, who are sort of assistants to Hirst, whose motives to protect their benefactor and themselves begin to quickly turn all of our assumptions about who these people are and what we are watching upside down.

Frank Corrado as Hirst and Randy Moore as Spooner seem, along with director  Penelope Cherns, to be trying to be following Pinter's script as a piece of music, as if the language is so strong that all you need to do is hop on, deliver it well and let you take it for a ride. The result is a pretty uneven production that produces a handful of interesting moments but doesn't really hold together. By the time Benjamin Harris as Foster and Peter Crook as Briggs arrive, each bringing a bit more of a pointed and welcomed energy to the production, the tone has been set and the proceeding action feels disconnected from what has come before. The problem is most pronounced during the play's handful of extremely long monologues almost all of which are delivered almost as if there is no one else on stage and subsequently, the rest of the life on stage dies. Cherns says in her program notes that "Pinter demands a light touch." It feels here that she touched way too lightly and didn't make the bolder choices that would have given the audience the more visceral experience that this play is designed to deliver.

A testament to the power of this festival is that despite my feelings about No Man's Land I felt even more compelled to see Old Times afterwards. Having seen them both now, along with the initial two one acts of the festival, I wish I had been able to make it to some of the auxiliary events around these shows. I do hope ACT is happy with the results of this experiment and feel  moved to bring us another wave of Pinter works in the future.

The Pinter Festival  plays at ACT through August 26. Tickets here.

Afterthoughts

Accents : In a festival like this, where a number of Pinter plays are being tackled by the same ensemble at once, I would have loved to see one show done without British accents. Clearly many of Pinter's plays are set in specific locales in England and use language that is distinct to British culture. Yet a number of his plays are unrealistic and non-naturalistic enough that I believe they could weather a true relocation across the pond and have our American actors speak the words with their own domestic accents. We do Shakespeare without accents all the time. Beckett, it could be argued, actually brings a different nuance when done with an Irish accent, but he still holds up marvelously when done with unadorned American accents. In these plays, Celebration, seems to be the play where accents mattered the least. In No Man's Land, I would argue that the accents almost got in the way. It felt like Corrado and Moore sort of fell in love with their accents and played the delivery of their lines more than the action of the play.

Design : While I found the costumes, lights and sets for The Dumb Waiter and Old Times  to be wonderfully effective and visually striking, I felt that the design elements in both Celebration and No Man's Land to be severely judgmental of  the plays' characters. The color choices in both were unappetizing palates with what seemed to be purposefully ill-fitting costumes that pulled the audience even further away from any kind of empathy with the characters. Just as the set of Celebration  didn't read as a fancy restaurant, the set of No Man's Land simply didn't read as the rich house it was supposed to be. Instead of a wall of books and a separate bar, both were crammed into a single unit. The exit door which is supposed to lead to the rest of the house, read more like it lead to a small bathroom or the narrow hallway of a nursing home (I actually thought that Hirsh, when he crawls out of the room having fallen down drunk, was exiting into a bathroom to vomit, not to make his way slowly toward his bedroom elsewhere in the house). Maybe in an attempt to keep the four plays looking dramatically different visually, the design team went a bit too far with No Man's Land in finding a disjointed and claustrophobic counter balance to the cleanly orchestrated and Old Times.

The Dumb Waiter and Celebration - A Theater Review

It was with great enthusiasm and excitement that I greeted the news, earlier this year, that ACT would be producing a Pinter Festival this summer. Despite the best of intentions on my part, I had missed all of the installments of their Pinter Fortnightly series to date and was hoping to be able to, at some point, get a glimpse of the work they were doing with the plays of this seminal playwright. A festival seemed just the thing, and if my introduction to it with these two one act plays is any indication, it is going to be an event Seattle will be talking about for quite some time.

The Dumb Waiter, one of Harold Pinter's earliest plays,is the perfect choice to kick off this festival as it is almost a case study in what lies at the heart of all of Pinter's plays. It is a taut tension filled piece that deals even-handedly with both the banalities as well as the essence of life. Here making tea and deciding the best way to kill someone are discussed with equal import. It straddles the fence perfectly  between gritty realistic drama (that Pinter's self-appointed protege David Mamet took and ran with) and existential mindscapes (that Pinter's acknowledged influence and later friend and colleague Samuel Beckett so often employed). It is darkly funny, even menacing (a favorite word amongst Pinter critics), and challenges its audience to view the world a bit differently by its end.

Darragh Kennan and Chuck Leggett in The Dumb Waiter

Two hit men wait in a room for their next job to arrive. These two roles are played with the perfect combination of light handed physical comedy and pointed penetrating rage by the wonderful talents of Darragh Kennan as Gus and Charles Leggett as Ben. Both men show equal comfort and skill at lounging pensively in a long Pinter silence, as well as quickly exchanging banter back and forth. They and director John Langs make sure that the pace and timing of the play is spot on. I've read this play a number of times and seen it produced before, but ACT's seemingly flawless production, will be the one that lives in my memory from now on.

(For a full disclosure I should mention that I saw these plays in preview, so any critiques I have from here forward could certainly have been addressed by opening night.)

Celebration, one of Pinter's later plays, makes for a very interesting partner with The Dumb Waiter. From a claustrophobic single room with two characters in the first play, we move to a busy restaurant with eleven characters in the second. Where The Dumb Waiter seems to have a tight kinetic energy driving it forward, Celebration has a looser more collage-like feel. Like Pinter's other later works, this play is more confident in its tangents. It takes the characters and audience quickly from point A to point C sometimes never bothering to circle back to B.

Frank Carrado in Celebration

Yet the precision I found so remarkable in the first play, I found to be somewhat lacking in the second. Director Langs here has chosen for his cast of diners to play most of the one act boisterously drunk. This energy tends to muddy moments that call for focus and worse yet, tends to allow the audience to write off the characters' sometimes jarringly odd behavior as simply the drink talking. The audience I was with forgave the characters so much that they were laughing hysterically through most of the show (I know that in most cases this would be a good thing, but it was off here). This seemed to encourage even more broad comedy from the cast. While clearly Celebration is one of Pinter's lighter plays, light for Pinter is still pretty dark and, yes, menacing. This production missed those elements.

That said, the framing of the two pieces with controlled zen nature of Darragh Kennan at the beginning of The Dumb Waiter and then with the final monologue as the "waiter" in Celebration, bookended the evening perfectly and made me eager to come back to check out Old Times and No Man's Land when they join the festival in a few weeks. Congratulations to Kurt Beattie and Frank Corrado for having the courage and drive to bring this festival to Seattle audiences.

The Dumb Waiter and Celebration  play at ACT through August 26. Tickets here.

Afterthoughts

Set and Staging : I sat at the side of the thrust stage, as did about 1/4 of the audience. The staging on the first play was little tough at times, seeing only the back of one actor's head as he blocked my view of the other actor, but overall passable. The fact that I couldn't really see the dumb waiter or its contents when it opened, which clearly the audience at the front of the thrust could, was a bit distracting.

In Celebration, however, these issues became a bit worse. The biggest challenge of a play like this, from a staging point of view, is that you have 4 diners at a single table who don't get up much during the show. If you sit them traditionally around the table, the audience is going to miss one or two actors for almost the whole show depending on where you are sitting. A tough problem to fix for sure. But the choice here to have all four actors cheated to the upstage part of the table, leaving 1/3 of the table unadorned an unused, crowded the actors together in a way that didn't really make sense within the play. Plus, from my side view, they were often almost lined up in a row where I couldn't really get a good look at any but one of them at a time.

The set for The Dumbwaiter was perfect utilitarian excellence and the use of lighting to punctuate moments in the play, ingeniously effective. Yet the set and costumes for Celebration seemed to make an unnecessary negative judgement on the characters. Though it clearly is supposed to take place in a very nice upscale restaurant, the colors and decor here clearly suggested a restaurant past its heyday. The tackiness and unattractiveness of the diners' atire also made us feel that these people were not to be empathized with but more to be laughed at. It struck me that the play could have been much more affecting if the restaurant resembled one of the finer restaurants down the street from ACT, and if the diners looked liked the well dressed and well educated audience that was watching the show. If so, I believe the laughter that would have been created during the show would have been much more nervous laughter than the almost hooting and hollering I heard.

Hedda Gabler at The Intiman Theatre - Theater Review

It is hard to be critical of a play that has so much going for it. When you see so much strong artistic talent on display (a sleek well balanced and visually arresting modernist set; energetic, committed and assured performances from a number of excellent actors; bold choices with established plot points and line deliveries that jar and reawaken even the most tenured Ibsen aficionado) you are expecting and even rooting for a solid, if not, excellent production of a play.



Timothy McCuen Piggee and Marya Sea Kaminski

Unfortunately, despite all elements mentioned above( none of which are thrown out lightly - these are clearly extremely talented artists at work) this production of Hedda Gabler leaves its audience confused, frustrated and, dare I say, at times, even bored, as Hedda herself is so desperately trying not to be.



Ultimately, the problem here is context. On its most simple level, Hedda Gabler works when the societal constraints set upon Hedda, are most clear. She is from a very established family, she is used to the finest things, she expects greatness in her life, but all the world around her expects for her to be simply a mother and a good wife. She is not cut out for this world. Neither is Nora from Ibsen's A Doll's House. Its been said that Hedda is the Nora who does not slam the door at the end of her play. Nora slams the door and walks onto some kind of new life. Hedda doesn't see that as an option. She feels trapped at the beginning and the cage closes in on her as the play progresses.


In this production, Marya Sea Kaminski (giving a fully invested skillful and attention grabbing performance) in the role of Hedda, plays her, from the start, as the standard definition of a psychopath. She has no empathy, is impulsive, is manipulative (beyond the script's requirements), lacks guilt, and has superficial charm. This portrayal is heightened by the director (Andrew Russell) and choreographer (Olivier Wevers) need to have her perform odd jittering hand gestures that are accompanied by classic "psycho" type music when other characters aren't watching : is she reaching for those guns locked in the box at the other end off the room; is she trying to stop herself from lashing out violently at her husband or their friends and neighbors? It doesn't matter, because the moments are too isolated and fleeting to be integrated into what, in may other ways, is a very straight forward performance.


Ryan Fields and Marya Sea Kaminski


Therefore, we don't get any vision as Hedda as the romantic that she is. She wants greatness and beauty in life and, if not, greatness and beauty in death. Hedda must at some point in the play attempt to try to live with her circumstances, even if just for a moment. She needs to try to find something that will allow her to avoid her eventual suicide. Otherwise she would do it much earlier. The fact that she doesn't have the will and full reasoning to kill herself earlier in the play (much like Hamlet doesn't at the beginning of his play) is part of what gives the play dramatic tension (Ibsen is called the father of the well-made-play for a reason). Director Russell's choice to have Kaminski play Hedda so cold, so flippant and so unaffected, and have so many lines dripping in contemporary irony that the original play couldn't have suggested, distances the audience from her story and diffuses the drama that Ibsen wrote.

Yet Russell's choices with Kaminski could have potentially worked a bit better, had other elements of the production come together. The set, which upon viewing before curtain, was impressive, unexpected and masterfully executed. The depth and height of the space, the coolness of color, the lack of traditional domestic living room drama decor, was exciting and expectation setting. However, once the play began, the ensemble used only the front most 1/3 of the stage for 90% of the play and all action happening behind the gauze put up to divide the stage as well as the action taking place on the elevated platform above and behind the action, could have been eliminated altogether and would have given the audience the same, if not clearer understanding of the play ( I would go as far to say that you could take the same performance put it in a 20' x 20' black box space, loose all the choreography and backstage action, and the play would have even a stronger impact).



Don't get me wrong. Some of the visual tableau's were stunning in their composition. They just had nothing to do with the play we were watching. The best and most obvious example of this kind of misfire, is the final moments of the play where traditionally Hedda, having found herself trapped into a new a hidden, and to her, unacceptable, kind of slavery with Judge Brack, goes to another room and takes one of her pistols and shoots herself. Here Russell and Wevers have Kaminski actually onstage perform a dance moment that is clearly and extension of all those weird distracting gestures from earlier in the play. She battles with herself as she throws herself between the onstage characters who do not notice her distress. Then, in a final moment, she drops, a shot is heard and she reaches out to the audience (nothing even miming her handling a gun has occurred). This unexpected piece of avant-garde interpretation is so out of place and seemingly random in this production that upon leaving the theater I heard someone say "Oh, she shot herself, I didn't get that."



Again. I have no objection to the artistry of the movement sequence itself. Actually, taken on its own, it may have been the most complex and engaging moment of the evening. Yet it had no context withing the rest of the production. The audience applause at the end of the evening was a bit timid in my estimation (remember this is Seattle where it doesn't take much to get a standing ovation). The enthusiasm that was present but scattered in the applause seemed to be for the effort of the actors (again Kaminiski was solidly committed in what she was asked to do and I would get tickets to anything she, the outstanding Timothy McCuen Piggee (Judge Brack) or Ryan Fields (Jorgen Tesman) would be cast in next) but hesitant in its confusion as to what it had just seen.



I am so glad to see Intiman taking bold steps in its reincarnation this year. It is a theater that has brought some great moments to Seattle stages. The artists in this production are clearly worthy to be part of its legacy. I eagerly look forward to seeing more plays in the Festival.

Hedda Gabler plays as part of the Intiman Theatre Festival through August 25 tickets here


Afterthoughts

I haven't seen Romeo and Juliet in this festival yet, but I have to assume that the set I saw in Hedda Gabler was designed more for the Shakespeare production than it was for the Ibsen. I was almost distracted during Hedda, picturing so clearly how those classic scenes from that tragic love story would be staged on this set. It almost seemed as though some of the staging that I found irrelevant (the off stage actors seated above, rising to their feet when their names are mentioned, as if we wouldn't be able to keep track otherwise, etc) was an afterthought - we have all this space from the Shakespeare production, we might as well use it. Clearly one of the trappings of doing a multi-play festival, but I believe this play could have been given a bit more its own world on stage.

Red at Seattle Repertory Theater - A Theater Review

When Seattle Rep announced its 2011-2012 season, I assumed that Red by John Logan would be one of the pieces that I would skip this year. I hadn't read the play yet, but descriptions of it, a play about a famous artist, Mark Rothko, a two character play, taking place in Rothko's studio between the aging artist and his young apprentice, seemed to be one of those plays about "art" that is not only easily described to the potential audience but just as easily digestible to that audience. Everyone gets to feel that they have a glimpse into the creative process of a great artist, no one is really all that challenged, and everyone goes home feeling more cultured than before.

Additionally, in the New York production, the Rothko role was played by the great, but scenery chewing, Alfred Molina. The idea of watching Molina embody the unchecked ego of a great artist and rage and howl for 90 minutes, seemed like a safe, predictable and self-indulgent experience for both actor and audience. Its interesting how the premiere casting of a play can work on our perception and interpretation of it.

Denis Arndt as Mark Rothko

Fortunately for Seattle audiences, the Rep and director Richard E. T. White either ignored or purposely reacted against the Molina archetype in their casting of Mark Rothko. Indeed, it was the casting of Denis Arndt that convinced me to see the show. Arndt is one of the most fluid and effortless actors to watch on stage. His attention to the subtle details of his characters and his non-negotiable embodiment of them have delivered, over the years, some of the best performances I have seen on Seattle stages. His introspective, sometimes even delicate Rothko seductively lured the audience in from his first moments of silence on stage, bringing all the more drama and tension to scenes where his hard shell engulfed the character like a fist of pride, defensiveness, and self-loathing. Arndt is magnificent to watch and is a reason in itself to see this show.

A minimalistically elaborate set

Yet, this production is generous enough to offer more justifications that just this to recommend it. The design team here has done an outstanding job. Rothko's studio is both monumentally grounded and minimalistically elaborate. It is so texturally diverse you want to jump up there and touch it, yet also simple and utilitarian enough that its allows the focus to always shift as need between the actors and the art. The lighting (light is a huge topic and theme of the play) is so subtly effective that I am sure most audience members wouldn't even think of it as the artistry that it is.

Seagram Murals at the Tate Modern

The paintings themselves are a bit more hit or miss (what a huge challenge - to create credible equivalents of masterworks of abstract expressionism). The first couple we see in the studio tend to look a bit too much like the work of a stage painter. Yet they do progress as the play does and the final two horizontal pieces stand out and beg the audience to take them in and absorb the pulsing movement that Rothko has been describing the whole evening.

Connor Toms as Ken

While Rothko seems like the bigger casting decision, so much relies on the effectiveness of Ken, the young apprentice whose questions, comments and reactions are the catalyst that keeps the play moving. Connor Toms brings all the energetic, youthful and wide eyed naivete that you need from this part and makes for a perfect counterbalance to the often curmudgeonly Rothko. I wish, however, we saw him grow up a bit more. When  Rothko finally kicks him out at the end, I think we should also see a young man, and an artist, who has matured and possibly outgrown his role as apprentice. Toms plays him as still a bit green at this point, but it is a minor nuance in an otherwise solid performance.

Director White and his team here have created a richly layered experience here, one that allows the audience to slow down, reflect and gaze at the performance as much as follow its action. The contrast of light and dark, the pulsing and movement that Rothko talks about are all present here washing over the audience again and again, scene after scene like cascading waves on a beach that, when the stillness of the final scene arrives, delivers a unexpected surprise as to how far we have journeyed from the shore.


Red plays at Seattle Repertory Theater runs through March 24

There is a Mark Rothko exhibit currently at the Portland Art Museum on display through May 27.


Afterthoughts

I had some trouble with the play itself. The best things that can be said for it, is that it is light handed enough to allow artists like these to create such a fine evening of theater from it. The role of Ken is such a device to get Rothko talking that we almost loose his humanity (again hats off to Connor Toms), which is probably why we get the obligatory sad and tragic personal story about Tom's family that does little for the play except give the actor a nice juicy moment and introduce Ken's absence of a father figure.

That said there was one moment in the play that didn't quite live up to its potential in this production (spoiler coming, so please skip this paragraph if you don't want anything given away). In the final scene of the play it calls for Rothko to be "slumped awkwardly on the floor, gazing up at the central picture." When Ken enters and turns on some lights, Ken "stops - it is a shocking sight. Rothko's hands and arms are dripping with red. It is paint, but it looks just like blood." Ken thinks Rothko, who has alluded to suicide before, has slit his wrists. He freaks out for a moment and then realizes it is paint. In this production, Arndt is not slumped awkwardly, as one might be if they were loosing blood, or in this case had a had a few drinks. Nor is the paint that is used blood red but more clay colored and does not look for even a split second to the audience like Rothko has slit his wrists. Actually, the audience is confused at why Ken is freaking out. Its clearly paint, the same paint that has been used throughout the entire evening.  The real Rothko did end up committing suicide by slitting his wrists and clearly the playwright included this as a bit of foreshadowing. What a difference is they had delivered to the audience the same shock that Ken feels.

This is a surprising miss, but ultimately a very minor criticism in what is a wonderfully successful production.

The Cryptogram - Theater Review

I was thrilled and curious that Seattle Public Theater chose David Mamet's 1994 drama, The Cryptogram to kick off its new season. I read the play when it first came out and was intrigued and confused by it at the time, and always wanted to see what it would look like on its feet. Seattle Public gave me, and the rest of the audience, a thoughtful, chilling and well balanced production of what is clearly and challenging piece of theater.

The Cryptogram is a smaller work from the controversial Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet. First, its basically a one-act play clocking in at barely an hour long. Mamet, who is known for his terse muscularly minimalist dialogue, has never been one to write a Eugene O'Neil-esque 4 hour epic drama. However, even amongst the brevity of most of his plays, The Cryptogram still stands out as a more modest piece of work.

That is not to say that his themes are small. Indeed, the one thing you can probably never accuse a Mamet play of is being unambitious in its content. On a basic level the play, like most of Mamet's work, is about trust; who can you trust, what is the real truth, can you tell the difference, does the difference matter in the end? Where normally these questions are played out by con-artists, thieves, businessmen, and movie executives (clearly Mamet believes these four groups to be practically synonymous), in this play they are explored through a domestic family setting.

In a traditional American living room one evening in 1959, ten year old John, played with an intense haunting duality of innocence and wisdom by the young Rowan Calvert,  eagerly awaits his father's arrival home from work in anticipation of the camping trip the two will take tomorrow. An old friend of the family, Del, whose complex motivations for being at the house this night are balanced expertly in a memorable performance by Richard Nguyen Sloniker, waits with John's mother, Donny, a tightly wound female played with determined callousness by Emily Grogan, as the two try to calm the excitable young John and get him to go to sleep.A seemingly simple domestic scene.

Yet even as the first lines are spoken we know things are not well in this house. John complains of hearing voices, of hearing a radio playing. The two sounds are making him uneasy and unable to sleep. His mother, does not now, nor anywhere in the play, ever really listen to John. She is the classic self-involved distant mother whose sole aim is to get him to bed regardless of anything he says (There is another whole essay to be written about how Mamet writes coldly and judgmentally about women. In this play, where the never on stage father abandons his family, it is not he who receives the audiences scorn but the ever-present onstage mother who is vilified and condemned.)

Director Kelly Kitchens seems determined to maximize the creepiness factor of the play by adding dimly lit interludes at the opening of the play and between the scenes that emphasize the atmosphere of unease in the household. She also changes a small bit of stage business involving a letter that makes its origins and its place in the house even more mysterious than the written play suggests. These choices have a dual effect, one that helps and the other that hinders. On the positive side, by letting the audience know, via that stark minimalist set, the moody sound-scape and the additional staging, that this is going to be an unsettling experience, it allowed the audience to go with that experience more fully than if it was staged with an eye solely on realism. However, in  a play where meaning for the audience is already frustratingly allusive, the combination of these directorial decisions made the overall experience of the play just that much less satisfying.

This is David Mamet's most personal and autobiographical play (There is also another whole essay that could be written about the significance and symbolism of the young John and a young Mamet. The boy's handling of the knife, a tool he is given by an adult, to open boxes with begs the question, "what will he do with the knife?" Mamet, who wrote a book about the art of drama call The Three Uses of the Knife, eventually took his own tool, the pen, to fight back at a world that he felt didn't listen enough). Supposedly he wrote it much earlier in his career and kept it in a drawer due to his strong personal feelings about it. If you have ever read or listened to an interview with the author, you will know that he is almost combatively private and closed off about personal matters. It feels like this lack of willingness to share that aspect of himself might have bogged him down in this play.Even is such a short work, there is an amazing amount of repetition. Small plot twists that in his other plays and movies would be revealed and dealt with in a few lines and a minute or two of stage time seem to go on forever here. When Donny finds an inconsistency in Del's story about how he was given a knife by her husband, the two of them go over the details so much that audience members are tempted to intervene to move the story along.

All that said, the Seattle Public Theater production does exactly what it should do with a play like this. The three actors skillfully handled the extremely challenging and sometimes seemingly purposefully unnatural dialogue of Mamet's text that served the author's intentions and aesthetic without falling into a deadened cliche delivery that those of us familiar with Mamet's work have heard way too often. Plus, as I lingered in the lobby and outside the theater, I heard virtually everyone who left discussing the play, offering their own take and interpretation of the material. These artists engaged their audience and gave them an experience that lasted well beyond the running time of the play itself.


Seattle Public Theater's The Cryptogram runs through October 23 at the Bathhouse Theater on Greenlake.

After Thoughts or Pet Peeves 

As one of the aims of this blog is to engage and enrich the Seattle Theater Scene, I feel its important to include comments on productions that would not normally have a place in a regular review. Mainly, these following criticisms should not be read as an attempt to deter anyone from going to see this worthy production, but should be looked at as part of a collective peer group dialogue where smaller points of a production can be discussed in the spirit of getting us all actively thinking about how to continually better our work in the future.

Prop Consistency : This was a minimalist staging of a play without a lot of needed props or set pieces. That said it was supposed to take place in a traditional living room. I thought the overall look of the play was solid  and fitting - costumes, set, props. However, there were a few moments that seemed to ignore the artistic aesthetic established by these elements. The first two had to do with liquids. Donny brings out a couple cups of tea early in the play. I am all for not having actors bring real hot  liquid out onto the stage. Yet, I am also a believer that the audience should at least be able to accept that tea might be in those cups. Yet when Donny came out swinging her arms holding those tea cups, it left no doubt that not only was there probably no liquid in those cups, but that it clearly wasn't hot. It was a very distracting moment. Almost as distracting was when Del is trying to feed John some medicine from a spoon. He pours the medicine from a bottle onto the shallowist of spoons on one side of the stage and then proceeds to walk across the stage with the spoon to the reluctant John where they then begin to battle for a couple minutes about whether John will drink the medicine or not, while Del continues to move about holding the spoon with the medicine, which we are then asked to believe Del successfully gets into John's mouth. Anyone trying to accomplish such a task would clearly bring the bottle to the boy and pour it there. If they didnt think of that right off, the awkwardness of trying to accomplish a playground game of not spilling the liquid from the spoon as you cross the room, would make them correct themselves and proceed as previously described. Did these actions ruin the play - no. But the accumulation of these kind of inconsistencies do make, even for the average theater goer, even if they can't put their finger on it, a less than full experinece.

Packing When There is Nothing to Pack - In third and last scene of the play Donny is packing up the house. The play calls for the room to be "denuded." Yet when you start with a minimal set (no real walls, no real pictures on walls, no knickknacks) it doesn't leave much to pack. Not a problem. Don't make the actress pack what is not there. Put the boxes about so we know moving is eminent and leave it at that. But having the actress awkwardly roll up a large rug and put throw pillows in a box, felt weird and not in keeping with the world of the play. She was packing these things because they were the only things there, but since the director and set designer had decided on a minimal set, the packing aspect of this scene should have taken a back seat to the other drama happening on stage.


Sound : As I mentioned earlier, there was a non required but effective sound-scape added to the play. This made me all the more curious about another subtle but significant sound element. When we first meet Donny, she is offstage in the kitchen. She breaks a tea pot. Del reacts to the breaking and they exchange dialogue while she remains in the kitchen.First, I didn't hear the crash of the tea pot. Nor did I later, in another scene, hear the tea kettle start to whistle until well after Donny had reacted to it and was moving off stage to get the tea. But bigger than these two issues was the fact that Donny didn't sound like she was in the kitchen. She sounded exactly like an actress sounds when they are backstage. Your voice sounds different when you shout into curtains rather than shouting in a space surrounded by drywall. Again, in a minimalist production we don't have that much to pay attention to and these little details stand out.