Weekend Two

Just got home from ETI's "All's Well That Ends Well," at 12th Ave Arts.  They did a good job; I had trouble reading through that one.  I thought Janet Hietter as Clown/Widow and Linda Cleckler as Lafeu/Duke were particularly outstanding; they made watching it fun.  They have a free show tomorrow night at Luther Burbank Park on Mercer Island, and are then taking it to Echo Glenn, after which the program is done and it's out into the world for them.  Congratulations to all of the ETI students.

Saw all eight performances of NWNW week two yesterday.  Impressions: OCD; Ritual; Timidity; Identity; Validation; Race; Authenticity; Reasons to Live; Dark.

My favorite was the last piece on the mainstage, PE/Mo's "Anatomy of an Accident."  I think there were eleven performers on stage.  My impression was that it had to do with racial profiling, not just by police, but by witnesses as well.  Assuming guilt.  Building up the story because you can.  Wondering what the "truth" of the moment was.  The movement was contained chaos, a contained violence, and at times I was concerned for the well-being of the performers as they smacked down to the ground, though my second thought was that they had really good fight choreography.  I was mostly engaged, and it was a potent piece of "theatre," save one bit with the "police woman" which came across as superficial, it was 30 seconds to a minute, and I couldn't tell you where it was (I'd have to see it again), but there seemed to be a lot of consideration in the rest of the piece, and this moment lacked that, it went for the general, and in that felt momentarily lazy, and as an audience member, you lost me, which is a shame.  Became a distraction to an otherwise powerful performance, which again I loved.  (I mention it because I've been reading Peter Brook's "The Empty Space.")  The choreography was fabulous.

My other two favorites were the theatre piece "Awaiting Oblivion or" by Tim Smith-Stewart, and "The Beautiful" by Dani Tirrell.  The latter dealing with how to find one's identity, how to be the "real" you as a gay, black man in America.  There was a bit about violence against transgender people as well.  (Which begs the question, "How is gay marriage or a transgender individual a threat to you?"  It has nothing to do with you.  It takes nothing away from your rights to marriage-and the legal privilege that distinction affords you, nor does it affect your own masculinity (or femininity, though most perpetrators of violence toward gays and transgenders tend to be male.)  It's a sad state of affairs that the violence has seen an uptick recently.  It was high when I first moved to Seattle back in the late 80's, as well, but it had seemed that as a society we had evolved beyond that in the intervening years.  So the recurrence makes me somewhat disappointed with humanity, here.)

"Awaiting Oblivion or" had to do with "How to be ok when everything is not ok-Temporary Solutions for surviving the dystopian future we find ourselves in at the present."  At one point there was a debate between Hedda (Hedda Gabler) and Nora (A Doll's House) with Hedda giving reasons to die, and Nora giving reasons to live.  I enjoyed the discussion.  They brought up "Thelma and Louise," that car plunging off into the Grand Canyon at the end.  And as a side note, I never really bought into that as a feminist statement (even though the screenwriter is considered a feminist.)  It always felt cheap to me, like the raw end of the stick.  Why is the only available way out for the women to die...how is that "winning" anything?  Is that the only option available to me as a woman?  Thelma made a series of bad choices and then Louise drowned with her in her vortex.  Louise had a decent life, a supportive partner, who even sent them money (which, through another one of Thelma's bad decisions, was lost.)  And the police investigator was on their side in the end, but both he and Louise's partner were ineffectual as heroes.  Enough digression, at the end of this performance there was an alternative ending to "Thelma and Louise," wherein they become praying mantises and escape to Mexico.  (Even becoming zombies and devouring the men would have been a preferable ending (for me), though admittedly, an entirely different genre of movie.)  When we did movie nights on campus in college, that was often the choice.  (And yes, it's just a movie, my problem isn't the movie itself, but that it became some feminist rallying cry.)

Kudos to all the performers and writers over the two weekends.  Thanks for putting yourself out there.

And all this inspired me to actually sit down and write two pages of a performance piece I've been thinking about.  I probably won't use these particular pages of writing, but I cracked open the mystery.