The four characters in the title story. You cant tell from this photo how over-emphatic the delivery of the lines were.
The four characters in the title story. Not pictured: their emphatic, almost jovial delivery of dialogue and narration. John Ulman/Book-It Repertory Theatre

First of all: I walk out of plays at intermission all the time, so save your outrage. I walked out of Grease at the 5th Avenue Theatre at intermission. I walked out of 99 Ways to Fuck a Swan at 12th Avenue Arts at intermission. (The friend who walked out of Grease with me was happy we left, but the friend I walked out of 99 Ways to Fuck a Swan with was aghast. I encouraged him to go back, but he didn't want to.) I walk out of movies even more often than I walk out of plays.

So it shouldn't be startling that I walked out of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. But people are easily startled, and they like to follow imaginary rules of decorum, and one of the imaginary rules of decorum in Seattle theater is you are trapped there until the bitter end because it's polite. I can't go for that. (No can do.) It gives the director and the producers and the actors unclear feedback. If theater audiences are not allowed to yell or throw things anymore, at least we ought to be allowed to politely decline to reenter the theater at intermission if it just doesn't seem worth it.

I reread Raymond Carver's short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love the afternoon before I walked down to Seattle Center. Big mistake. What's brilliant about the minimalist classic set in the Pacific Northwest is how under-narrated the stories are. There is so little narration you almost can't tell what's going on; you certainly can't tell the significance of much of what's going on. It gives the stories a creepy, low-energy quality. It establishes a rhythm that's inseparable from the content.

But Book-It's style of adapting literary works is anti-minimalist. It's "WE! ARE NOW! GOING TO READ TO YOU! FROM A BOOK!" Their house style is over-narrating, no matter what, and in the case of under-narrated, minimalist material like Carver's stories, it's a disservice to the writing, the audience, the actors, the meaning, and the sense of suspense.

"She slowly raised her glass to her lips," one character says as she slowly raises a glass to her lips.

"She cried," one character says while she starts crying.

"He groaned extravagantly!" a woman yells when the man groans extravagantly.

Maybe this works for audience members who are hard of seeing, and maybe it works for literature with minimal dialogue, but Carver is almost entirely dialogue, there is almost no narration needed if you're going to act out what the characters do, and characters switching back and forth between dialogue and their narration of what they were doing that we could plainly see them doing with our own eyes didn't do anything except deform and distract from the material. An hour of it—two of the four short stories—was all I could take. Maybe the two stories in the second act were phenomenal. I'll never know.