September 12, 2007

Pullout

Theater Shortlist

by Brendan Kiley, David Schmader and Christopher Frizzelle

Eric Hanson

Genius Awards

Zoe Scofield

There Ain't No Easy Way Out, Scofield's ballet of brutality, scorched the stage at the Northwest New Works Festival in February 2006. It was a severe, powerful work from a severe, powerful choreographer. Her dancers moved like creeping animals—more bird and bug than mammal—prone to violent spasms and then total control, with arched backs, angled joints, and the frightening expressions of Noh masks. They were not fucking around.

The negotiation between rigor and chaos is everywhere in Scofield's work, from the costumes that sometimes look like rags and sometimes like carefully stylized—if tattered and alien—vestments. Scofield likes mud, paint daubed like mud, powder, violent gestures, video (provided by her visual collaborator Juniper Shuey), and loudness (provided by her sonic collaborator Morgan Henderson of the Blood Brothers).

Now she's back with The Devil You Know Is Better than the Devil You Don't (at the TBA festival in Portland this weekend and On the Boards this April) and, most recently, a music video with the Dave Matthews Band. The video is all Scofield severity, with paint, powder, and violent gestures. Then Mr. Matthews gets creamed with mud. BRENDAN KILEY

Amy Fleetwood

Amy Fleetwood has graced Seattle stages with performances of impressive depth since the dawn of the grunge era. I first saw her in 1991, in Holy Ghosts, Romulus Linney's Pentecostal monologue bonanza, and the premiere production of then-fledgling Aha! Theater. Fleetwood, then in her late 20s, was cast as the elderly Mrs. Wall, and it's a testament to her intelligence and spooky abilities that it was not ridiculous. She was awesome. Since then, Fleetwood has continued to work on local stages—with Book-It and A Theater Under the Influence, primarily—but it wasn't until this year that Fleetwood got the splashy lead role her talent deserves. In Strawberry Theatre Workshop's An Enemy of the People, Fleetwood was cast as Dr. Stockmann, absorbing the historically male role brilliantly and bringing Ibsen's protoenvironmentalist drama to thrilling new life. As Strawberry Theater Workshop director Greg Carter understood, Fleetwood is the kind of actor you build shows around, and if you've got to subvert a Norwegian masterwork to do it, so be it. She's a world-class talent devoting herself to Seattle theater, and we shouldn't underestimate our good fortune. DAVID SCHMADER

Marya Sea Kaminski

Marya Sea Kaminski was shortlisted in the theater category in the last Genius Awards issue, but her work in the year since has been impossible to ignore. She starred in My Name Is Rachel Corrie at Seattle Rep, although "starred" isn't really the word: She was the only person in the entire show. And it wasn't an easy show. It was nonfiction as art. Rachel Corrie, a real person who died acting as a "human shield" in the Gaza Strip, has become, essentially, not a person anymore but an example of something, someone whose personal qualities have been turned into symbols. Kaminski made her a person again. If you went into the show with strong convictions, you left with your convictions eroded. And it was a real success: Due to overwhelming demand, Seattle Rep had to extend the run.

That was not Kaminski's only one-woman show this year. A couple months before Corrie, Kaminski did In DisDress, an autobiographical monologue in two acts about, among other things, wanting to make theater in a city where most people aren't interested in theater anymore. The show linked her father's death to other forms of death. It was a funny, gutsy stabbing-in-the-dark at quandaries that had defeated other theater artists and now had come around to her. It was meta without much pretension. It was full of ideas. Kaminski is that rare, dangerous bird: a gifted actor who can really write. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

Allen Johnson

As a performer, Allen Johnson is nothing if not intense—you think he's teasing you with a feather and suddenly he's socked you in the guts. He has written and performed only one major work, the solo show Another You at On the Boards, but we're still talking about it. It was a collection of anecdotes about the cruelties and ecstasies of childhood and adulthood—from the joy of watching a little girl pick her nose to the joy of sex, from the mind-numbing abuse he endured at the hands of his parents to the way he and his father spent long, tender hours telling each other stories.

Fucked-up childhoods are so common in solo performance, they've become a cliché. But Johnson turned his autobiography into something wickedly beautiful because he refused to dumb it down into a me-versus-the-world bromide. Instead, Another You was complicated and rich and painfully funny—a life-changing thing to watch. Johnson has said that Another You might be the only show he ever does. If that's true, it's enough. But we desperately hope there will be more. BRENDAN KILEY

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