They say:

This weekend, The Seattle Fringe Festival will choose, by lottery, the 21 artists that will be performing in the 2012 Seattle Fringe Festival on Sunday, May 13 from 7-9 pm at the Studio Theater at On the Boards located at 100 West Roy Street in Lower Queen Anne.

Over the past two months, the Seattle Fringe Festival has received over a hundred applicants from artists from the greater Seattle Area and all over the US, Canada and even one from Australia. The Steering Committee in association with Seattle Contemporary is excited to see which artists will be chosen for the Fringe’s pilot year September 19 – 23, 2012. We will randomly choose 8 nonlocal and 13 local artist/companies to be represented.

This is a free event and doors will open at 6:30pm. We will start to choose the artists around 7:15pm. On hand will be a cash bar featuring beer, wine, and spirits. We will also have some food snacks along with the fun and anticipation of finding out which artists get randomly selected to be represented in the 2012 Seattle Fringe Festival. So come on down and celebrate the Fringe being back in Seattle.

I'm not so sure about this lottery situation, though it probably involved very long discussions about the dangers of nepotism, the tyranny of curation, and how applications and work samples aren't representative of what people will see onstage. Regardless, the organizers have decided to let someone else do the deciding, so let's sit back and watch what happens. Best of luck, everyone!

(Footnote: In my search for the above link, I found this, which is what the lyrics might sound like to a Dutch person who thought they were written in English.)

Big Story Small is an evening of big, iconic plays that have been distilled into small, strong shots. The evening is produced by Pony World Theatre, which is building a good reputation for its intersections of classic and new work—the company’s last outing was an excellent office play called Suffering, Inc., built entirely of fragments from Chekhov scripts.

This round of Big Story Small includes some great local artists, including playwrights Brendan Healy and Kelleen Conway Blanchard, and Webster Crowell, who won the Stranger Genius Award for film in 2003.

The full lineup is below the jump.

Should be good.

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And then they have a Twitter fight. You can read about the cat-cat-cattiness over here. The show was Einstein on the Beach, a five-hour, intermission-free, "part art installation, part minimalist musical meditation, part dance spectacle"—you'd think someone who'd take the time to sit through that would be the kind of person to know and care about basic theater etiquette. It'd be another thing if it were, say, Mama Mia.

However! There is something to be said for opera a as messy, noisy public spectacle, and Rebecca Brown says it in this week's theater section, after attending Seattle Opera's (free) simulcast of Madama Butterfly, which beamed the opening-night performance from fancy McCaw Hall to the mammoth and concrete Key Arena:

KeyArena was filled with kids and parents, hipsters and secretaries, retired people and penny-pinchers, females and their confused but willing men, hormonally twitching adolescents, and beaming people in wheelchairs, and everyone was having a fantastic time.

Madama Butterfly tells the very Pacific Rim story of an American guy who impregnates an Asian teenager, and Seattle Opera made the most of the East-West relationship by giving folks at KeyArena samples of green tea, origami lessons, and the chance to try on Japanese-type costumes. (Parts of the crowd looked like kids at an anime convention.) At halftime, on the big screen, there were opera cartoons (the fat lady and the "wabbit") you could laugh and howl at and then fantasize about wearing a horned helmet and a ginormous breastplate. Also at halftime, you could eat chips and salsa (three flavors), licorice whips and popcorn, and drink a beer.

Read the rest here.

The theater blog HowlRound—"a journal of the theater commons"—is dedicating this week to Seattle. It kicked off with a Sunday post by playwright Vincent Delaney about how Seattle has become a better place for playwrights in the past few years. Monday was a mash note by playwright Stephanie Timm to Seattle's theaters and artistic leadership. Today's post—on what makes an "artistic home"—is by dramaturg/literary manager Liz Engleman.

The posts so far are fairly nice, polite, and tame—which isn't a total shocker. One doesn't expect any working artist to bite the institutional hands that may or may not feed them in the future.

But Delaney takes one swipe at Seattle's lack of arts philanthropy, a problem Paul Constant has written about over the years regarding Amazon's absence from the giving landscape. As Delaney writes:

I’ve always been astounded—no, shocked—that the city of Gates, Ballmer, Allen, Bezos and McCaw has been so ridiculously bad at supporting its arts and artists. What sense does it make that Minneapolis, a much smaller metro, without our sudden shocking influx of wealth, is able to support writers with such panoply of grants? Some of those grants are literally life changing—and yes, I consider $16,000 for a Jerome fellowship to be life changing, for writers at certain stage of their career, and not just for the money. So much of the game for us is self-esteem, self-worth, learning to take seriously the talent in yourself. Why don’t we have those opportunities?

One reason I've heard floated over the years—the nouveau richies of our young(ish) city don't have a culture of giving, that sense of noblesse oblige you see in older cities with more entrenched generational wealth. We're inching there, they say, but we're still far behind.

(h/t Mullin.)

Or that's what some scholars at Oxford University say. They analyzed the play's vocabulary, rhymes, and rhythms and found Middletonian traces:

Writers have their own distinctive literary "fingerprints" - a kind of stylistic DNA - and a highly-detailed analysis of the language in the play shows "markers" strongly linked to Middleton.

The rhyming and rhythms of sections of the play, the phrasing, spelling and even individual words suggest the involvement of Thomas Middleton.

As an example, the word "ruttish" appears in the play, meaning lustful - and its only other usage at that time is in a work by Middleton.

Maybe Middleton helped write the play(s) and maybe he didn't—whoever wrote all those characters had a huge stylistic bandwidth and must've been a hell of a mimic. Either way, I don't have a dog in the hunt over who wrote Hamlet and Lear and the rest. We have the plays, the plays are a cornerstone of human culture (a festival in England is now performing all 37 Shakespeare plays in 37 different languages, including Maori, Shona, and Urdu), and the debate over authorship is a parlor game.

More to the point, the scholars point out that playmaking during Shakespeare's time was far more collaborative and ensemble-driven than we usually think. The romantic, iconic image of one genius madly scribbling alone in his garret might not be quite right.

Instead, it may have looked more like the mess of collaboration—which might account for that huge stylistic bandwidth. As one of the scholars put it: "We need to think of it more as a film studio with teams of writers."

*Speaking of Middleton, anyone remember that production of The Changeling adapted by Bret Fetzer and performed at the Rendezvous a few years ago? Good stuff—and an early design by Matthew Smucker, who has become one of the great go-to designers in town, get called out in the review.

The Theater Puget Sound website has a casting call for a project called HOODIES UP!—new short plays about or inspired by the Trayvon Martin saga by Jose Amador, Paul Mullin, Mallery Avidon, Reneschia Brown, and others. The auditions are on the afternoon of Saturday, May 5. More details here.