This weekend's Bash for Bart—a party for Intiman's outgoing artistic director and Tony Award magnet Bart Sher—was about what you'd expect. Theater people drinking free cocktails as fast as their little gullets could handle them, alternately giving each other a hard time and forming little mutual-admiration societies, gossiping about each other's personal and professional lives, and admiring the man of the hour.

Actor and theater scholar Laurence Ballard made some nice remarks and introduced a slide show of Bart's past productions. Broadway star Kelli O'Hara (The Light in the Piazza, South Pacific) sang and sang (and occasionally seemed to be pitching herself, from the stage, for any new opera work Bart's got coming his way).

Unfortunately, I had to leave this celebration of the past to host a discussion about the future at Theater off Jackson—which I only mention because I missed Bart's remarks and am now being asked, by a journalist or two, to respond to one of them. Here's a rough transcript, supplied by Intiman (delivered, they say, in a spirit of light-hearted ribbing):

It seems to me that to characterize Seattle is to talk about the profound struggle here between the inside and the outside... I want to dispel right now one very clear thing—and this is for you, Brendan Kiley—there is no such thing as local, and there is no such thing as national. There is only one thing: commitment. Commitment to work as hard as you can to make work here with the best people for the biggest audience. Ask Peter Boal. We only want to make great things.

I've argued over the years for Seattle theater artists to get over their nativism and admit that the best script/actor/director might come from Seattle or might come from Nashville. You want the best person for the job, and screw your provincialism.

But... I've had a slight change of heart—because theater is geographically bound. And a city's theater scene (like its music scene) has its own character. If we want radical homogeneity then, by all means, let's let the local starve by denying it exists. Then we can spend our money on imports instead of development, get all our music from one national station, and let sameness rule. (It's already starting to happen at the regional-theater level.)

And you cannot in good conscience argue that "there is no such thing as local, there is no such thing as national."

A touring production of Xanadu at the 5th Ave Paramount is national, and a new production of Sgt. Rigsby and His Amazing Silhouettes—written by Scot Augustson, developed and performed in Seattle by Stephen Hando and Shannon Kipp and other actors we know and love—is local, and yet another production of Doubt, with local actors, is somewhere in between.

Of course, it's a false choice. We don't have to choose whether to judge works on a local/national axis or good/bad axis. On the Boards figured this out years ago by having a parallel season: the Inter/National Series and the Northwest Series. OtB brings us Young Jean Lee and Forced Entertainment and throws money and support and audiences at local artists like Zoe Scofield and Amy O'Neal and Allen Johnson.

We can cultivate our garden and import ideas from the outside world.

Or we can have willfully obtuse arguments about whether the local is inherently superior to the inter/national or whether the local even exists. But that seems like a waste of time.

And if you really want to get down in the weeds on this localism argument, see this impassioned essay by playwright Paul Mullin.

... in Pasadena.

Teresa Eyring, executive director of the Theatre Communications Group, the nation's leading service organization for nonprofit theaters, said Friday: "I think people will be startled by it, surprised and concerned, and will want to help. Sheldon has a fantastic reputation, and it's one of the oldest theaters in the country."

The playhouse's first step, Eich said, will be hiring a lawyer to advise officials on such matters as a possible bankruptcy filing. Eich said he isn't sure if the playhouse's 8,000 subscribers will be reimbursed.

What a drag. The Pasadena playhouse is old and gorgeous (it began life as a burlesque theater called the Savoy) and its longtime artistic director Sheldon Epps struck a rare balance between populism and pushing the boundaries, giving the people what they wanted and giving them what he thought they needed. Plus, the theater struck up a nurturing relationship with a younger, more restless group (The Furious Theater Company), which every large theater in the country should have already done by now.

Plus, it's the place where Intiman's new-ish managing director, Brian Colburn, learned his trade in crisis conditions, joining the theater in 1997 as it crashed into the ground. (He eventually became its managing director.)

"The theater thought it only had three months to live," Colburn says. "They said it would be an educational experience for me."

The charismatic African-American actor and director Sheldon Epps took over, and he and Colburn radically changed the theater—overhauled its programming, doubled its budget, raised an endowment. "I'd love to attribute that to my own business acumen, but it was Sheldon's change of the programming."

Maybe the Pasadena Playhouse can pull another Lazarus. Here's hoping—some regional theaters are inevitably doomed to die, this one has historical and architectural value. (Look at its list of alumni: Tyrone Power, Victor Mature, Angela Bassett, Dustin Hoffman... ) It's worth fighting for.

It would be a shame if the Pasadena Playhouse had to become a museum to the death of an art form.

Fact: In ten years, Intiman's artistic director Bart Sher has become an American theater colossus. Love him, hate him, or both, the man has made an international-caliber career by keeping one foot planted in Seattle and letting the other hop around the map: directing August Wilson at the Lincoln Center, opera in Baden-Baden and the Met, musicals on Broadway.

During that time, he's won a Tony, Intiman has won a Tony, and Bart got himself a glowing, long profile in the New York Times Magazine.

• Remember this portrait?

It's an old and sour saw in Seattle theater: the shortest route from the fringe to the big stages is through New York. (Local legend says some local actors have even taken NYC cell phone numbers just to create the illusion of bi-coastalism.) But Sher, perhaps Seattle theater's greatest success story, gives that line the lie.

While other ambitious directors have bounced in and out of town during their scramble to the top—David Esbjornson, Gordon Edelstein—Sher kept Seattle as his home base and, even when working in other cities, worked hard to assure Seattle that Intiman was still at—or at least near—the center of his attentions.

(And, despite much criticism and speculation and hand-wringing, he meant it. During his 10 years in Seattle, Sher directed 16 productions at Intiman, many of them excellent: his eerie and moving Richard III; his taut and unusually, pathetically funny Uncle Vanya.)

Now Sher's finally leaving, having named successor Kate Whoriskey (an entrance interview with her—with asides by Sher—here).

Tomorrow night, Intiman is throwing a party to honor Sher and say goodbye. The Bash for Bart is also a fundraiser for Intiman, with food by Tom "T-Dogg" Douglas, a concert by Broadway star Kelli O'Hara (A Light in the Piazza, South Pacific), a lecture about Sher's direction by theater genius Laurence Ballard, and a farewell address by the big man himself.

Tickets aren't cheap ($150 to $2,500), but this will be a big night for Seattle—the end of one regime, the beginning of another.

We don't cover it very rigorously, but Seattle has some excellent children's theater—Linda Hartzell over at Seattle Children's Theater is a great, progressive artistic director and Giant Magnet, until recently, was a powerhouse. (We'll see what happens to that festival, since it lost two of the people who made it what it was—Andrea Wagner and Brian Faker—to a board giving them pushback. Maybe the new GM will keep up the hits... and maybe it won't.)

These institutions regularly program international-caliber shows that don't insult the intelligence of children (Faker once said something to me like: "If I could, I'd line up every bozo clown with balloons and a banjo against a wall and shoot 'em") but regularly expose the idiocy of adults.

The latest example is in this week's Theater News:

The lobby of Seattle Children's Theatre saw its first-ever spontaneous prayer circle earlier this month, as parents from a Christian school asked the good lord to shepherd them through the valley of darkness that is Perô, a Dutch puppet play written for 6-year-olds.

Grown-ups have been complaining about this mournful, gorgeous play about the sentimental education of a baker because it a) admits that divorce is a fact in the world, b) admits that children from different parents sometimes live together, and c) reveals the shocking truth that sometimes grown-ups kiss each other (and sometimes kiss the wrong person).

Never mind that many kids in the audience are all too aware of divorce and Brady Bunch households (and, um, kissing). Never mind that Perô deals with these issues in a light, sensitive, and honest way. Never mind that for the U.S. production, the Dutch director cut the bit where a washerwoman takes off her bra to reveal little puppet breasts with little puppet nipples—not because he thought it was inappropriate, but because the kids tittered for 20 minutes straight and once the adults saw the breasts they forgot everything else about the play. (So who's more filthy-minded? Those who can see breasts and move on with their lives or those who see breasts and fixate?)

Nope. The Christians have to get their chastity belts in a bunch and (once again) demonstrate that they are more infantile than their infants.

(Note to not-dumb Christians everywhere—when are you going to stand and deliver? These fundamentalist halfwits are giving you all a bad name. It is your responsibility, more than anyone's, to fight the moronism in your own ranks.)

Read the whole stupid thing here.

And buy tickets to Perô here.

UPDATE

Because commenters are making it clear that I wasn't being clear: The prayer circle (reportedly rather frantic and freaked-out) happened after seeing the show and was followed by vigorous complaints from parents and teachers. Other adults who've seen the show (particularly at the school matinees) have been making vigorous complaints as well, while the kids have been relaxed and sanguine about the whole thing.

ACT Theater has finally turned it around, ending 2009 with a $70,000 surplus—its first real, sustainable surplus in over a decade.

ACT had a surplus in 2005 because of Menopause the Musical and another in 2003 because it screamed for help. But this surplus is structural, based on a long-term business plan, and here to stay.

Adding to the numbers reported July 7, 2009, ACT has acquired an additional 400 new donors since July, for a total of 600 by December 31, 2009, which is a 20% increase over the 2008 donor base. ACT showed a 39% increase in individual giving. Additionally, single ticket sales increased more than 23% and the new Basic Monthly Membership, the first-of-its-kind program providing patrons with an All-Access Pass to nearly everything on stage at ACT, has amassed more than 350 members since its launch in July 2009. These increased contributions and growth in audiences, combined with strategic budget cuts, lean and efficient productions, a fully-integrated, intelligent and agile business plan, has eradicated the 2009 $780,000 deficit in one year.

Lots of hands helped build this budget but its main architects were ACT CFO Mary Brown and executive director Carlo Scandiuzzi. (Did I tell you or did I tell you?)

Congratulations to everyone.

Maybe it's too soon to ask the inevitable tough question, but why wait?

Now that ACT has dragged itself back to life, will it justify its own existence? The current programming isn't exactly a revelation (a little Pinter, a little burlesque, a little cabaret), but the 2010 season holds some hope (The Lieutenant of Inishmore in October, for example).

We'll have to wait and see.

Yussef El Guindi, one of Seattle's more successful playwrights, rarely has his plays produced in Seattle.

He sits in an apartment on Summit Avenue, sending his scripts around the country, getting lavish praise from The New York Times, The New Yorker ("an Arab-American cousin of the young Woody Allen"), The Chicago Tribune, the Humana Festival, etc. etc. in return. "That wasn't intentional," he told me over the phone yesterday. "It just kind of happened that way."

El Guindi is a carefully articulate and witty man with a British/Egyptian accent. And he's impeccably politic. "Regional theaters are like vending machines," he said at one point in the conversation: "you always get the same plays from them. But, really, I don't have a complaint about that. I like to see a Neil Simon or an Alan Ayckbourn or a Tom Stoppard. They're intelligent voices and I like to hear what they're saying. But I do wish some of the regional theaters with secondary spaces, like ACT or Seattle Rep, would use them to show more experimental, cutting-edge work."

See that? In just a few sentences, he offers sharp criticisms, adds qualifiers, and pays everyone a compliment, from regional theaters that produce Neil Simon to under-produced experimental playwrights. For the theater world, that's Madeleine Albright-level diplomacy.

El Guindi's last play produced here was Back of the Throat, five years ago in the tiny little basement of Theater Schmeater. This weekend, one of his newish plays—Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes—opens in the tiny little basement of >Theater Schmeater.

It's exciting—anything could happen on that stage.

Kyle Regan—a masochistic Stranger reader—has vowed to do every single thing recommended by the Stranger Suggests (movies, galleries, bars, concerts) for the month of January. Look for his reports daily on Slog. —Eds.

I went into Xanadu without any idea of what it was about. Comments from friends ranged from “I loved the movie!” to “You mean that gay shit?” Ah, with friends like these...

My friend Kiyomi and I arrived at our seats next to Dan Savage and his boyfriend, Terry. Savage went onstage before the show began and gave a quick speech about the gay plot to ruin the sanctity of marriage. This was a benefit show for Equal Rights Washington, after all.

Xanadu was an experience. Cliffnotes: In 1980, lousy artist Sonny is inspired by Clio, a Greek muse. She falls in love with Sonny (breaking a divine taboo) and helps him open a venue where "all the arts" can live together under one roof (music, dancing, painting, making out): a roller disco.

Spandex, sparkles, and mirror balls twinkle and glimmer during the entire performance. A unicorn shitting Lisa Frank stickers would have been more masculine. Elizabeth Stanley's hilariously bad Australian impression (a nod to Olivia Newton-John) was great. She sang, danced, and looked hot while rollerskating. What the hell can you do rollerskating?

As far as I could tell, the songs were close to, if not the same as, the movie's numbers. Not a bad thing, considering how well the campy numbers went with the corny jokes and ridiculous plot. By the time the show ended, I felt like I'd huffed a small tub of glitter glue. The show was total eye-candy, and I'm pretty sure an auditorium of gay rights activists are fine with sparkles. Kiyomi and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The night made thousands of dollars for Equal Rights Washington, which was also pretty badass.

Since the night wasn't flaming enough already, Kiyomi and I went to ERW's after-party at Chapel, hosted by Dan Savage. I suck at mingling. Multiple Stranger staffers and random industry people came by my table to say hi, but I could only disappoint them with my lack of insight and education.

This is your chance to get VIP tickets to see Xanadu tonight and drink with the cast afterword—for half price. Tickets have been going for $99 to benefit Equal Rights Washington, and if you want guaranteed tickets at that price and to support the state's leading gay-rights group, you can but them online here. But if you want discounted tickets for $49, you can buy them this evening between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. at the Equal Rights Washington will-call table at the Paramount Theatre (while supplies last).

The show—which Brendan Kiley calls "an arsenal of disco balls, frosted lips, roller skates, and stretch-pants"—is hosted by The Stranger's Dan Savage. The after party, with Savage and the Xanadu cast, is at Chapel, right up the street from the theater. Show begins at 7:00 p.m.

Here's your chance to see Xanadu at the Paramount Theatre tomorrow and take along a guest—without spending a gay dime. Details are below.

5:00 PM UPDATE: Thanks for playing, everybody. The tickets have met their new owner.

Want to attend without entering the contest? Buy tickets here for $99 each. All the proceeds benefit Equal Rights Washington, the state's leading gay-rights organization, which successfully fought to pass Referendum 71. Your money gets you into the event hosted The Stranger's own Dan Savage and entry to a special after party at Chapel with the Xanadu cast. The Paramount. Wednesday night. January 20. Show at 7:00 p.m.

Our arts editor, Brendan Kiley, who is not a homosexual, had this to say about the show:

Xanadu slew the critics when it hit Broadway with its arsenal of disco balls, frosted lips, roller skates, and stretch-pants. Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called it 'simultaneously indefensible and irresistible' and it won a pack of awards including a Tony nomination for best musical.

Throw your name in that hat for free tickets by emailing us here with the subject line "Gay Me Up!" and our fleet of trained squirrels will randomly select one of you at 5:00 p.m. today and shoot you a congratulatory email. Special thanks to Paul from SF for donating the two tickets. He paid $99 each, and the proceeds went to the wonderful Equal Rights Washington.

Colorado theaters are the latest to deal with a statewide smoking ban and whether or not theaters should allow actors to smoke onstage.

I endorse indoor smoking bans, even though smoking is a filthy vice I sometimes enjoy. (It's not even my filthiest vice, but it's my only filthy vice that damages the long-term health of strangers.) But all smoking bans should come with a stage exemption. The secondhand exposure is tiny, and miming smoking is moronic. Talcum cigarettes are twice as moronic because they demand that you suspend disbelief twice—once to pretend that the character is smoking, twice to pretend that someone blowing powder out of a tube is a reasonable facsimile of smoking.

(Which reminds me of a certain Seattle production I saw about a Russian revolutionary years ago. The director had a goofy moral opposition to guns onstage. Apparently, she believed theater audiences would be more likely to run out, buy guns, and start shooting people if they saw guns "glamorized" in theater. If only theater had the power to make anyone to do anything... include attend theater. Anyway: the director had all the actors in this Russian-revolution play use bananas instead of guns, which turned the drama into the worst/best unintentional farce ever.)

In fact, most laws should come with an exception for theater. Performers should be able to smoke tobacco, smoke opium, slaughter animals in violation of the health code, steal, blackmail, commit lewd acts, cut labels off mattresses, burn the flag, gamble, cockfight, practice law and medicine without a license, or whatever else they like (short of inflicting bodily harm to unwilling persons).

Because that's a show I'd like to see.

Kyle Regan—a masochistic Stranger reader—has vowed to do every single thing recommended by the Stranger Suggests (movies, galleries, bars, concerts) for the month of January. Look for his reports daily on Slog. —Eds.

Electra was no less brutal. Brendan Kiley called it right: Marya Sea Kaminski was the gem of the show. She hissed and spat like a feral animal. Her sorrow was hard to watch. Batshit nuts never looked so good. The other characters pale by comparison: I wanted to watch Kaminski the whole time. It was like watching fireworks. Dirt-stained, vengeful, manic fireworks. The blood surprised me, too. This wasn't a cut-on-my-finger- blood. This was a Lizzie-Borden-with-an-axe blood.

This was not the stodgy "classical theater" piece I dreaded. Greeks were motherfucking hard. I went to show expecting to barely stay awake. It was riveting. When my friend Jenya and I left the small auditorium, we had to take a break to digest what we just saw. It was that good. Well, it was that good for two people who are equally uneducated where drama is concerned. The musicals and comedies I've seen have all pretty much blended into a mash of semi-memorable jokes and gags, but I expect that this piece of theater will stay vivid for quite a while. A powerful show that I would have missed but for it having been suggested.

This is the week for talking about playwrights—first the TCG data about the most popular plays of the last decade. (Surprising: more newish than classic. Unsurprising: more small-cast than large-cast.)

Now the NYT has a story on "the care and feeding of playwrights":

Many of the playwrights see the nation’s major nonprofit theater companies as impediments to their work, favoring plays that have few characters to save money on actors’ salaries, for instance, or that have themes appealing to large audiences. Playwrights say artistic directors are obsessed with selling tickets in spite of their nonprofit missions and with pleasing board members by favoring world premieres or playwrights who are already admired by critics.

(Those are old complaints, but they're getting more attention with the new book Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, published by the Theater Development Fund.)

One of the theaters that behaves a little differently (and a little more boldly)? Steppenwolf, whose board agreed to treat Tracy Letts's mammoth, too-expensive August: Osage County like a high-risk, high-yield investment (instead of the low-risk, low-yield model preferred by most nonprofit theaters). The investment paid off:

When the playwright Tracy Letts handed over his “August: Osage County” for production in 2007, the board of the Steppenwolf Theater Company here agreed to forgo a balanced budget to finance this 13-character drama and its three-floor set. The bet paid off. The play earned rave reviews, moved to Broadway, won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award, and recouped its investment.

That willingness to take wild risks on big, ambitious shows—too big and too ambitious for most—reminds me of a certain young Seattle company. (And keep paying attention to Implied Violence. They've got some projects in the pipes for the next couple of years that, if they succeed, will break Seattle's brain. And maybe some of its highway overpasses.)

But, like any investor, the Steppenwolf board has to be willing to take a few hits, too:

Mr. Letts’s follow-up at Steppenwolf, “Superior Donuts,” was not so fortunate. Reviews were mixed, and its run on Broadway ended last week at a loss to investors.

No matter the track record, Mr. Letts’s relationship with Steppenwolf could not be stronger. “If Tracy Letts has a new play, we’re absolutely going to do it,” said Polly Carl, Steppenwolf’s director of artistic development.

The lesson in the story (besides it's hard out there for a playwright and the importance of an engaged, gutsy board) is basic business economics—but too many nonprofits seem to believe (or used to believe) that just because you're not seeking a profit doesn't keep you immune from market forces.

Read the rest of the story here.

• A very studied "whatever."

And he's remarkably gentle, after the thrashing he gave them for Rambo Solo: "an execrable piece... chic-inflected privileged-white-boy solipsism."

NTOO has again passed theater through the kidneys of friends and colleagues—in No Dice, which came to On the Boards and gave me a case of critical colic, they aestheticized banal phone conversations into performance art; in Rambo Solo, the performer talked about his obsession with First Blood; and in Romeo and Juliet, the text is friends' memories of the play, spoken by two actors (Anne Gridley and Robert M. Johanson).

Is the NTOO aesthetic a lament for cultural illiteracy? Two-bit anthropology? Garden-variety laziness? An attempt to take that old Magritte quote—"The banality of all things is The Mystery"—seriously? Or just another set of performance artists asking us to pay money and attention to watch them disappear up their own assholes?

A sample of the text, spoken by Gridley as Juliet:

Uhhh . . .
Romeo and Juliet?
The Capulets—
And the—?
(And I can’t remember the other guys.)
Came from two families
That didn’t—
That were warring?
Against each other?
Aaannnd . . .
The two young people fell in love—
(Even though they were WAY too YOUNG to do ANYTHING!)
Aaannnd . . .
Because they couldn’t be together—
They—
DIED.
How’s that?
Is that fast enough?

(More NTOO—with cowardly Europeans, my pathetic bitterness, and how Hilton Als is a big ol' racist—below the jump.)

I missed this back in December—Hugh Grant declaring theater a waste of time:

"I personally find going to the theatre is enjoyable about one time in 20", he told World Entertainment News Network (WENN) last week. "The other 19 you're just going, 'Oh, come on. Let's get to the end of it and have a drink'".

... one of the reasons he says he declines to tread the boards? He "can't quite justify it ... because I know what misery it is for the audience". Recognising the limits of one's own talents is rare in moviemaking; for that alone we should forgive Grant everything he made in 1995.

Just because the stone-thrower lives in a glass house doesn't mean his rock can't fly out and hit its target... or something.

Meanwhile, over at the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout digests some data from Theater Communications Group about the most-produced plays of the decade (not counting Shakespeare or seasonal plays):

1. "Proof," by David Auburn (54 productions).

2. "Doubt," by John Patrick Shanley (48 productions).

3. "Art," by Yasmina Reza (45 productions).

4. "The Drawer Boy," by Michael Healey (36 productions).

5. "Rabbit Hole," by David Lindsay-Abaire (33 productions).

6. "Wit," by Margaret Edson (29 productions).

7. "I Am My Own Wife," by Doug Wright (26 productions).

8. "Crowns," by Regina Taylor (26 productions).

9. "Intimate Apparel," by Lynn Nottage (25 productions).

10. (tie). "The Glass Menagerie," by Tennessee Williams, and "The Laramie Project," by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project (23 productions each).

It's a surprising list. Most of the plays are serious and philosophical, none of them is a musical—and, barring the Williams, most of them are contemporary. No Brecht, no Miller, no Shaw, no Wilde... American theaters and audiences, according to the numbers, prefer new and newish plays to the classics.

But you wouldn't know that from the bitching of most contemporary playwrights—or, um, me.

(Another way somebody—Hugh Grant maybe—is sure to read the data: Audiences don't like new plays and theaters wouldn't be in such trouble if they produced more museum pieces. But that reading doesn't work. Financially broken theaters have their bureaucracies and institutions, not their art, to blame. And it neglects the success of relentlessly contemporary theaters and companies like Steppenwolf, On the Boards, the Public, the Wooster Group, etc., etc.)

The TCG lists, broken down by season, also tell us that Seattle is seeing pretty much what the rest of the country is seeing. Between ACT, Intiman, and the Rep, we've gotten all the Nottage and Ruhl and Martin McDonagh that everyone else gets. It's almost like they're colluding...

Which tells us that our theater culture might be more nationally homogeneous than we thought. Over on his blog, local playwright (and Stranger Genius Award-winner) Paul Mullin has been banging a gong for cultivating more locally produced plays. His essay "Theatre Takes Place: Why Locally Grown Plays Matter" is long, passionate, and gutsy. A taste:

Over the last fifty years, the model of the auteur director serving as the alpha and omega of dramatic endeavor, imposing his or her “concept” on new play and classic alike— a model borrowed from and encouraged by the film industry— has grown increasingly infectious in American theatre. You need not look beyond Seattle with Dan Sullivan and Bartlett Sher essentially running their respective shops like Triple A feeder teams for the Broadway big leagues. (We can expect more of the same from the Intiman’s newly appointed Artistic Director, Kate Whoriskey. Hand-picked by the beatified Sher, she is sure to serve mostly as his marker absently placed in a book he may or may not return to some day.) [Ouch.] Hell, the fact that the recently introduced TPS Gregory Awards has a category for Outstanding Director but none for playwright is a crystalline example of how far this trend has gotten out of hand.

The new TCG data bears Mullin's discontent.

"Theater Takes Place" is the first of a 13-essay cycle called "Towards a World-Class Theater" that Mullin is threatening to complete. (It's part of a larger threat he first made publicly from the stage at the Genius Awards, challenging everyone in the room to make Seattle a "world-class theater town" within ten years.)

Say what you will about Mullin's arguments, the man's got some fire in his guts.

The two-time Tony nominated actor who starred as Shrek Lord Farquhar has been cast as Dan Savage in The New Group's spring musical of The Kid.

(The New Group's last musical was Avenue Q, and we all know how that turned out.)

Congratulations to everyone.

Kyle Regan—a masochistic Stranger reader—has vowed to do every single thing recommended by the Stranger Suggests (movies, galleries, bars, concerts) for the month of January. Look for his reports daily on Slog. —Eds.

The Eagles Auditorium—home to the ACT—is one of those buildings you drive by hundreds of times without ever noticing it. That's unfortunate. The building itself is beautiful: elaborate terra cotta and general architectural coolness helps it stand out strong against the towers that surround it. Motherfucking Martin Luther King Jr. stayed there during his only visit AND the building was Aerie No. 1 of the Fraternal of of Eagles. History, represent!

Here's how 14/48 works: the evening before the show—Thursday night—a theme is drawn out of a hat. Seven writers wrote scripts that riffed on that theme. The directors, actors, and crew had all day Friday to mount these new plays. Immediately after the show, that night's plays are scrapped and a new theme is chosen for the next night's show.

Not to brag, but I actually have theater experience: I sold concessions at 5th Avenue Theater for a whole six months. It is the capstone on my resume. Unlike going to art galleries—no experience at all until this week—seeing theater was something I had a sliver experience with. But I had never heard of 14/48 or ACT so this was my first non-5th-Avenue-related theater-going experience. I can't fathom how hard it is to coordinate everything it takes to put one of those 14/48 skit shows together. I'm not saying they were flawless—sometimes the pacing felt off, especially when the show attempted to shift from comedic to tragic pieces. I preferred the comedy pieces, of course, because funny is easier for morons like me to enjoy.

And, God fucking damn, did I ever enjoy 14/48. The theme last night was “collateral damage," and we got to see a real variety of stuff: collaterally damaged alien heads, a collaterally damaged baby, and... well, some other pieces that incorporated the theme less successfully. The one about a chatroom was inventive, but confusing. (I was given two tickets to 14/48 so I brought my friend Law. He makes Bruce Lee look like an accounting major. And Law's least favorite was my top pick. Clearly Law has no taste.) But this was my favorite Stranger Suggests so far. It was fun and me and Law both left ACT with dopey smiles on our faces. Even better: I won the raffle for free tickets to the next 14/48 and I got to suggest a theme.(“Mad Science"—fuck you, it was all I could think of.)

There were two suggested events last night: 14/48 and the Shabazz Palaces show at Neumos. I didn't get to the Shabazz show but there should be a review of it on LineOut at some point.

The Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, "New York's premiere eco-friendly theatre festival."

First of all: Isn't theater already the most low-impact medium? Books eat trees, paint is toxic, movies are made out of gasoline fumes and misery... so what the fuck is an "eco-friendly" theater festival? You recycle your wine bottles? Re-use your sets? Ask people to return their programs? Don't theater companies already do all of that?

I'm guessing by "eco-friendly," they really mean "didactic bullshit" like these unfortunate souls and their tie-dyed jazz hands:

(I actually had to sit through these guys' act on several occasions during my formative years. It's even worse than you'd think.)

The theater of good intentions—from Soviet realism to The Conciliation Project—has always and everywhere been a bad idea. Bad for people, bad for theater, bad for the world.