The world premiere of TheatreRUN's Russian Doll ended its run at Consolidated Works to a half-full house two Sundays ago. A half-full house on the closing night of a show as good as Russian Doll is sad, but it's not as sad as, say, having to cancel a performance because literally no one showed up (which also happened during the run), or getting panned in another weekly newspaper by a reviewer who admitted to not understanding the show ("I'm at a loss") and then held up his own failure to understand it as the only real evidence that the show didn't work. (The Seattle Times, on the other hand, raved about it, and Brendan Kiley wrote a brief column in this paper profiling the charismatic ensemble: two actors, four actresses.) When word finally began to get out that Russian Doll was actually sturdy, modern, comic, smarter than its own premise, and worthy of people's attention--surely it was better than Take Me Out, that cheesy play at Seattle Rep about the gay baseball player, which most reviewers bent over forwards to describe as daring, full of meaning, etc. --by that point, Russian Doll had closed. One member of the cast was packing her bags for London, another for Switzerland. (The play was created collaboratively at ConWorks, but the players live all over the world.) And Russian Doll is the kind of show that can't go on without its actors, and these actors in particular: Their intuition, timing, chemistry, and control is not the kind of thing that's easily replicated.

My contribution to the Russian Doll word-of-mouth mill consisted of calling two-dozen people the afternoon before closing night, many of whom were writers. (More than anything else, the show, which again and again pulled in unforeseen directions, exemplified narrative possibility, which I realize isn't a thrilling plane of thought for everyone, but the first of the three performances I saw made me want to go home and turn out a novel.) One problem Russian Doll's creators are going to have as they take the show elsewhere is describing Russian Doll in a way that makes it sound remotely entertaining. The description of the show that ran in The Stranger's calendar--"spectacular physical theater"--sucks. The show was spectacular, and its physicality was endlessly compelling, but it wasn't a show about pantomime. It was about people. Pantomime is a tradesman's trick; it's imitative and dull. What the few who saw Russian Doll saw was life--sharply presented, but messy, seemingly uncalibrated, surprising. The Russian doll of the title, made entirely of metal, got no here-is-a-symbol treatment. Nor did the theme of time, although time's at the center of it all: its thrilling forward rush, its awful imperviousness, its neutrality, its speed, its dispensations, its unfathomable capacity. There were physical innovations in Take Me Out, too, but who cared? The innovations in Russian Doll, which also involved physical elements, were riskier. Russian Doll was modern in the literary sense. It was about being trapped in the act of being.

frizzelle@thestranger.com