It's a perennial pastime in the theater world--the hand-wringing about defecting artists, the civic pride taken in an August Wilson, the shame of a collapsed Fringe Festival, the dark mutterings that the quickest route from the fringe to the Seattle's Big Three is through Lower Manhattan. There's no denying it: Seattle loves New York and hates New York. Mostly, it resents New York.
That envy is an unnecessary conceit and I was determined to prove it. Having the opportunity to visit the City of Pretense, I tried to find a native who could make us feel better about Seattle's artistic standing. It had to be someone without too much pride, a person who knew theater, but was on the B-list at parties, someone who might admit that Seattle has something to offer. I had to find a theater critic.
David Cote is the theater editor of Time Out New York, and he looks the part: a little slumped, with the fast speech of an underappreciated intellect that has to express itself quickly, before its listeners get bored.
As Cote described it, the New York theater profile isn't that different from Seattle's, just taller, with better hair and higher cheekbones. The complaints are the same: There isn't enough fluidity between the fringe and the big houses, audiences are paradoxically smug and over-enthusiastic ("people get fucking standing Os for nothing," Cote observed), and the outpouring of topical, anti-Bush plays hasn't amounted to much. And there are always lots of bad actors. "There's nothing more useless than a bad actor," he said. "It's like, go to Kabul or something."
So far so good. I asked him if he'd seen anything in Seattle. "Stuff in Seattle seems very collegiate--very game," he said. "But I've never seen anything that really impressed me. Everyone is too nice. If I lived there, I'd write a show that would piss everyone off. I'd make it vile, or maybe loud and industrial. But mainly vile."
Not a terrible review, all in all. My civic pride intact, I offered to pay for Mr. Cote's lunch, hoping he'd politely suggest we split the bill.
"Will The Stranger pick it up?" he asked. And then something happened--the envy, the need to seem more important than I am, hit me all at once.
"Of course," I lied. "Buying your own lunch is for Internet journalists." We shared a knowing chuckle. I thought it was a very sophisticated, urbane maneuver: a pleasurable $25-dollar conceit.
