Last weekend, Intiman opened its big, ambitious comeback from near-disaster with a new bunch of leaders and artists and four plays opening in one weekend featuring one team of actors and designers. (For a quick hit on what went wrong, click on the link above. For a quick hit on the new crew, which we ran in our most recent issue of A&P, click here.)

We'll have more about how the weekend went—with writing by Charles Mudede, Anna Minard, Sarah Galvin, and myself—in this week's paper.

Briefly:

Mudede is entranced with the set for Romeo and Juliet (directed by Alison Narver) and the comic timing of Marya Sea Kaminski in the character of the Nurse.

Galvin enjoyed Miracle!, a drag-musical version of The Miracle Worker (the brainchild of theater director—and Stranger editorial director—Dan Savage). She writes: "Watching Annie teach Helen to give the finger, I realized that perhaps the best things about this play (besides the line, 'I will cut you, and then fuck the cut') are such unique moments of realism and humanity, which would not be possible without its absurd, offensive premise."

Minard thinks Dirty Story (by John Patrick Shanley, who wrote this play just before he cranked out his hit Doubt) is an odd fit for the rest of the plays. It's a psychodrama about a couple (he's a misanthropic writer, she's a doe-eyed wannabe writer) that backflips into a heavy-handed political metaphor about the Middle East.

I think their Hedda Gabler (directed by Intiman's artistic director Andrew Russell) is the most clear and accessible production I've ever seen, and it has momentum. But it makes an odd choice about how to portray Hedda's suicide (with choreography instead of a gun) that I'm still mulling over.

But no matter what the critics say, I would count the weekend as a success—the energy was high and engaged. Some folks flew in from across the country just for this weekend. People watched plays, drank booze, and talked passionately about the plays, sometimes in agreement and sometimes in disagreement. They loved some stuff, hated some stuff, and didn't know what to think about some stuff.

If I were running a theater, that's exactly what I'd want.