Zoe Scofield
There Ain’t No Easy Way Out, Scofield’s ballet of brutality,
scorched the stage at the Northwest New Works Festival in February
2006. It was a severe, powerful work from a severe, powerful
choreographer. Her dancers moved like creeping animals—more bird
and bug than mammal—prone to violent spasms and then total
control, with arched backs, angled joints, and the frightening
expressions of Noh masks. They were not fucking around.
The negotiation between rigor and chaos is everywhere in Scofield’s
work, from the costumes that sometimes look like rags and sometimes
like carefully stylized—if tattered and alien—vestments.
Scofield likes mud, paint daubed like mud, powder, violent gestures,
video (provided by her visual collaborator Juniper Shuey), and loudness
(provided by her sonic collaborator Morgan Henderson of the Blood
Brothers).
Now she’s back with The Devil You Know Is Better than the Devil
You Don’t (at the TBA festival in Portland this weekend and On the
Boards this April) and, most recently, a music video with the Dave
Matthews Band. The video is all Scofield severity, with paint, powder,
and violent gestures. Then Mr. Matthews gets creamed with mud.
BRENDAN KILEY
Amy Fleetwood
Amy Fleetwood has graced Seattle stages with performances of
impressive depth since the dawn of the grunge era. I first saw her in
1991, in Holy Ghosts, Romulus Linney’s Pentecostal monologue
bonanza, and the premiere production of then-fledgling Aha! Theater.
Fleetwood, then in her late 20s, was cast as the elderly Mrs. Wall, and
it’s a testament to her intelligence and spooky abilities that it was
not ridiculous. She was awesome. Since then, Fleetwood has continued to
work on local stages—with Book-It and A Theater Under the
Influence, primarily—but it wasn’t until this year that Fleetwood
got the splashy lead role her talent deserves. In Strawberry Theatre
Workshop’s An Enemy of the People, Fleetwood was cast as Dr.
Stockmann, absorbing the historically male role brilliantly and
bringing Ibsen’s protoenvironmentalist drama to thrilling new life. As
Strawberry Theater Workshop director Greg Carter understood, Fleetwood
is the kind of actor you build shows around, and if you’ve got to
subvert a Norwegian masterwork to do it, so be it. She’s a world-class
talent devoting herself to Seattle theater, and we shouldn’t
underestimate our good fortune. DAVID SCHMADER
Marya Sea Kaminski
Marya Sea Kaminski was shortlisted in the theater category in the
last Genius Awards issue, but her work in the year since has been
impossible to ignore. She starred in My Name Is Rachel Corrie at
Seattle Rep, although “starred” isn’t really the word: She was the only
person in the entire show. And it wasn’t an easy show. It was
nonfiction as art. Rachel Corrie, a real person who died acting as a
“human shield” in the Gaza Strip, has become, essentially, not a person
anymore but an example of something, someone whose personal qualities
have been turned into symbols. Kaminski made her a person again. If you
went into the show with strong convictions, you left with your
convictions eroded. And it was a real success: Due to overwhelming
demand, Seattle Rep had to extend the run.
That was not Kaminski’s only one-woman show this year. A couple
months before Corrie, Kaminski did In DisDress, an
autobiographical monologue in two acts about, among other things,
wanting to make theater in a city where most people aren’t interested
in theater anymore. The show linked her father’s death to other forms
of death. It was a funny, gutsy stabbing-in-the-dark at quandaries that
had defeated other theater artists and now had come around to her. It
was meta without much pretension. It was full of ideas. Kaminski is
that rare, dangerous bird: a gifted actor who can really write.
CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
Allen Johnson
As a performer, Allen Johnson is nothing if not intense—you
think he’s teasing you with a feather and suddenly he’s socked you in
the guts. He has written and performed only one major work, the solo
show Another You at On the Boards, but we’re still talking about
it. It was a collection of anecdotes about the cruelties and ecstasies
of childhood and adulthood—from the joy of watching a little girl
pick her nose to the joy of sex, from the mind-numbing abuse he endured
at the hands of his parents to the way he and his father spent long,
tender hours telling each other stories.
Fucked-up childhoods are so common in solo performance, they’ve
become a cliché. But Johnson turned his autobiography into
something wickedly beautiful because he refused to dumb it down into a
me-versus-the-world bromide. Instead, Another You was
complicated and rich and painfully funny—a life-changing thing to
watch. Johnson has said that Another You might be the only show
he ever does. If that’s true, it’s enough. But we desperately hope
there will be more. BRENDAN KILEY
