Contrary to the playbill copy on The Bushwick Starr's website, there will be no "live sex" in WET's production of Erin Markey's new play, Singlet, which opens this Thursday at 12th Ave Arts.
"But it depends on what you think of as sex," said Markey over the phone last week. "I come from a really queer framework, and nobody ever thought any of the sex I had was sex, so that means anything can be sex—even just eating dinner."
Markey's surprising, left-field humor pervades Singlet, which explores the edges of the sexual attraction within friendships. The play features two actors, Markey and Emily Davis, who seamlessly transition between several different characters as they break and rebuild the boundaries of their constantly shifting relationship.
Markey's interest in the subject of intimate friendships and the multiplicity of selves emerged from their own life. About ten years ago, Markey and Davis were cast as sisters in the same show in New York City. The two actors got "pretty tight pretty fast" in order to make the play successful, and their close relationship stuck. Markey wanted to tap into the intense level of intimacy they developed over the course of the last decade as collaborators and friends and then use it to charge the emotions of the characters in a play, so they wrote the counterpart in Singlet explicitly for Davis.
And the two do get close. The show opens up with Davis and Markey nose-to-nose. Together they trying to reach "the holy grail of clothes," as Markey described it, which is fitting into an extra-small shirt. The campy critique of feminine expectations is hilarious, casually and cleverly revealing the characters' deep psychological issues even as they skim along the surface of their relationship. In the next scene, the two play coaches co-teaching a social studies class. That dynamic morphs into a kinky role play scene between a coach and student, which then morphs into even stranger and more intimate relations.
Markey cites Jean Genet's The Maids and Esther Perel's podcast Where Should We Begin? as primary influences. The comparisons seem apt to me, as Singlet takes many of the formal elements and some of the dark humor of Genet's play, combines it with the concerns and intrigue of Perel's couples therapy podcast, wraps it all up in a wrestling outfit, and then puts it on a regional theater's stage near you!
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: a general high school wrestling aesthetic governs the movement in the show "as a way to physically articulate some of the points of tension and aggression and softness and struggle" that occur between the two characters, Markey said. "And there are little dance-fighting influences in there as well."
Markey's known for creating formally adventurous, music-driven, comedic shows drawn from their own experiences. A musical called A Ride on the Irish Cream, which the New York Times's Charles Isherwood did not like, was about an intimate relationship, and it starred the person Markey was in a relationship with at the time. Another show called Boner Killer, which The Portland Mercury's Noah Dunham did like, combined their background as a sex worker in New York City with the character of their aunt, a nun with whom Markey strongly identified, to explore the strange feeling of confusing disappointments.
Singlet carries on many of those concerns, though it represents a shift in their work insofar as it's their first show not driven by music. "It was a joy, because it takes much less time to write a play than to write a musical," Markey said, laughing.
Markey's impossible-to-categorize, genre-bending work is the perfect inaugural piece for WET's new GUSH series. Samie Spring Detzer, WET's artistic director, envisions the new slot as a way to inject some cutting-edge, experimental, contemporary theater into Seattle's scene.
On the Boards and Velocity Dance Studio bring similar kinds of work through town, but they generally focus on dance. "I wanted to be able to create a space for Seattle audiences to get on board with where I think the future of WET is headed, which continues to be creatively engaging in new ways of telling stories," Detzer said in a brief phone interview.
The series expands WET's season to four shows, though the GUSH shows will be built more quickly and only run for two weeks instead of three.
When Detzer was shopping around for shows to bring home, she says Markey's work kept coming up. Detzer was intrigued by Boner Killer, noting that WET "definitely strives to be boner killers in everything we do." So she took a trip over to New York City to catch Singlet, and she was "totally blown away by the performance."
"It was a fun and theatrical and totally fearless and completely rule-breaking and funny and smart and didn’t take it self too seriously," Detzer said. "I knew Seattle had to see it."
