Erin Markey’s Singlet is the smartest and funniest piece of theater I’ve seen in Seattle in a while, which means I must issue a rare Seattle Art Alert.
🚨If you’re not seeing Singlet this weekend, then you must cancel your plans and see Singlet this weekend. Nothing you do this weekend will be better than watching Markey and Emily Davis do their thing onstage. This is not an opinion. I am a professional theater reviewer with a minor in Theater Studies and I’m telling you a fact. If you do not believe me, you are only participating in the ongoing degradation of experts in our society.🚨
As I wrote in my preview of the show, Singlet explores the edges of the sexual attraction within friendships. The play features two actors, Markey and Davis, who seamlessly transition between several different characters as they break and rebuild the boundaries of their constantly shifting relationship.
It’s also a nonlinear deconstruction of classic American theater tropes that simultaneously masters and pushes those tropes further. Creepy incest shit as a metaphor for the way American capitalism eats its young? It’s in there! Mother-daughter mutual self-destruction/protection pacts? Very much in there! Pounding brewskis onstage? What did I tell you??
The pervasive tone is “we’re being ironic—but actually we’re deadly serious,” which is the only tone left for millennial artists in a country that had to abandon irony in the early aughts and then had to abandon “the New Sincerity” after a dictator entered the White House.
You can tell a show is good when people are laughing at weird times, and people were definitely laughing at weird times here. Some were even weirdly laughing at weird times, which, given some of the subject matter, made me nervous about them. But honestly, I was too busy laughing to really care. This was especially true of a scene at the close of the first act, where Markey performs a perfect parody of a British monologue an acting student would have to practice to get into grad school. Markey nailed it so hard I completely lost it. I embarrassed myself laughing.
The show gave me all the joy of reading a long, funny, but deeply serious associative poem, of the kind someone like Mary Ruefle or Dean Young or Michael Earl Craig would write. You never know where Markey and Davis are going to next, and you’re almost terrified to find out, but you’re dying to know. I rarely see and feel the kind of command of language and logic that these two actors displayed onstage, so I was just incredibly pleased the whole time.
