First, for the doubters: Forgive the Satori Group its name. A bunch of theater kids naming their company after a bit of Buddhist enlightenment should give any reasonable person pause—as would the Salvation Theater, the Beltane Company, or the Five Pillars Players.
A bad name can smother a worthy endeavor in its cradle, but the Satori Group has already proven itself strong and adventurous. Its members are throwing their young selves directly against two acute Seattle anxieties: first, whether this is a town you have to move away from if you want to make theater (Satori moved here from Cincinnati after taking reconnaissance field trips to Chicago, Austin, and other cities), and, more importantly, whether Seattle audiences care about new work (they’ve recently dedicated themselves to finding out). Not too shabby, considering that many of our older, homegrown companies have been too chicken to do the same.
Last weekend, Satori opened Winky, its adaptation of a short story by George Saunders. It’s an ambitious choice, both because Winky largely takes place inside its characters’ heads and because Saunders’s short stories are more about mood than action. Saunders has picked up the torch left burning on the ground by Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Kennedy Toole. He writes sweet, sad satire about Americans, our stupidly reductive culture of ads and slogans, and our striving—and failure—to be better than we are.
Fiction has a freedom that theater lacks: It can easily jump between universes (from, say, the cockpit of a spaceship to the scalp of a policeman) in just a few sentences. But a play must work especially hard to break the physical continuity of things happening in the same room, on the same stage. For Winky, Satori found and colonized a loft in Pioneer Square where they built four different environments, use puppets and projections, and move their sets and their audience around to accommodate the story’s authorial shifts (it keeps changing narrators). The result is a shape-shifting experience that knocks us off balance, sucking us into a world where a kitchen wall becomes a theme park, an alleyway becomes a video game, and stairways dance. (Saunders helped Satori with the adaptation and staging concepts. “He seemed excited that we were blowing out his story,” said company member and lead adaptor Spike Friedman.)
Winky begins at a perverse self-help seminar called People of Power. A hype man whips up the real-life audience (“Let’s get stoked! Woo!”) before a smug motivational speaker named Tom Rodgers (Adam Standley) appears. He strides onstage with some action-movie music and cheesy theatrics, fake-fighting actors with shirts labeled “Whiny,” “Self-Absorbed,” and “Blames Her Fat on Others.” It’s a wry gesture to begin a play that heavily relies on theatrical trickery: winking at how easily people are manipulated by a few idiots on a stage.
Rodgers offers us two metaphors, oatmeal and crap. Oatmeal, Rodgers says, represents our soul in its pure state: “Every day your soul cries, ‘Today, let me be oatmeal!'” But we let people crap in our oatmeal, polluting our souls and ruining our lives: “In real life, people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time—friends, coworkers, loved ones, even your kids, especially your kids—and that’s exactly what you do. You say, ‘Thanks so much!’ You say, ‘Crap away!'” The key to success, Rodgers declares with an arrogant flip of his long black bangs, is to do exactly what we want, to accommodate no one, to cut the oatmeal-crappers out of our lives.
Then a voice-over commands the audience to turn our chairs around. We’re facing a small closet where a frustrated loser named Neil Yaniky (the round, ruddy, and appropriately pitiful Anthony Darnell) is having a private consultation with Rodgers. Together, they identify the person crapping in Yaniky’s oatmeal—his sister, Winky. Her problems? “Too religious. Crazy-looking. Needs to get her own place.” This Winky, by Yaniky’s account, is a soul-sucking monster.
For the third transition, the audience walks around a corner into the Yaniky household, where the charmingly batty—and perhaps schizophrenic—Winky tries to clean up the kitchen for her brother but is constantly derailed by hallucinations. Actress Greta Wilson, with dyed white hair and an expressive, long-limbed body, waltzes airily through Winky’s bright, distracting world. Roller coasters appear on the walls, stenciled geese come alive, and a sock she keeps on her shoulder dispenses advice. Winky sings and smiles while Yaniky storms home, chewing over past humiliations, determined to become a Person of Power. The two siblings are living on different planets, and their inevitable collision is both tragic and pathetic.
Satori’s third ensemble-generated piece, and its first in Seattle, Winky is a collection of strong ideas with a few rough edges. The puppetry, video, and set changes mostly succeed, giving the play the light-footed freedom of fiction, despite a few clunky transitions. (“It was a little bumpy,” one cast member quietly confessed to a friend in a hallway after opening night.)
The direction (by Caitlin Sullivan) and acting are strong, particularly Darnell as Yaniky and Standley as the smug self-help shyster. Spike Friedman’s adaptation rearranges some of Winky‘s narrative furniture to good effect. An audience’s attention, for example, is different from a reader’s: Winky-the-play foreshadows and echoes bits of inner monologue that the story only mentions once. But the script bogs down in the overlong third and fourth sections—solo passages with Winky and Yaniky—leaving the actors to twist in the wind.
Winky may not be the fullest flowering of Satori’s potential, but it’s a rewarding (and often ruefully funny) experiment in blowing down old walls and building up new ones. Let the Satori Group be an example to the rest of us. 
Satori Group’s “Winky” is truly – surprisingly – awful. Since it’s based on a short story I expected it to be unified and concise. It isn’t. This was ‘adapted’ by Spike Friedman, but it’s also described as an ‘ensemble-generated piece.’ In other words: written by committee.
The first scene is a satire of a Tony Robbins-style motivational seminar. The actors were supposed to be blasting it out to a couple thousand people but on opening night they had about as much energy as Activities Directors at an old folks home. Then an announcer told us to stand up and turn our seats around to face a little stage that was hiding behind curtains. This encounter, between the hot shot motivator and a meek convert, had the blueprint of something edgy and frightening, but it was simply lifeless and flat.
Then we were told to get up and walk to an adjoining space where there was a terrifically wacky set, with all sorts of video and shadow puppet effects to show us a young woman’s oh-so-charming insanity. It was such a glib, cutesy view of mental illness that it was almost insulting. At the same time it managed to be excruciatingly boring. (I’ll bet that Satori can back up this nonsense with a convoluted drama school theory of some sort.) Then – I kid you not – we had to sit there while the cast and crew disassembled the wacky set so that we could walk back to the first room.
The last scene was so boring and disconnected from everything else that it was impossible to understand what the story was supposed to suggest, or what the emotional tone was supposed to be. If the idea was to take us through states of mind, or give a skewed view of a brother-sister relationship, or… Christ, who knows?
I understand that a play need not be a linear story. But even if a play is meant to convey themes of disunity and incoherence it must do so with unified and coherent craftsmanship. “Winky” is just an indulgence of theater techniques. Forcing the audience to move around isn’t “participatory theater”, it’s just disrupting, annoying, and tedious. This all could have been done on a single stage, and the director, Caitlin Sullivan, should have said “No!” to half of the gimmicks.
Forty years ago an audience might have thought such a disjointed mess was simply fascinating. Today we have a right to demand, as a bare minimum, coherence of purpose and execution. Testing the patience of the audience is simply unfair.
Satori Group’s “Winky” is truly – surprisingly – awful. Since it’s based on a short story I expected it to be unified and concise. It isn’t. This was ‘adapted’ by Spike Friedman, but it’s also described as an ‘ensemble-generated piece.’ In other words: written by committee.
The first scene is a satire of a Tony Robbins-style motivational seminar. The actors were supposed to be blasting it out to a couple thousand people but on opening night they had about as much energy as Activities Directors at an old folks home. Then an announcer told us to stand up and turn our seats around to face a little stage that was hiding behind curtains. This encounter, between the hot shot motivator and a meek convert, had the blueprint of something edgy and frightening, but it was simply lifeless and flat.
Then we were told to get up and walk to an adjoining space where there was a terrifically wacky set, with all sorts of video and shadow puppet effects to show us a young woman’s oh-so-charming insanity. It was such a glib, cutesy view of mental illness that it was almost insulting. At the same time it managed to be excruciatingly boring. (I’ll bet that Satori can back up this nonsense with a convoluted drama school theory of some sort.) Then – I kid you not – we had to sit there while the cast and crew disassembled the wacky set so that we could walk back to the first room.
The last scene was so boring and disconnected from everything else that it was impossible to understand what the story was supposed to suggest, or what the emotional tone was supposed to be. If the idea was to take us through states of mind, or give a skewed view of a brother-sister relationship, or… Christ, who knows?
I understand that a play need not be a linear story. But even if a play is meant to convey themes of disunity and incoherence it must do so with unified and coherent craftsmanship. “Winky” is just an indulgence of theater techniques. Forcing the audience to move around isn’t “participatory theater”, it’s just disrupting, annoying, and tedious. This all could have been done on a single stage, and the director, Caitlin Sullivan, should have said “No!” to half of the gimmicks.
Forty years ago an audience might have thought such a disjointed mess was simply fascinating. Today we have a right to demand, as a bare minimum, coherence of purpose and execution. Testing the patience of the audience is simply unfair.
@ 1 (& 2)
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion, but i don’t think that we could disagree more in our conclusions.
I found the usage of the performance space to the extremely inventive and aggressive, almost as if someone had dared them to make the most of it. I don’t think there’s another company in town that would’ve attempted something of the same scale in that venue.
Was it the perfect play? Absolutely not. But I wish more theatres would run the risk of imperfection (or alienation), in the interest of creating something memorable.
Mr. Kiley is on the right track, but I think he is pulling his punches. “Winky” was an experience that became much less than the sum of its parts. Each of the scenes must have been fun to workshop but three of the four scenes are performed like rehearsals where the “energy” is held back on purpose.
Except for the “Winky’s kitchen” segment I felt sort of invisible, like the cast wasn’t sure that the audience was there. One of the actors simply does not know how to project their voice; it constantly trails off into a whisper that is barely intelligible. I’m sure this is a perfectly nice individual but I don’t understand why this person is cast to be up front in all of Satori’s shows.
I couldn’t even see what happened in the last scene because of the way the chairs were set up. They were acting at floor level instead of up on a stage. Again, it was like a rehearsal. It’s not much fun if you can’t see the actors.
On the plus side it’s only $15.
p.s. to Satori Group: Please do not look up the phone number for C. Spoke in your mailing list and call me to ascertain who wrote this review. CSpoke really is C. Spoke. Calling your customers to uncover the true identity of monarch29 (who hammered “Winky”, see above) is dangerously close to paranoid.
Both poignant and humorous, Winky raises significant issues in a personal manner and challenges the audience in the manner of all great art; revealing its treasures to those who are willing to take the journey to discover the rich layers of subtext and the way the play’s innovative staging resonates with the work’s thematic structure.
The long speeches that close the show are punctuated by inventive projection of images, ephemeral characters, and puppets, and only critics and playgoers with a TV attention-span could possibly find these beautifully written and deftly performed monologues overlong. I suggest that anyone with a true love for meaningful theatre will find the elements that are misunderstood by some to be the very heart of what makes this production stand in shining contrast to much of the tame, albeit well-executed, work that is more usually seen locally.
That said, Winky is ultimately a richly accessible play, and remarkably acted and constructed so that the satire and absurd humor is never at the expense of the pathos of the two main characters’ underlying humanity.
I wish I could have seen this play. It sounds like it was a different kind of experience.