Ghost Sonata
Open Circle Theater at All Pilgrims Church
Through May 10.
Open Circle is the young existentialist of theater
companies—it doesn’t have any money, but loves to brood over
ideas, preferably dark ones. In its 15-year history, the company has
produced Jacobean bloodbaths, works inspired by Kafka and Cocteau, and
annual adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft stories with little more than a
few tables, chairs, and folding screens. Their productions demand an
audience’s willingness to look past the novice acting and
Dumpster-diver sets and appreciate their ardor. The artists of Open
Circle are true amateurs—their theater isn’t always good, but
it’s always made with love.
Ghost Sonata, then, is a typical Open Circle production. A
moody nondrama by August Strindberg about a poor student (Andrew Perez)
who gets tangled up with a corrupt bourgeois family, Ghost
Sonata wasn’t written to make the time fly by. Instead, it
sustains a feeling of wicked entropy. An evil old antagonist in a
wheelchair (Aaron Allshouse, easily the best thing about the
production, jumping from aged calm to pit bull ferocity precisely when
it’s needed) needs an entrée into the doomed family for some
obscure, nefarious purpose. So he strong-arms the student into wooing
their daughter.
But their apartment is a vipers’ nest of adulterers, thieves, and
poseurs—as well as an old woman who thinks she’s a parrot and a
vampiric cook who sucks all the nourishment out of her employers’ food.
Some people soliloquize, others die, and Ghost Sonata ends, as
it must, with a despairing speech by the student: “There must be a
curse on all creation and on life itself. When they say Christ
descended into hell, they mean that he descended to earth, this
penitentiary, this madhouse and morgue of a world.”
Strindberg wrote Ghost Sonata (Spöksonaten in
the pretty, original Swedish) in 1908. Spare, somber, and performed in
an echoing church, Open Circle’s production is an apt, if occasionally
soporific, homage to the play’s hundredth anniversary. BRENDAN
KILEY
Big Love
Balagan Theatre
Through May 17.
Any play that begins with a gorgeous redhead (Kaitie Warren) in a
wedding dress heaving herself up onstage, stripping to her underwear,
and taking a bath starts out solidly in the “win” column. After she
changes out of her wet panties, she’s joined by two other gorgeous
women wearing slips and they gleefully shatter china while singing “You
Don’t Own Me”—another definite win. When a man dressed as an old
woman, with an Italian accent so thick that it would make both of the
Super Mario Brothers blush, sits center stage and starts crushing
tomatoes on the floor, you know you’re in very good hands.
Big Love has a smart, funny script by Charles Mee working
in its favor. (Very) loosely inspired by the writings of Aeschylus,
it’s the story of 50 Greek women who flee to a wealthy Italian man’s
island to avoid entering into 50 arranged marriages with their 50
meathead cousins. Thyona (Wonder Russell, powerful and proud) is
betrothed to Constantine (Curtis Eastwood, malevolent and cunning), the
ringleader of the grooms-to-be. She’d rather kill than be forced into
marriage.
The 15-person cast delightfully overwhelms Balagan’s small space.
They throw food, spew blood, strip down to nearly nothing, and wrestle
and scream and throw themselves at the floor like the world’s worst
breakdancers. Director Jake Groshong expertly choreographed the
climactic orgy of sex and violence to feel chaotic. The stage appears
destroyed by the end, and the dry-cleaning bill must be in the four
figures. It’s the perfect play for the belated arrival of
spring—sexy and ridiculous and clever. I can’t recall the last
time I had so much fun in a Seattle theater. PAUL CONSTANT
The Greeks
Nowhere.
How my heart was broken when I read that Big Love, reviewed
and loved by Paul Constant (see above), is only “loosely inspired by
the writings of Aeschylus.” I’ve had enough of loose interpretations of
Greek tragedies. I want to see the real thing. I want to see The
Supplicants directly as The Supplicants, and not at the
great distance of Big Love. This city adores the classics.
Elizabethan tragedies, Molière’s comedies, Scandinavian dramas
thrive in our playhouses. Ghost Sonata is currently running
(see Brendan Kiley’s review above), and there was a flurry of Chekhov a
year or so ago. But when it comes to the ancient Greeks, the bedrock of
our theatrical tradition, there has been close to nothing. This is a
sad state of affairs. How long can we go on without even one direct
production of Antigone, The Oresteia, The
Clouds?
Look at what we are missing. In Sophocles’s Ajax: After
losing a competition to Odysseus, Ajax turns murderous and starts tying
up and butchering Menelaus, Agamemnon, and other leaders of the Greek
army. But Ajax, who has been made mad by Athena, is ignorant of the
fact that he is just butchering sheep. When Odysseus overhears Ajax
boast that he is about to kill him, when in reality he is about to kill
a bleating sheep tied to a pole, Odysseus says the strangest and
saddest thing: “Yet, I pity Ajax’s wretchedness, though he is my enemy,
for the terrible blindness that is upon him. I think of him, yet also
of myself, for I see the true state of us that live. We are dim shades
and weightless shadows.” For our existential nourishment, we must
regularly return to and draw from this deep, rich well of pity. And
what of the carpet of blood in Agamemnon? Or the sorrows of
Xerxes in The Persians? We must not abandon the Greeks! We
need them with us always. CHARLES MUDEDE
