Fourteen years ago, the world met Michael Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay, a sprawling novel about two Jewish cousins in 1940—one a nervous New Yorker, the other a magician who fled Nazi-occupied Prague—and their rise to comic-book glory. The novel became a kind of Moby-Dick for the McSweeney’s generation with its explorations of WWII, comics culture, Jewish mysticism, magic, vaudeville, and a wide variety of romantic misadventures. Book-It has adapted this beast into a five-hour play that makes for a rock-solid, consistently entertaining evening. (Center Theatre, Seattle Center Armory, book-it.org, 6 pm, $23–$48, through July 13)
Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua.... More by Brendan Kiley