Four years ago, Englishman Tim Etchells left a deep stamp on
Seattle.
He and his company Forced Entertainment blew into town for a weekend
and performed Bloody Mess—their multihour spectacle of
fog machines, brutal slapstick, gorilla suits, and
nudity—four times at On the Boards. People are still talking
about their favorite moments. (Mine: Two guys talking about different
kinds of silences, moving from sweet things like the silence before a
child blows out birthday candles to dark things like the silence after
a car has flipped and the driver asks, “Is everybody okay?” “Yeah,”
they say after each example. “That’s beautiful.”) Just last month on
Slog, a commenter wrote: “Bloody Mess at OTB was the best
theater I’ve seen in the 20 years I’ve lived in Seattle.”
That Night Follows Day, Etchells’s latest show, is another
performance experiment, an inversion of children’s theater: 17
kids, ages 9 to 14, performing for adults. The children, in a very
natural and nonperformative way, speak directly to the audience,
telling us about ourselves: “You feed us. You dress us… You watch us
when we are sleeping. You tell us that once the world was full of
dinosaurs… You teach us that in the world there are bad men… You
teach us not to fight… You offer to teach us a lesson… You teach us
to choose our words. You teach us to watch our tongues. You teach us
that certain words must not be said at all… You speak another
language, so we won’t understand. You whisper conversations at the
bottom of the stairs.“
An audience of adults watching children and being scrutinized in
return creates an awkward, disorienting feedback loop. Audiences
usually hold the power in a theater, watching actors much the same way
that adults watch children—silently, unchallenged, handing out
approval or disapproval. By flipping the script, Etchells puts us back
on our heels, making us more vulnerable for his toughest punches: “You
teach us… that poor people are dirty. That white people are full
of shit. That black people are stupid. That foreigners stink.”
The project, Etchells writes from England, started with the idea of
“kids being ‘presented’—school assemblies, choirs, school
photographs. I wanted to turn the tables on the audience a little.” He
developed the script with a group of Flemish kids. “They tell me
that the text is good!” he writes. “That they recognise it, that it
speaks to things they’ve seen and felt.”
This production stars kids from Vancouver, directed by Maiko Bae
Yamamoto and James Long of Theatre Replacement (Sexual Practices of
the Japanese). Directing kids, Yamamoto says, was “an
eye-opener”—they have shorter attention spans but better memories
than adults: “They sometimes get sad, and they sometimes cry, and
they are prone to being ridiculous.” But, she adds, so are
grown-up actors. 
