The Flying Dutchman
Seattle Opera
Through Aug 25.
The plot of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman drips with sexual
politics. A Dutch sailor, cursed by the devil for his colonial
ambitions (he made the mistake of declaring his intention to sail
around the Cape of Good Hope), must remain adrift at sea until he
secures the love of a girl who will remain faithful for the rest of her
life. The sailor gets his chance at the little and big deaths (sexual
release and passing of the mortal coil, respectively) only once every
seven years. His next mark is a dreamy captain’s daughter. When we
first meet Senta, she’s already passionately devoted to the Dutchman’s
story and portrait; she’s so far gone that she already seems not quite
of this world. Experience engulfs inexperience, of course; they both
end up dead and happy, but he’s happy because he’s finally dead and
she’s happy because she has joined her beloved.
In this square staging, remounted from a 1989 production, the
Dutchman is Greer Grimsley, a Byronic vision in his mane of dark hair
and glittering coat. Senta is Jane Eaglen, easily four times the size
of the skinny little chorus girls around her and not at all resembling
a woman with one foot in the grave, wasting away for ghostly devotion.
The sets are shallow and force the enormous cast (men’s and women’s
choruses, plus the principals) to pile up on one another like every act
is a curtain call. Shut your eyes, and the music—especially the
orchestra, led by conductor Asher Fisch—is rapturous. But opera
is a visual medium, too, and every time you sneak a peek, the
hilariously morbid story devolves into camp. ANNIE WAGNER
Prayer for My Enemy
Intiman Theatre
Through Aug 26.
Prayer for My Enemy is the latest production by playwright
Craig Lucas and director Bartlett Sher, the duo who received accolades
for their work on The Light in the Piazza, as well as
Singing Forest, The Dying Gaul, and adaptations of
Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya.
Two childhood friends reunite after one tailgates the other in
traffic. Tad (James McMenamin) has survived a failed marriage,
substance abuse, and an accidental tantric retreat and is now an
amiable slacker. Billy Noone (Daniel Zaitchik) is about to be shipped
off to Iraq—he joined the Army Reserves to get his father (John
Procaccino) to stop calling him “Fagboy,” “Liberace,” and “Helen.”
Meanwhile, a sad woman named Dolores (Kimberly King) takes care of her
mother, who recently suffered a stroke.
Tad becomes enmeshed in the psychologically damaged Noone family as
Billy falls to pieces in Iraq. Those vignettes are interspersed with
seething monologues from Dolores that, beyond thematic resonance, seem
to bear no relation to the main story. Much of the play is spent
discussing brains—Billy’s father is obsessed with elephant
memory, Billy’s sister has an autistic son, and Tad experiments with
drugs to tolerate Billy’s cracked family. Set designer John McDermott
evokes the theme with an impressionistic autumn tree (resembling an MRI
brain scan) that lowers from the rafters.
Despite the promising beginning, Enemy drags in the second
third, particularly in a segment with the Noone family. The theater
world would be a better, more populous place if nobody ever produced
another play about an adult son with a tough-as-nails father, a
frazzled mother, and an inferiority complex. That’s a lot of
cliché, but at least it is well-acted cliché.
The final third, when Dolores’s story collapses into the Noones’, is
a payoff worth the previous wincing. Lucas’s script transcends its
crime-drama and family-strife genres and ends with a touching funeral
scene that leaves deliciously unanswered questions. Enemy isn’t the grand slam that Piazza was, but it’s a solid double,
a drama that grows more exciting as it rushes toward a memorable and
haunting conclusion. PAUL CONSTANT
First Class
ACT Theatre
Through Aug 26.
To begin: First Class is a one-man play written by David
Wagoner, performed by John Aylward, and directed by Kurt Beattie. The
set is simple (a stage, a desk, a blackboard, a record player), and
Aylward’s performance is flawless—not just because he’s a good
actor, but because he abundantly loves the subject of the play, the
American poet Theodore Roethke.
First Class has two parts: one in which Roethke addresses
his students, one in which he addresses himself. The first part is
about his genius; the second is about his madness. In the first part,
Roethke enters a classroom and flaunts his impressive command of
English poetry: “I assume you have read Yeats and Hopkins and Dylan
Thomas and William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens and E. E.
Cummings and Farmer Frost and Tiresome Tom Eliot.” He continues
excitedly: “Have you read Louise Bogan? Stanley Kunitz? Rolfe
Humphries? Archie MacLeish? Kenneth Fearing? Ruth Pitter? Hart Crane?”
He concludes breathlessly: “Auden? MacNeice? Hardy? John Donne? Ben
Jonson? Vaughan? Herbert? Herrick? Campion? Earl of Surrey? Sir Thomas
Wyatt? The anonymous Elizabethans? All of Mother Goose 10 times?” Plato
imagined Socrates, his former teacher, as the first hero of philosophy;
Wagoner imagines Roethke, his former teacher, as the last hero of
poetry.
The madness section is not as good as the genius section. Roethke
dismisses his class (“Let’s take a breather; go do some homework”) and
goes to his office to write a poem. He pulls out a bottle of bourbon
and begins the act of creation. As he gropes for ideas, titles, and
themes, demons from the past attack him: his father, his childhood, his
insecurities—the difficult experiences that hurt him into poetry.
He wonders to himself: “I keep telling my students how to do it and
when to do it, but who’s going to tell me?”
The lesson: Poets are at their worst when talking about their own
creative process and at their best when talking about the genius of
others. CHARLES MUDEDE
