Will Eno Is Overrated

Satori Group at Little Theatre
Through April 5.

Charles Isherwood, the younger counterpart to Ben Brantley at the
New York Times, has a reputation for being a wary kingmaker.
Isherwood, it is said, generally distrusts the new and the interesting,
but occasionally goes out of his way to remedy this reputation by
hyperventilating over a young(ish), inventive(ish) playwright (Mary
Zimmerman, Will Eno), who serves as a gimcrack and inoculation against
accusations that he is, at heart, timid and conservative. This is the
critic who dubbed Eno “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart
generation.” How could anyone buck a Beckett? Isherwood is saying, in
effect: “If you don’t like Eno, you don’t get Eno.” Hogwash.

Seattle has seen Eno’s Thom Pain (based on nothing) at the
Seattle Rep, and now TRAGEDY: a tragedy—getting cute with
capitalization is always a bad sign—by new-to-Seattle company
Satori Group. Not so much Beckett as bumptious, Eno writes loping,
postmodern laments about the emptiness, alienation, and shit-slog that
is modern living. Like an adolescent poet, Eno can’t see past his own
ennui.

TRAGEDY begins with the sun setting, perhaps for the last
time, and four newscasters report on the end of the world with all
their staid clichés. “It’s the worst world in the world here
tonight,” one intones. “Is the sense of tragedy palpable?” the anchor
asks. “Absolutely, Frank,” John-in-the-field replies. “You can feel
it.”

It goes on like this for 70 minutes or so, repetitive but not
cumulative, a witty one-liner bobbing to the surface every few minutes.
The ensemble—which recently relocated from Cincinnati—is
capable but cannot give the text the ballast it desperately wants. The
set, by Andrew Lazarow and Clare Strasser, is the best thing about
TRAGEDY: The anchor sits at a desk, behind short walls with
windows that recall the cafe in Hopper’s Nighthawks.
TRAGEDY is nothing more than a gloomy farce of broadcast
TV—a nontale told by idiots, signifying nothing. BRENDAN
KILEY

Village Theatre
Through April 26.

At the turn of the century, Nellie Bly’s muckraking,
undercover-girl-journalist columns for the New York World made
her famous and a feminist icon, so it’s doubly depressing that most
people have no idea who she is anymore. Peter Kellogg and David
Friedman intend to rescue Bly and spruce up her legend with their new
musical Stunt Girl, and, in that respect, it functions
admirably.

Never mind that the first routine, “That’s the Headline,” with its
dancing newspaper salesboys, inspires traumatic Newsies flashbacks: As soon as Sarah Chalfy strides onstage all is forgiven.
Her plucky and ambitious—but never shrill—Bly immediately
charms Joseph Pulitzer (the hilariously gruff John Patrick Lowrie) into
hiring New York’s first girl reporter: “I can do what no male reporter
can do. I can be underestimated!” It’s a gloss over Bly’s real-life
exploits, of course, but it’s a charming gloss.

As with most biographical musicals, Stunt Girl has pacing
problems. By the intermission, Bly has had herself committed to an
institution to expose the atrocious conditions there, blown the whistle
on a black-market baby scam, uncovered police corruption, and fought
for worker’s rights against evil corporations, not to mention circled
the globe in an homage to Jules Verne. The second act—where all
the character development happens—can’t help but squander that
breathless momentum. Witty numbers, especially “Don’t Bore Them” and
“I’m in Hell,” are fine musical fodder, but Stunt Girl would be
greatly improved by cutting half an hour; the young girls in the
audience who should be paying rapt attention are squirming in their
seats by the curtain call. PAUL CONSTANT

On the Boards
April 2–4.

This is not a review.

Last August, young choreographer Tanja Liedtke had a case of
insomnia. She got up for a 2:00 a.m. walk around her neighborhood in
Sydney, Australia, and was struck by a garbage truck. She died alone.
Construct, her final work, is a North American premiere and may
be your only chance to see Liedtke’s choreography. A vigorous piece for
three dancers with a score by DJ TR!P, Construct is a critically
celebrated—and apparently funny—piece about a love triangle
and the relationship between making a performance and making a home.
BRENDAN KILEY

Seattle Shakespeare Company
Through April 5.

All that matters with The Merchant of Venice, and this is the
weakness of the play in general, is a strong Shylock. If you have that,
the whole battle is won. To worry about the other main characters in
the play (Antonio, Portia, and Bassanio) is to worry about the gas of
words and actions that burns up the time between the hard and core
moments—those moments have the Jewish moneylender on the stage.
That said, let’s turn to Seattle Shakespeare Company’s current
production of the tragedy. (It is not a comedy!)

Directed by John Langs, Merchant is on the side of success
because Charles Leggett’s performance has real substance. He manages to
bring the necessary weight (the right amount of real life) to the only
human character in the play, Shylock—if you pricked him, he would
bleed; if you tickled him, he would laugh; if you poisoned him, he
would die. Leggett’s Shylock has the density of a human being; he is
neither good nor evil, but a sympathetic man with legitimate
grievances. And he expresses these grievances not with great emotion or
meanness, but with a sense of hurt. The rest of the actors are almost
incidental. When Leggett is not onstage, we are only waiting for him to
come back. The other characters do not need an ounce of human life
because they are essentially unbelievable. The best way to see the play
is as a story about one man and his phantoms.

A final point: SSC’s production sets Merchant in the time
around the stock-market crash of 1929, but it would have been more
meaningful to set it around the current crash. What our economic crisis
has that the other lacks is, of course, Bernie Madoff. CHARLES
MUDEDE