ArtsWest: The Mountaintop

We have had a long and bumpy relationship with ArtsWest. In the beginning, we did everything we could to support the theater, giving 'til it hurt, subscribing, inviting our friends and hosting after-show parties. However, ArtsWest has had a lot of ups and downs in its artistic choices and direction, and we have not subscribed for many years, choosing instead to attend individual shows that looked like they might be substantive. 

The Mountaintop by Katori Hall and directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton is indeed substantive, nourishing theater. This entirely absorbing, two-character, 90-minute play speculates on the last night of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, and poses the question: what if god sent a messenger to help Dr. King as he is called home? What if he knew his life on earth was about to end? What would he say?

Camae (brianne a hill) and Dr. King (Reginald André Jackson)
in ArtsWest's production of The Mountaintop by Katori Hall.
ArtsWest photo by Michael Brunk.

That sounds a bit lofty, but in fact this play is down to earth. brianne a. hill plays the potty-mouthed, sassy, street-tough angel whose first assignment (she was murdered just the night before) is to escort Dr. King to the other side. The writing and the pitch-perfect performance by Reginald André Jackson cut through the hagiography around Dr. King so that he could be portrayed as a real man—a brilliant, extraordinary man, but in the end, a man. 

The play is set on the night of April 3, 1968 in room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where Dr. King spent the last night of his life and where, the next day, he would be shot on the balcony. The set, designed by Burton Yuen, made us voyeurs into this room, with the door and window to the balcony as backdrop. We understand it was a faithful recreation of the Lorraine, and the many small details helped ground the play, making the setting vivid and helping to make the characters human by contrasting the ordinary and mundane with the weighty themes of the play. 

As the play opens, Ralph Abernathy has just stepped out for cigarettes, and Dr. King calls room service for coffee. Camae is the lovely maid who brings the coffee and handles Dr. King's flirtations, rants, arrogance, anxiety, and grief with aplomb. 

This is a very funny play, and the timing and energy from hill and Jackson bring out that humor. It is also a painfully serious play, as Dr. King wrestles with his failings, his mortality, and his god. I found the scene where the angel Camae shows Dr. King the future in fierce and flawlessly delivered poetry to be especially moving. 

I'm going to have to stop saying I categorically dislike video in plays. The use of a video montage to show Dr. King the future was appropriate and effective. We were talking about video in plays recently with a friend of ours who works in theatre, and he said people are learning how to incorporate video into plays well. The design team for this production certainly did it well.

Sadly, our experience was not quite as entirely absorbing as it should have been based on the artists' efforts. A man in front of us, in the front row, chose to converse with his seat partner through the show in a perfectly audible stage whisper. So disrespectful to the actors, and so distracting for people around him. What would you do—complain to an usher? Well, here's the thing: he was an usher. Doh. Dear ArtsWest: please ask your ushers not to converse during the show. Thank you.  

ArtsWest has a new artistic director, and their tagline is "fiercely compelling theatre." Sounds audacious, but hey, audacious is good. The Mountaintop is certainly that kind of theater, and we hope to be back many more times.

ArtsWest comes up with the right formula with Emilie

Voltaire (Nick DeSantis) sneaks
a peck from Emilie (Kate Witt)
during Emilie by Lauren
Gunderson, running through
Feb. 20 at ArtsWest. Photo:
Michael Brunk, ArtsWest.

After the Seattle opening of Emilie Wednesday evening playwright Lauren Gunderson enthused that it was like meeting her own characters for the first time, such was her enthusiasm for the production created by director Susanna Wilson and cast at ArtsWest in West Seattle.

Emilie is the story of Emilie du Châtelet, early 18th century French mathematician and physicist who came up with the notion, "force vive", that kinetic energy was proportional not to the velocity of an object, as believed by Newton, but to the square of its velocity. She also translated, and upgraded, Newton's Principia Mathematica into French, and that translation is still the standard in the language today.

If that sounds like a boring premise for a play, well, you're wrong. Plus it's also about battles between head and heart, of women in science, and a dandy verbal duel between Emilie, played by Kate Witt, and her lover, the pompous horse's ass and usually wrong Voltaire (Nick DeSantis).

Witt's Emilie is reincarnated to tell her life story, in which young Emilie is played by the talented and fetching Sara Coates. (I expect Voltaire may have written that if Sara Coates didn't exist we would have to invent her. But I digress.) Jason Marr is wonderful as a number of men, including Emilie's husband, a future lover, and Sir Isaac Newton. Jody McCoy plays a variety of women, including Emilie's ever-so-proper mother.

A randy Voltaire (Nick DeSantis)
gets it on with living Emilie (Sara
Coates), but it's narrator Emilie
(Kate Witt) who really makes the
sparks fly. Photo: Michael Brunk,
ArtsWest.

Coates gets the kissing scenes because narrator/Emilie Witt gets zapped with electricity and the lights go out if she actually comes into contact with the figures from her past. It underscores the isolation she feels as she toils away in a scientific world that very much belongs to the men.

Witt is fabulous and owns the stage, which is literally her blackboard. Director Wilson and designer Dan Schuy came up with a set that is mostly chalkboard paint, and Emilie scribbles her formulae and diagrams all over the place, as well as her running tally of the good points of love and philosophy. Emilie, a larger-than-life force, wins at everything, including cards. Though for a while there she's not so sure she'll win at love.

The end was surprisingly moving. Emilie gets pregnant at 42, and it becomes a race between the very probably deadly childbirth and finishing her translation of Newton.

In an interesting touch, Wilson has Witt remain on stage during the intermission, continuing her studies and making notes and diagrams on the chalkboards. Most of the opening-night audience missed it, but I missed intermission; it was too interesting to watch!

Emilie has crackling dialog and vivid characters, and it's a fabulous story. Don't miss it. It runs at ArtsWest through Feb. 20.

New Weisenheimer blog on astronomy

Poster for the exhibit The Beginning of Totality, photos by
Roger Ressmeyer. Image courtesy ArtsWest.

Weisenheimer launched a new, separate blog about astronomy recently. After a little over a year of writing about local astronomy for Examiner.com, I decided to start SeattleAstronomy.com. Having my own site gives me a lot more editorial control over the look and content of the site. While it's titled "Seattle Astronomy", my aim is to cover space and astronomy news and events from Seattle and the Northwest.

Every once in a while my interests in astronomy and other topics intersect. It happened this week, and in this case it's art, photography, and astronomy. There's a great new exhibit at ArtsWest Gallery in West Seattle called The Beginning of Totality. It features the work of renowned photographer Roger Ressmeyer, who gained some fame as a celebrity photographer beginning in the mid-'70s, but who later turned his camera lenses skyward to shoot a different sort of star.

Check out my review of The Beginning of Totality, and get out to ArtsWest for the exhibit, which runs through the end of the month.

Tell Me on a Sunday entertains at ArtsWest

The standard showbiz bromide "Break a leg" nearly came literally true to scuttle the entire run of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Tell Me on a Sunday less than a minute into its opening night at ArtsWest Wednesday. A lift bringing actress Danielle Barnum up from beneath the stage for her grand entrance stuck and lurched slightly, sending Barnum staggering a bit. She was able to regain her balance, avoid skeletal damage, and turn in a marvelous performance as Emma in this seldom-produced Lloyd Webber show.

Danielle Barnum as Emma in Sheldon Bloom's swimming
pool in the ArtsWest production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's
Tell Me on a Sunday. Photo by Matthew Durham.

ArtsWest did most everything right in this production. Barnum is an engaging performer with a sweet singing voice. Director Christopher Zinovitch and crew cooked up an interesting set with a clever projection screen that sometimes hid, sometimes revealed the musicians. The musicians did a fine job with Lloyd Webber's score. The one mis-step, apart from Barnum's stumble onto the stage, may have been the selection of this particular work.

Tell Me on a Sunday is not typical Lloyd Webber fare, which could be good or bad depending on your point of view. This is a one-actor show, and while Weisenheimer isn't necessarily opposed to the same, it seems a musical must be especially challenging to pull off when there's nobody else to sing and dance with, particularly when the one character isn't fabulously likable. Emma's life in the U.S. is a lonely one, trying to break into the hat-making business far away from her native England, and she and her series of invisible beaus use each other until they're finished, then move on to the next. Some wonderful comic touches helped lighten the tone. The swimming pool scene in Beverly Hills was pretty funny.

Barnum gives it her best and turns in an enjoyable performance. We saw her in Balagan Theatre's well-received production of The Full Monty back in November. She was delightful in Tell Me, and pulled off some incredibly rapid wardrobe changes during the one-act show. She's a talented young actor and we're looking forward to seeing more of her. Kudos to musical director and pianist Deanna Schaffer, Joseph Baken on violin, Jacqueline Benthuysen on viola, and Justin Huertas on cello for some top-notch playing.

There were a few opening-night glitches on Wednesday, notably with the lighting, which we didn't think was always where it was intended to be. We're sure those will get ironed out.

All in all, Tell Me on a Sunday is worth a look. It's playing at ArtsWest through May 23.

Sunlight at ArtsWest leaves a few things in the dark

West Seattle's ArtsWest theater purports to produce "artistic events so fiercely compelling that they require conversation." It's a bit of an audacious claim from a company that has been doing the goofy Christmas musical Plaid Tidings the last few holiday seasons. But ArtWest's recent production of Sunlight by Sharr White, directed by Vanessa Miller, accomplished the mission.

Sunlight is the story of a family torn apart in the post 9/11 world. The protagonists are a liberal college president, the conservative dean of the law school who also happens to be his son-in-law, the president's daughter/dean's wife, and the president's long-time assistant.

Director Miller coaxes marvelous performances out of all four actors. John Wray is hilariously fussy and bossy and pompous as the president, Matthew Gibbon, who has built this college out of a swamp. John Ulman is Vincent, his former star pupil who, as head of the law school, helped the government develop "guidelines" under which torture is acceptable--guidelines that led to the brutal death of a 15-year-old boy. Caught in between is Peggy Gannon, fabulous as Charlotte, Matthew's daughter, lawyer, and advisor, and Vincent's about-to-be estranged wife. Karen Nelson was incredible as Maryanne, long-time assistant to Matthew and something of a companion since the death of his wife several years previous.

While the performances were wonderful, the play has a few holes in it. The title refers to the quote from former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who opined that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But this play takes place at night, and I don't think all the cards are on the table. Vincent's main argument in support of torture is that Charlotte worked in the World Trade Center, he didn't know if she was OK that morning, and therefore torture is always justified if we think we can root out a threat. It's too simple, and not the real reason governments take part in the practice. Neither is it believable that Matthew would completely trash his dean's office, then trip him and start a fistfight in his living room. Even if he had been drinking.

But props to White for raising the question. I expect we'll be seeing plays about torture for a while now. Last year's Wisey-Award-winning best play, Equivocation, also included torture among its many plot lines. Creepily, in Equivocation Sir Robert Cecil was a big supporter of the practice, and suggested that it might even be considered a plus on the résumé by the time the 21st Century rolls around. And good for ArtsWest to doing some interesting and challenging new work.

September is theater month

Happy September! It's Weisenheimer's favorite month because it means that my Sweetie, the official scorer, and I will soon be headed off to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival! Theater heaven!

In the meantime there's still plenty happening on the local theater scene.

Balagan Theatre's season opener, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, with the fabulous Terri Weagant, just wrapped last weekend. Play number two, Elephant's Graveyard by George Brant and directed by Jason Harber, opens Thursday. It's the West Coast premiere of the play and Harber's directorial debut. Balagan favorites Ryan Higgins, Chris Bell, and Ray Tagavilla are in the cast, as is the company's executive director Jake Groshong, who hits the stage for the first time in a couple of years.

Tickets for Elephant's Graveyard are available on-line, and you can still get Balagan season tickets, a steal at $110 for the remaining nine shows in the season.

The usual disclaimer: Weisenheimer is president of the board at Balagan, but it doesn't mean I'm biased!

There's a bit of Balagan flavor to the next show at West Seattle's ArtsWest Theater. Balagan board member Mike Dooly is in the cast of ArtsWest's production of Dead Man's Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl and directed by Carol Roscoe. The show opens Sept. 9. It's the season opener for ArtsWest and the Seattle premiere of the play, which ran from February through June at OSF.

We especially loved Dooly as Iago in Balagan's Othello last year. He's was also in Closer, Death/Sex, and Picasso at the Lapin Agile at Balagan, played in Wooden O's Richard III this summer, and had a couple of great roles in the 14/48 festival last month.

Tickets to Dean Man's Cell Phone can be found on-line.

Go see live theater!

Gutenberg impressive

Weisenheimer and my Sweetie, the official scorer, were founding subscribers to West Seattle's ArtsWest theater, and our names are carved on the facility's wall in recognition of our contributions to the capital campaign that made the gallery and performance space a reality. It had been several years since we'd taken in a show at the theater, but the blurb for the company's current production caught my eye:

GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL! is a loving spoof in which two aspiring playwrights perform a backers’ audition for their new project: A big, splashy musical about printing press inventor Johann Gutenberg (not Steve Guttenberg from the cinema classic Short Circuit).

Who could resist that? Gutenberg! The Musical! was written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, directed by Stephanie Farhood, and stars Chris Shea and Evan Woltz (at right) with Kim Dare on piano. Shea and Woltz play Doug and Bud, the playwrights who perform the entire show for all of the "Broadway producers" who may be in the audience.

The show is hilarious and Shea and Woltz do a great job wearing the hats -- literally -- of multiple characters. One thing scared me a little, and that was when Woltz was portraying the evil monk who didn't want everyone to learn to read. I swear he was channeling Wayne Knight's character Newman from the television series Seinfeld.

Sweetie and I really busted a gut at this one. It's worth a look, but there's only a week left in the run. Go see it in West Seattle!

OSF gives me a time warp

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival warped time for me the other day. We're still six months out from our annual trek to Ashland for the 2009 festival, and they announced the 2010 season this week!

The four Shakespeare plays on the schedule are:

• Hamlet
• Twelfth Night
• The Merchant of Venice
• Henry IV, Part One

Highlights of the rest of the fest include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Pride and Prejudice directed by Libby Appel, and Ruined by Lynn Nottage. The skinny on the entire season is here.

West Seattle's ArtsWest has announced its season for 2009-10. It includes Dead Man's Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl, which is running at OSF this season. We probably won't see it there, as it closes in mid-June.

For a treat here and now, check out Patrick Marber's Closer at Balagan Theatre on Capitol Hill. It has just opened and runs through April 4.

Regroup redux

The West Seattle Blog called our attention to this blog post by Alan Harrison, executive director of West Seattle's ArtsWest, in reaction to the article about which Weisenheimer posted yesterday regarding the challenges faced by arts organizations in the city.

The post strikes me as awfully whiny and self-righteous. For example, Harrison writes that some companies are doing just fine:

Only the arts organizations whose mission is at the heart of what they do are doing well, that actually live and die by the mission because it is so compelling, because only they are the organizations with a "fan" base as opposed to a "customer" base.

Weisenheimer really hates mission statements. I don't want to see one when I go to the theater. How about an interesting show?

Once you get past the whining -- the Times didn't send a critic to ArtsWest's latest opening, alas -- Harrison raises some interesting questions. He mentions in a couple of different posts on his blog a hunch that Intiman and Seattle Rep will merge this year. An interesting notion.