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Franciscan Polar Plaza is the place to be once winter hits. Think you can find something better to do than busting out some ice skates? Yeah, good luck with that. Polar Plaza is on its fourth year of setting up an ice-skating rink decked
Features
"Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act," M. F. K. Fisher opined, "that should not be indulged in lightly." If he's right, then the intimacy quotient in downtown Olympia is about to get downright freaky. On Saturday, Sept. 11, the Olympia Action Network and the Volunteer Center of
Guides
21. OLEANNA >>> SUMMER 2011 David Mamet's Oleanna is one of those plays people holler about decades after it was written. It's a two-hander about a college professor, John, and his ongoing feud with Carol, a female student. Is John guilty of sexual harassment, or is Carol just wielding political correctness
Guides
Somewhere out on the vast prairie, two strangers ride into a frontier boomtown. One spits a thick stream of tobacco juice into the sagebrush. "For the great desire I had to see fair Padua," he drawls, "I am arrived for fruitful Lombardy, the pleasant garden of great Italy." Hey,
Guides
Three years ago, my beloved girlfriend, then completely unknown to me, was at the Capital Playhouse's Live Theatre Week performance of Sweeney Todd I attended. Small world, right? A romantic "meet cute?" Nope, we didn't talk that night and wouldn't for several months, but Capital Playhouse has decided to
Stage
In October 1977, a man whose birth certificate read William Stanley Milligan was arrested for the rape of three women on the Ohio State campus. Milligan claimed insanity; his psychologists claimed he suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), then called "split personality." The rapes were allegedly committed against Milligan's
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In Jeffrey Hatcher's 2008 adaptation Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Hyde is represented by four actors, one of them female, but Jekyll's a different actor altogether. It's a challenging idea, which Harlequin Production's director Scot Whitney does a fine job of communicating quickly. Of Harlequin's four Hydes, I found Mike
Stage
Having previously addressed the upcoming theater season in Tacoma, let's take a look at the year in Olympia. Harlequin is first off the blocks with its production of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde as adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher, premiering Aug. 26. The public read-through made it clear Hatcher's eloquent voice is
Stage
Let's face it; we have to admire the self-confidence of any group willing to call its production BOMB, even if it is a clever acronym (Best of Modern Broadway). Such faith in a production directed, choreographed, and performed by kids-including the band!-borders on foolhardy. I've stated my reluctance to dump
Archives
Three unknown assailants blindfold me and slide me into the back of my car in broad daylight. Two are in camos. It's a little after 4 p.m. in one of the most liberal strongholds in America, and nobody watching gives a damn. My abductors drive me to a secret lair,
Stage
Grit City's upcoming theater season is cram-packed with interesting shows, so with no further - (See what I did there?) Tacoma Little Theatre opens the year Aug. 27 with Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, an ingenious two-hand thriller in which an aging mystery writer and an ambitious Casanova match murderous wits. Tacoma playwright
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Then there's Alice Cooper, born Vincent Furnier, who pretty much invented live heavy metal spectacle. Long before Britney Spears draped a serpent awkwardly about her neck, Cooper was welcoming us to his nightmare by tossing a live chicken (not, as press reports claimed the next day, biting its head off),
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Here's the setup: A dozen members of New York's Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Laramie, Wyoming at the turn of the millennium to research the murder of Matthew Shepard in October 1998. Shepard, openly gay, had been robbed, beaten into a coma, tied to a fence and
Stage
It's a musty old theater saw that even catastrophic plays can be saved at the last minute. As Shakespeare in Love shrugged, "It's a mystery." Frankly, I'm not a fan of this belief. I always wonder how good the show could have been if it were rehearsed properly all along.
Stage
"I was typecast as a lion," Bert Lahr once said of his post-Wizard of Oz career, "and there just weren't many parts for lions." If actors have one universal gripe, it's typecasting, the process by which actors are limited to a single kind of role. Actors with limited range sometimes
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The tragic, yet ultimately inspiring story of Rachel Corrie made its way from Olympia to around the world in a matter of days back in 2003, when The Evergreen State College student made her way to the Gaza Strip to protest the destruction of homes of Palestinians at the hands
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Over the course of Margaret Cho's ever-evolving career, the world has watched her blossom from an insecure comedian into an empowering yet still-hilarious feminist icon. Flirtations with drugs, kicking the habit and confronting her sexuality - all before the eager eyes of her fans - have transformed Cho into a
Stage
It wasn't long into Animal Fire Theatre's outdoor production of Macbeth before I was reminded of Jerzy Grotowski's indispensable book, Towards a Poor Theatre. It's a must-read for any director. Theater can't hope to compete with film in terms of spectacle, so Grotowski argued it should concentrate on writing and
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There we were in Priest Point Park, watching theater that went beyond poor to free, in which actors sped around on all fours like greyhounds. When I heard about Animal Fire Theatre's approach to Macbeth I was skeptical, but it's applied with discretion and wit and it's damn fun to
