Every role costs you something. This is what my friend and colleague Timothy always reminds me when we are in a spirited conversation about character and process. Playing Brooke Wyeth in Victor Pappas’ production of Other Desert Cities at ACT is an emotionally expensive endeavor. Some of her tragic circumstances slice clean to my bones and the characters’ wit and dialogue ricochets like bullets off the living room furniture. This family that Jon Robin Bates has created knows how to fight, laugh, love hard and take good hard swings at one another through sarcasm or scrutiny. Only with your family. This play is peppered with the kind of brutal honesty that can only happen with your family, with the people who know and love you, acquaintances could not endure the harsh edges of each of these characters. But we do, this family we’ve created and inhabited. We endure one another inside of the firecracker humor and hard-hitting reveals of this story. I leave each performance emotionally exhausted and energetically frantic, a threadbare extension cord connecting Brooke’s charged stakes with the uneven currents of my own life. It’s been hard to fall asleep.

Every role costs you something, yes. And every role has its gifts and this process has been infinitely generous.

I am surrounded by a cast of great artists, wielding their skills with mastery. Pamela’s cutting intellect dissects the internal workings of the play’s language, beat by beat. Kevin is fastidious with his daily notes and insights and small, profound adjustments. Lori’s comedic ease delivers fresh choices and opportunities every night. Aaron disarms me in our shared scenes with his gentle wisdom and tactical charm. As an actress, I’m paying attention, watching each of these craftsmen construct and refine their role. The risks of this work are worth the rewards – the moments I am sharing with my colleagues on stage, the courage and tenacity I am learning from this complicated character, the responses from the audience each night, coming in and out like waves crashing, the chance to surf those laughs and to tumble under the audience’s shock and curiosity. Exhilarating.

Marya Sea Kaminski plays Brooke Wyeth in Other Desert Cities, Now – June 30

Hi, my name is Julia! I am originally from Richmond, VA, and I am a rising Junior Drama Major at Kenyon College. This summer, I am working at ACT as a marketing intern, focusing mainly on the upcoming production of Middletown and bringing it beyond the theatre walls and around the city through Farmer’s Markets all over the city. Aiming to create a discussion of community, isolation, and interactions in Seattle, I will be trying to establish connections and getting the conversation started.

People say that Seattle is a hard place to connect with one another, so we wanted to hear what its residents had to say on the subject. We started with a simple display:  a map where people could “put a pin in” their favorite place to connect, as well as slips of paper where they could write in their answers if their place wasn’t on the map. We hoped to get people talking, and ideally they would identify the place in Seattle where they felt connected to themselves, nature, their partners, friends, or pets.Drama Major at Kenyon College. This summer, I am working at ACT as a marketing intern, focusing mainly on the upcoming production of Middletown and bringing it beyond the theatre walls and around the city through Farmer’s Markets all over the city. Aiming to create a discussion of community, isolation, and interactions in Seattle, I will be trying to establish connections and getting the conversation started.

Will Eno’s Middletown has been labeled as a play that’s about everytown USA, but I think the beauty of the play lies in the many ways that it is unlike anywhere I can point to on a map. Its citizens are beautifully honest, unafraid to wear their faults on their sleeves, and strive for deep human connection over almost anything else. It seems to me that our world here in Seattle is very different, and this was confirmed by my first experience at the Broadway Farmer’s Market in Capitol Hill.

In general, we were met with one of four reactions: laughter, fear, genuine interest, or complete disregard. Our first Market resulted in39 pins on the map and 7 written responses. The areas that had the most pins in them were parks in the neighborhood, coffee shops, and the farmer’s market.  Common answers were “I don’t have a place that I connect to” or “Does my house count” or even “By connect, you mean Wi-Fi right?”  The people who had the most fun answering the question were those that answered with a partner; it seemed that their shared memories and experiences made the connection to a place stronger.

For me, the most interesting part was how people were so genuinely afraid of talking to us or refuse eye contact. Sure, we have all been conditioned to ignore those people peddling things on the street, walking by as if no one just asked us how are day was, but when does that automatic response that we are all guilty of begin to hurt the way our society works? Why are we all so averse to talking to people who weren’t on our agenda, and when did connecting with someone start to mean through a computer? These questions get to the heart of why conversations like this one surrounding Middletown are so important.  I am excited to continue my research, and hopefully have a few conversations that surpass my expectations. Seattle is a wonderful city, and I think it could be made even better if everyone reached out a little farther and tried to learn a little more about people that surround them.

Say hi to Julia and tell us where you connect at the Magnolia and West Seattle farmers markets this weekend.  #SeattleConnects

The Challenge of Memoir by guest blogger Jennifer Worick 

I just saw Other Desert Cities and my jaw is still on the floor.

See, usually I research the play or film I’m going to see. I don’t mind a spoiler. But in the case of this remarkable play, I went in blind and came out with my eyes opened.

Why was I so affected? The story is about a fractured family who come together for the holidays. The Wyeths are old guard Palm Springs Republicans, the daughter a writer who left to pursue a writing career on the East Coast. She’s home for the first time in years, disconnected from her family and with a revealing memoir about to be published.

Gulp.

Disconnected from a family who hold wildly different beliefs? Check.
Writing a memoir that my family’s not exactly thrilled about? Yep.
Let’s not even talk about the alcoholic aunt. That’s just too eerie.

If you were sitting around me in the Falls Theatre, I hope you’ll forgive the “Holy crap!” audible.

I worry about a lot of stuff, so it’s not surprising that I worry about what my loved ones will think after writing about them (I worry about what they think when I’m not writing about them). I have been thoughtless in the past about oversharing and processing my thoughts and feelings through my writings. A man I was dating mistakenly thought I was referring to him in a column that was primarily about my grandfather, who had just passed away. In an article about my high-school reunion, I didn’t even change the names, thinking none of my classmates would see it. I was wrong.

I was wrong in many ways. See, my story isn’t just mine. My perspective and my voice are, certainly, but events, well, they usually involve other folks even if we remember things differently. And boy oh boy, Other Desert Cities is a contemporary Rashomon.

I’m writing a memoir, which wasn’t really music to my mom’s ears. Shit went down when I was growing up. I’m trying to capture it from my point of view, through my eyes. But I’m having a tough time. I can’t help fast-forwarding to family reactions when I spill secrets that might not be only mine to share. Many memoirists (Augusten Burroughs, for example) have left a wake of ill will and severed relationships behind them for the sake of a fantastic, compelling read. I sure as hell don’t want that. Mom told me to wait until she was dead (something that was echoed by Kevin Tighe in the play) before publishing the memoir. I’m not going to do that, either. One, I want her to live for a long, long time. Two, it feels dishonest. If I’m going to risk someone’s reputation post-mortem, I should be willing to do it while they’re alive and face the music, even if I don’t want to hear it.

I’m not exactly starting with a lot of good will banked with my family. We all get along but I often feel like we’re on different planets. In the past, I’ve been checked out with the relatives. Family gatherings are challenging, which is why I wrote Beyond the Family Tree so I and others could better connect with kin. It offers more than 1,000 questions to ask relatives to deepen your relationship without acrimony or judgment. I couldn’t help but think that the Wyeths could have used my book on Christmas Eve. Talking about high school crushes, the best gift you ever received or personal heroes would have provided lively conversation and insight. But it wouldn’t have made for compelling theater…

Do you think art takes precedence over family and relationships?
What’s your favorite memoir?
Do you have any advice for navigating family gatherings?

Jennifer Worick is the New York Times-bestselling author of more than 25 books, including Things I Want to Punch in the Face. For a complete list, check out http://www.amazon.com/jenniferworick. In addition, she is a blogger, publishing consultant, and public speaker. Her publishing talks and workshops with Kerry Colburn can be found at http://bizofbooks.com. 

 A list of memoirs

·      A Sort of Life, Graham Greene

·      American Junkie, Tom Hansen

·      Are You My Mother, Alison Bechdel

·      Cherry, Mary Karr

·      Closing Time, Joe Queenan

·      Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese

·      Floor Sample, Julia Cameron

·      Fun House, Alison Bechdel

·      Garlic and Sapphires, Ruth Reichl

·      Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress: Tales of Growing Up Groovy and Clueless, Susan Jane Gilman

·      Just Kids, Patti Smith

·      Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Anatole Broyard

·      Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain

·      Lit, Mary Karr

·      Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, Anna Quindlen

·      My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS, Abraham Verghese

·      One Good Egg, Suzy Becker

·      Out of Egypt, Andre Aciman

·      Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, Bill Clegg

·      River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, Peter Hessler

·      Smashed, Koren Zailckas

·      Split, Suzanne Finnamore

·      Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper, Laurie and Art Pepper

·      The Boy in the Moon, Ian Brown

·      The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery, van de Wetering

·      The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

·      The Liar’s Club, Mary Karr

·      The Man Who Quit Money, Mark Sundeen

·      The Memory Palace, Mira Bartok

·      The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

·      The Year of Yes, Maria Dahvana Headley

·      What Disturbs Our Blood, James FitzGerald

·      Yes Chef, Marcus Samuelsson

Photo of Jennifer Worick from http://thingsiwanttopunchintheface.blogspot.com/

Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities is a show of great style and substance. A tightly spun, witty drama, the audience is treated to some of the best verbal tennis in the theater. Speaking of tennis, there are some pretty great tennis costumes (cool transition right?). Today we focus on the style part of Other Desert Cities and have a quick chat with Costume Designer Frances Kenny and Set Designer Robert Dahlstrom.

When you first read Other Desert Cities what struck you about the play?                    

Photo by Chris Bennion

Frances Kenny: I loved the story – the surprise of thinking I knew everything and really knew nothing. The play was so well written; I wanted the opportunity to participate in the storytelling.

Robert Dahlstrom: That I’ve known these people all my adult life, except all my references are, living or not, Democrats. They’d find a Tea Party son or daughter as shameful as a radical anarchist.

What type of research did you do for Other Desert Cities?

FK: I love looking at pictures from the time; magazines, the internet, movies, etc. I went to the Seattle Public Library downtown and spent a day looking at Tennis Magazine, Town and Country, fashion magazines, etc. I particularly searched out many pictures of Nancy Reagan, her friends, and photos with her husband.

RD: Found a painter at the Huntington Library, John Frost, who showed me the landscape as he saw it in 1926.

Appearance is very important to the Wyeth family, how did that influence your design?

FK: It was one of the main considerations of my design process. Every time I design a show, I become each character and Victor (Director) and I had long discussions to clarify our perceptions of the characters at a particular time and place – so the archetypes emerged.

RD: Their house has all the icons, except the Charley Russell bronze cowboy and bronco which we had to cut for lack of tabletop space.

If you could keep any set piece or costume item for yourself what would it be?                   

Pamela Reed. Photo by Chris Bennion.

FK: The pearl necklace because it is like looking into a Chrystal ball of family memories and a loved one.

RD: The sort-of-Saarinen table. It’s not a real one, which I couldn’t afford anyway, but it’s a very good knock-off.

Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Victor Pappas. Now-June 30

The young don’t think much about what will happen 20, 40, even 60 years down the line. But as Assisted Living documents—quite hilariously—early abuse equals later pain. This world

premiere by Seattle actor and playwright Katie Forgette tells the story of a rag-tag bunch of senior citizens who are reinvigorated and united by a newcomer. In their prison-turned-elder home, they regain an interest in friendship, subvert the dictatorial head nurse, and create art in a sterile, unforgiving facility by reading plays aloud.

Forgette does a masterful job of wrapping up all of our fears, discomforts and disagreements about aging with a dash of sass and humor. Each of the play’s characters experienced a wide variety of scenarios reflect the reality that is our world. Wally partied his way to colostomy bags and insulin. Joe fell—literally—to bad luck, sickness, and debt. Kevin, the male nurse, is avoiding a prison sentence and serving his time at SPA Facility #273. But the bad stuff doesn’t keep them down. The residents are renewed by the communal act of theatre and find an escape from the daily realities of their broken bodies and dilapidated dreams.

When you grow up roller skating in the Southern California sun and sneaking cigarettes behind the high school you don’t usually stop to consider the consequences 70 years later. The day after I watched the performance of Assisted Living, my grandmother was hospitalized. She was in a very bad place for several days but later rallied to a less frightening level of infirmity. But it suddenly made what I had witnessed onstage painfully close to home—maybe too close. Luckily for my grandmother, Medicare will outlast her. But for my boomer parents? What about me? This led me to consider the philosophical question fermenting under the surface of Assisted Living: If our bodies rapidly fall apart because of life choices made while young and stupid, are we ultimately responsible for all the financial burdens inherent in our failing body? I shudder to consider my grandmother in a world like that of Assisted Living—but thankfully we’re not there yet.

There are many ways to depart this world, and I for one don’t want to roll out on a gurney to be suddenly tossed into a chute in the floor. Let’s hope that our society and government are not on the path to the dystopian freak show masterfully imagined in Assisted Living. For my generation, that may just be what we have to look forward to in five decades.

Don’t forget, you can see Boomers gone wild in

Assisted Living, closing May 12!

When Bob and I began discussing the play, we debated the kind of setting that would be appropriate for this assisted living home.  The playwright indicates it is a decommissioned prison, and that left us with a wide variety of options—from the cold, sterile, prisons of today, to the classic, stone-walled prisons built in the 1800s, and all those in-between.  After doing some visual research, we were both attracted to the older prisons, those where there was an intent to provide a setting for penitence and rehabilitation, those built with more craft and care.  The play does not dictate that the living environment is harsh or cold, rather, it’s merely the best solution the government could establish. Our setting gives a nod to the Eastern State Penitentiary guard room, a hub at the center of a sprawling complex, with marble pilasters, plaster walls, and stone tile floor.  Vestiges of the prison remain, and the administration has done the minimum possible to make the housing situation functional.  The play occurs primarily in a common room, the public space of the building, poorly decorated, aging, and utterly cheerless in ways official buildings can excel.

-Martin Christoffel
Set Designer

Pick up the January issue of American Theatre Magazine for Misha Berson’s article An Impresario with the Vision Thing

This Monday, ACT selected eight plays from the 420 plays written during ACT’s Young Playwrights Program this fall. We will produce these eight plays in our annual Young Playwrights Festival this March. The 2013 festival will be March 7-9 at ACT. Here are the winners:

 Northwest School                       Fairest                                  Frank Garland

 Bainbridge High School              Destinations                       Rowan Lanning

 Ballard High School      Eustace Ames Schooners/Ships    Tali Hamilton

Cleveland High School                River Wall                            Isabella Abad

Eastside Catholic Middle School    George & Wilson: Secret Agents  Zach Tlachac

Garfield High School                     Year Like No Other           Ibrahim Edo

 Lakeside                                      Project DAC001                 Isabella Gutierrez

 Seattle Academy                                  The Inside Scoop              Jenna Levin

Additionally, nine other local theatre companies partnered with ACT and picked up the following 19 students’ plays to produce as staged readings this spring 2013 at venues throughout Seattle and one, Dukesbay Productions, in Tacoma:

Mountlake Terrace High School                    Encourage Rebellion                       Alyson Davis                                                        LiveGirls Productions

Nathan Hale High School                                 A Plot in the Dark                             Holly Butterfield                                                 LiveGirls Productions

Kings High School                                               Hard Place                                Gwen Hughes                                                         Washington Ensemble Theatre

Insight School of Washington                       Opening Night                                  Reed Stannard                                                        Seattle Playwrights Collective

Bainbridge High School                                 Under the Apple Tree                     Jonathan Catterfeld                                              Annex Theatre

Ballard High School                                          Coincidental Conundrum              Sean Adair                                                              Seattle Playwrights Collective

Ballard High School                                          Sparrow                                       Spencer Johnson                                                 Northwest Playwrights Alliance

Eastside Catholic MS                                    Sweeping Beauty                             Alex Kennedy                                                           Macha Monkey Productions

Eastside Catholic MS                                    What Happened to Alex?             Emmie Head                                                                   Twelfth Night Productions

Eastside Catholic MS                                   Janitor Joseph                                   Grace Jendrezak                                                          Twelfth Night Productions

Explorer West                                                The Play                                    Sam Hoyt                                                                       Macha Monkey Productions

Explorer West                                                Journey to a Journey to Earth     Lizzy Sutherland                                                      Ghost Light Theatricals

Global Connections High School              Eternal King of Tara                              Marius Tamayo                                                               Twelfth Night Productions

Lakeside School                                            Stripes                                             Clara Scudder-Davis                                              Seattle Playwrights Collective

Lakeside School                                           A Workless Progress                       Langston Guettinger                                            Dukesbay Productions

Lakeside School                                       WE ARE YOUNG                                Sophia Wood                                                             Seattle Playwrights Collective

Seattle Academy                                   The Purrfect Crime                           Rachel Habib                                                                Annex Theatre

Seattle Academy                                  When the Earth                                      Sasha Conley                                                            Seattle Playwrights Collective

TOPS K-8                                                   Free Wifi                                            Bella Rowland-Reid                                                    Northwest Playwrights Alliance

More general information on YPP can be found on our website http://www.acttheatre.org/Education/Program

Wisemen returns to ACT this December. Get ready. For a taste of what’s to come – check out the Rosenstock Video Blog.