Theatre Review: WET Gets Its Wettest Yet

Washington Ensemble Theatre’s season-opening world premiere of Seattle-spawned playwright Tommy Smith’s Sextet has got to be the most overwhelmingly chlorine-scented theatrical extravaganza since Seattle Opera’s hallucinatorially magnificent 2009 Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung, full of naked dead wives in a zillion-gallon tank, or maybe even the legendary 1974 Sigourney Weaver/Meryl Streep/Sondheim production of Aristophanes’ The Frogs in the Yale pool. (Smith's been produced at the less moist Yale Cabaret.)

WET can only afford an inch or two of water, filling the floor of the stage, but it’s enough to soak the bold soul who sat in the otherwise empty front row of last night’s packed performance, and plenty to plunge everybody into the surging depths of Smith’s ambitiously bizarre imagination.

Unless you read Smith’s explanation of the play’s three composer’s love triangles  (Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg and Gesualdo), you’ll never get exactly who’s cheatin’ who and who’s bein’ true, or stabbing, inciting hanging, fellating, or raping them with a flashlight. Don’t try to follow the erratic erotic logic, just let the spectacular, sexy, torturrific show wash over your subconscious, as your mind savors bright salvos of dialog that make sense in zigzag lightning flashes and monologues that cry out in existential anguish for an editor.

Smith is so talented a dramatic anarchist, I yearn to kidnap and send him to Lillian Hellman Rehab Camp, where he’d be forced at gunpoint to concoct tight plots and legible character arcs. But not if it slowed his demonic propulsiveness.

Congratulations to director Roger Benington; designers Andrea Bryn Bush, Andrew D. Smith, Tito Ramsey, Skylar Burger, Pete Rush and Clare Strasser; and the whole flesh-baring, pedal-to-the-wet-metal cast: John Abramson, Brandon J. Simmons, Chris Macdonald, Hannah Victoria Franklin, James James, Samantha Leeds, Steven Ackley, Tony Palmer and Heather Persinger.

WET is always worth watching, but this is a must-see event.

Sextet is on at Washington Ensemble Theatre (608 19th Ave. E) through November 15, 2010.
Photo of actors Hannah Victoria Franklin and Chris Macdonald by Laurie Clark