If ancient Greek history was oral, America’s is acoustic. America’s odyssey starts not with a departure but with a fresh arrival. Ours is not a there-and-back-again myth—where would we go back to? To have no history is to have no home.
Contributor: Alison Sargent
Seattle native Alison Sargent was once a City Arts intern. She has also written for Crosscut and Real Change news. When not writing for City Arts she works at Teatro Zinzanni where she is a member of the waitcast and occasionally teaches circus workshops to kids around Puget Sound.
Anthology Embraces Complexity
Imagine walking into a bar in which the sexual preference of every inhabitant is indecipherable. Women flirt with trans women and buy drinks for men; androgynous men dance with men and ask for women’s phone numbers. It would be, in a word, queer….
SOAP Fest: one weekend, four one-acts
There will be no talking animals in local playwright Scot Augustson’s new one-act, Milwaukee, one of the four new local works that make up this weekend’s first-ever Sandbox One-Act Play Festival. SOAP Fest is the second big creative project to…
Pocket Theater Is Happening
Clayton Weller launched the Pocket Theater Project on Kickstarter on April 27; it reached its goal of $8,000 in 8.5 hours. The proposed 20-30 seat theater Weller’s campaign advertised will center around comedy, and, operating under the conviction that…
Theatre Tackles Gun Control
Sandy Hook, Aurora, Café Racer, Columbine. It’s as if listing these names will bring some constellation of violence into focus or stop our orbit in its tracks.
In a prelude to Gun Control Theatre Action Week (May 27–June 2), Theatre Simple…
Getting SMOKED! at Café Nordo
Until last Thursday, I was a Café Nordo virgin. In this case, use of the word virgin is quite intentional; Nordo’s dinner/cocktail theatre has reached that level of Seattle experience, like 14/48 or Smash Putt at which “first-timer” no longer…
Llysa Holland on Gun Control Theatre
Tonight at West of Lenin in Fremont, Theater Simple is hosting a staged reading and discussion of 12 works from the new collection 24 Gun Control Plays. The evening is a preliminary action leading up to the first-ever Gun Control Theatre Action Week…
Soirée Absurde: The Best Language Class You Never Had
You don’t need to speak French to understand the triad of French plays being performed at the Seattle Center Armory by Le Théâtre Français de Seattle—they might actually make more sense if you don’t. “Une Soirée Absurde” features three…
Pony World Theatre conducts final tribunal into the death of Dalí
The Final Tribunal into the Mysterious Death of Mister Señor Salvador Dalí began as a title jotted down by playwright Brendan Healy while perusing a Dali exhibition in Melbourne, Australia. Two and a half years later, The Final Tribunal has been…
Culturebot’s Citizen Critic Project
In November 2011, Michael Kaiser, president of New York’s Kennedy Center for the performing arts, published an article on the Huffington Post announcing the death of criticism, murdered by the “scary trend” of arts blogs, message boards and chat…
Next Fall at ArtsWest
The premise of Next Fall is the quintessential pre-Referendum 74 nightmare: Adam (ArtsWest artistic director Christopher Zinovitch) and Luke (David Elwyn Traylor) have been living together for five years—unbeknownst to Luke’s Southern…
Riding with Spike Friedman
Auto Improv
Spike Friedman’s theatre is a 1999 forest-green Honda Civic. It’s the only performance space in town that is literally capable of crashing, one of several reasons I felt apprehensive about my first hour-long “live improvised…