Category: Performing Arts

Theater

Pentecost: Art as a Moral Matter

If control of language means control of thought, it is equally sensible that he who controls images controls identity. Where America and Europe often treat art as commodity or mere “self-expression,” the meaning of art runs quite a bit deeper in this play by David Edgar, given a fine production by the UW School of Drama.

Music Performing Arts Theater

Gender Rocked: A Conversation With The Women Behind These Streets

By the time of this writing, it would be pretty remarkable if you haven’t heard about Sarah Rudinoff and Gretta Harley’s These Streets, the creative duo’s new rock music theatrical experience that is opening at ACT.The scale of their promotional effort is as impressive as everything else about the project. This is due, in no small part, to the women behind the project, with whom The Seattle Star’s José Amador had an opportunity to have a discussion.

Theater

What It Means to Mean: Anna Karenina at Book-It

Directors are responsible for choosing an interpretation about what the play means and removing obstacles so that the actors can do their work. Particularly in text-based classic theater, the director must make a convincing argument what this play means and, to some degree, why it is being done at all. Book-It’s Anna Karenina fails to convince because it fails to argue.

Theater

Annex Theatre’s Undo: Touching, Moving Heartbreak

Why haven’t we institutionalized the act of getting a divorce? Seems a simple enough question, one with a ready enough answer, if a bit glib: Divorces are fraught with so many emotions we’d rather not be confronted with in public, that the idea of making it a formal thing just seems a bit…gauche. But what if, at the same time that marriage turned from being a business transaction into the ultimate institutional act of love, divorce became an officially sanctioned ending of that love? This is the question that Holly Arsenault’s Undo asks.