Dressed in a dapper costume of 19th century clothing, with a drawn on mustache, Scott Baker addresses us in the opening section of his self-authored, one-man show, in the character of John Wilkes Booth, the pompous Shakespearean actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in a theatre in 1865. Of a distinguished acting family, an inveterate performer, Booth speaks in a hammy, stage pentameter which borrows heavily from the Bard, seeking to ennoble his murderous intentions with an eloquence that would prove less suspect, perhaps, on the boards of a 16th century play house. He glowers and fulminates, preens and pontificates in ways that make you despair of his Brutus, or his Hamlet. The tyrant must die! He brandishes a Bowie knife and his pistol – stagily turning the barrel on himself – before re-directing it, leaping to action, and killing the house lights with a shout of “bang!”

Bang! The Curse of John Wilkes Booth is divided in to two parts. Mopping off his mustaches with a handkerchief at the commencement of the second act, Baker shifts gears, engaging a more measured tone as he tells us of what first excited his interest in Booth as a subject for a monologue. Not only were all the elements of the story, with their own theatricality, so richly and historically in place (in a diary entry Booth actually recounted a sort of dress rehearsal of the planned assassination, like the scene we have just witnessed), but obscure parts of the tale persist. Parts that suggest that Booth did not die in an army-lead raid just days after the event, but escaped to settle in Texas where, years later, as a wealthy, married man, he allegedly died at his own hand. Claims for his survival are presented, details elaborated, conspiracy theories revisited, as gradually we discover in the telling – the dramatic persona of Booth having been discarded – that we are now in the hands of quite another theatrical animal; narrator Scott Baker. With stagey flourishes of his own – lame vaudeville style jokes, acts of prestidigitation, vocal atmospherics – Baker assumes a 21st century Boothian hamminess in his accounting. As the trail leads gradually toward increasingly outlandish claims, Baker’s delivery proves spot on. Following not one, but two enacted death-bed confessions, there is perhaps something inevitable about the introduction of a traveling sideshow and some mummified remains. Imagine (if you will) Jack Palance concluding a narrative, as drawing to a close, he intones haltingly, breathily, “believe it or not”, and you’ll catch something of the spirit.

It’s all very enjoyable, sharp and humorously self-deprecating at the same time. Baker’s narrative delivery makes wise use of past theatrical styles, weaving them together into a teasing game of revelation that diffuses factual data even as it presents it. A secret society? A sinister globe-embracing plot? A curse? Well, of course there’s a curse! Now listen closely … An elaborate game of smoke and mirrors history may well be, but there’s an admirably restrained use of contemporary effects here; just the deployment of some long-serving, cheap magic of yore – a good story and an entertaining speaker. Strange the potency.

~~~

BANG! The Curse of John Wilkes Booth
The Drilling Company, Hamilton Clancy Producer
Writer: Scott Baker
Director: Richard Harden
One Actor! Thirty Roles! One Twisted Shocker! Verse, Song, Magic, Sideshow Antics and Stand-up Comedy! Discover how your History book lied to you about Lincoln, Booth and just about everybody else. And yes, there’s a mummy involved…
1h 20m   Local   Manhattan, New York
Vaudeville/Sideshow/Magic/Burlesque   Solo Show
Staycation: Ripped from the Headlines   In Someone Else’s Shoes
www.drillingcompany.org
VENUE #09: The Gene Frankel Theatre
Sat 11 @ 4  Fri 17 @ 7:15  Tue 21 @ 5:45  Wed 22 @ 2  Sat 25 @ 7

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The narrator of Matt Smith‘s self-authored, one man show, All My Children, goes by the name Max Poth – an unassuming, if not altogether uninteresting handle to swing through life on. The dictionary gives a definition of pother as a verb meaning to harass and perplex. This little revelation gives you something of the low-key, thoughtful style of engagement Smith uses to come at a subject, and there’s much more of it in evidence in his writing and performance of this, really, quite twisted tale of a middle aged man, who fixates on the idea that there’s a slender chance – but not really – six of his past girlfriends may have borne his children in unions they made with subsequent partners. Six of them. But not really. This sets Poth off on the trail of the far-flung offspring, hardly hesitating to draw breath, before he arranges meetings with each in order to relay the, er, news.

We first meet Max at some sort of support group where he addresses us as his fellow attendees. He doesn’t reveal much about himself, and the focus of the group is sketchy – something to do with self-improvement – which is why his unselfconscious announcement of this fraudulent project is all the more perplexing; and/or breathtaking. Indeed he hardly skips a beat as he launches straight into how the first meeting with “his eldest”, Jennifer, went. Not well. Which perhaps spurs him on to the next. Such alarming egotism – and is it simply mischief making? – compels, and we are enrapt as, in rambling order, we are introduced to five additional unsuspecting strangers, while Max stretches himself to include everyone. It’s appalling and it’s funny, and that’s some clever cocktail to shake. Actually it’s more than clever. It’s brilliant.

Smith as a writer has a canny sense of how much information it takes to convince, and how much can be left out so that an audience will enter a tale. There’s a masterful game of hold or play going on. He’s sharp enough to throw out humdrum-seeming details that quietly glow – the sense of boundless enterprise a comfortable train ride can induce; what it might mean for someone to be in a kitchen “not cooking”; a faded My Little Pony tattoo. Shrewd enough too not to bother with the larger details, such as why? why? and why? You don’t have to have studied Advanced Narrative. Just don’t be stupid. Some areas are left pointedly grey, which is as it so often is with the texture of life.

Smith’s delivery partakes most naturally of the style of Max Poth, a digressive, elliptical narrator who will tell it as he sees fit – unabashedly, selfishly, cynically. He’s not interested in talking to anyone about their cancer- “I’m waiting for that conversation to end.” But he’s someone who notices things about people that others might not, and he acts – in his roundabout way – to help. He doesn’t explain this. It’s just evident in his story. Preposterous and wrong-headed, Max proves peculiarly winning when it comes to his capacity to stick with his highly individual “progeny”; like some sort of satellite dad with sub-particle sensitivity powers. He makes a virtue of mockery when he bribes one of his “daughters’ to give him an Eskimo nose rub in a diner, while intoning koobie-boobies. It’s plausible this icky baby talk acts as a sort of strange soul food for both parties. Max doesn’t say this, but odd things occur afterward.

Max doesn’t know what he wants from these exchanges. Perhaps his dry, detached style has shorn his life of melodrama, and he needs a fix. None of “his kids” prove particularly disposed toward that humor, so perhaps he has to up the ante a little. He doesn’t want to answer the phone to his “real family” – who are ringing all the time now, thank you! – but there may be a way. Something that involves a measure of bribery; an allusion to an inheritance; a conditional gathering. The imagined scenario proves thrilling not just for Max, but the audience, who at this point are putty in his hands. Who are all but convinced, it might, after all, not be such a bad thing for the other parties involved to drop along. Or at least, if Max Poth gets to tell the story. Or rather, Matt Smith. Directed by long time collaborator Bret Fetzer, this is sophisticated, sharp, and wise comedy, delivered by an actor at the top of his game. Miss it and you lose.

~~~

All My Children
Matt Smith
Writer: Matt Smith
Director: Bret Fetzer
Max Poth takes “what-might-have-been” to extremes. He tracks down the now-grown children of long-ago girlfriends, and tells them he’s their real father (knowing that he’s not). A strange lark takes on a life of its own.
1h 30m   National   Seattle, Washington
Comedy   Solo Show
Staycation: In Someone Else’s Shoes   Family Vacation
VENUE #09: The Gene Frankel Theatre
Tue 14 @ 3:45  Sun 19 @ 7:30  Thu 23 @ 8:30  Fri 24 @ 2:45  Sun 26 @ 12

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As we get closer and closer to the futuristic realm of cyberpunk, that has been active in our collective imaginations since we first started understanding what computing was or what it could be, one has to ask the questions:

What about the people it could hurt?  Would we even know what it meant to feel that way?  Would dysfunction be the first glimpse into a greater ability to truly live on or beyond “the net”?  If the first person in this new space were alone, would he make friends with virtual projections of himself?

Virtual Solitaire written and performed by Dawson Nichols is a  fast paced drama which does an amazing  job of exploring these themes in a very real and human way — in an artificial world.

To be sure there have been a fair amount of stories written about this.  Perhaps one could say even a majority of cyberpunk stories have a character who has been “burned” by the system or who uses virtual reality as a refuge from a harsh external or internal reality.  We’ve seen this in everything from Mona Lisa Overdrive to the Matrix.  However, even if this theme has been investigated before, the story and performance by Dawson Nichols of Virtual Solitaire is a polished and well thought out investigation of the theme of redefining what is meant by a dangerous experiment in a world where the boundaries between real life and virtual reality become blurry.

Virtual Solitaire is some of the best cyberpunk I’ve read or seen anywhere (and I’ve read a pretty good percentage of the genre).  I would love to see a sequel based in the same world as this.  Nichols came up with a logically consistent and enticing plot angle which explains exactly why there is only one person represented in this one man show. Like most solo pieces, Nichols embodies a range of characters in order to change things up for the audience as well as show off his range. In this show however, this is more than just a device, as others have essentially taken over his brain and all the people have been routed through him for testing.  Thus, everyone is him.  The lighting design (design by Dawson Nichols with Eric Beauzay running the board) creates dramatic transitions from character to character that really sucks you into the virtual world that is being portrayed.

The story begins with main character Nathan stumbling about the stage full of various “glitches in his continuity”. It seems obvious he is a bit messed up as he begins mumbling rapidly and somewhat incoherently until we realize he is not crazy, but actually talking to someone else. He begins to talk to Clarence, a corporate technologist who is trying to “hire” Nathan to do some “extreme prototyping” of a virtual reality mystery game about a murder in an asylum. Clarence, over a private channel, converses with Stanley (Nathan’s boss) who is in charge of the project and tells him about the setup.

At this point Nathan takes us to the beginning of the story, looking at profiles of people involved with the case. Nichols does an amazing job of transforming from one character to the next. The plot is supposed to be displayed in a read-only format and be completely non-interactive with the character, bue due to previous damage to Nathan’s brain from his addiction to bandwidth and early childhood trauma there are numerous break-off points where events from Nathan’s life are being channeled into the story. We see a human drama in the synthetic world of Virtual Solitaire, and a wish to be able to show compassion for Nathan’s character after the world seems to fail at this.

This is a not-to-be missed cyberpunk drama helmed by one talented man who channels a multitude.  Be sure to see Virtual Solitaire while you can.

~~~

Virtual Solitaire
Writer: Dawson Nichols
1h 50m    
facweb.northseattle.edu/gnichols/mycelium/
VENUE #16: Players Theatre
Thu 25 @ 4 Fri 26 @ 8

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Brian McManamon as Andrew

Frigid Festival has really stepped up their game this year, is what I was thinking as I descended down the stairs from the Red Room, still reeling from the one-man show It or Her by Alena Smith. The medium of madness is one that has so many artistic possibilities, and when performed well it can be a goldmine for the audience. Nuances and colors of the human condition can be given a larger leash with which to run. Nothing is as delightful, for me, as a luscious character study set into a well-told tale. This production is all that and more.

We are introduced to Andrew in the dark, admonishing some people for whispering. All we see is a flashlight beam cutting a line in the darkness. When he turns the lights on in his basement, we find a disheveled man in long johns and glasses holding court with about 30 figurines, not people, as he struggles to place them in The Ultimate Arrangement.  And so begins the audience’s love affair with this production, a black comedy about a man whose inability to relate to people causes him to turn to objects instead, and ultimately lose himself in his fantasy world. As we learn more about Andrew, from his one-sided dialogue (or is it?) with his “devilish coquettes” – the porcelain female figures that he collects – we slowly form another picture of what his life was really like before he became the creepy guy in the basement.

McManamon’s physicality was genius. He completely took control of the stage. I found myself amazed, over and over, how this man could not only create such an amazing physical life of a neurotic and over-the-top character, but also have such grace on stage to constantly move about or even break into dance, and not break a single figurine. What’s genius is not that he didn’t break one, but that he kept his emotional life going the whole time. I didn’t see an actor thinking he had to be careful to not break any props;  I saw the character thinking that he had to keep the things he loved safe. As it should be. Regarding the performance as a whole, whether the  moments were Andrew being hilariously ridiculous, or tender reflection on how he wished he had a child, the actor was always throwing himself completely in his work – and enjoying every minute. This kind of artistic joy is not lost on the audience.

Director Jessi D. Hill took care to not fall into the trap of stereotypes, nor of playing for laughs (which was not necessary with McManamon’s shrill crooning over the objects of his obsession). I enjoyed the staging; Hill brought all of the complexities of this tragic character out in the open using a minimalist space of a trunk and three fluorescent wall lights. Overall a fabulous show, with a yummy twist at the end that surprised even this reviewer. Yes, Frigid has definitely stepped it up.

~~~

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