An eerily glowing kinetic sculpture and a hacked '50’s era typewriter create a fuzzy portrait of a Cold War operative, privacy-obsessed misanthrope, and real-life father of director Lars Jan. Archival wiretap transcriptions and missives from communist spies intertwine with MRI brain scans and the NSA, prompting questions about the nature of memory, privacy, and the possibility of ever truly knowing your dad.
The merciless humor of comedian and social critic Paul Mooney is channeled in a fast-paced and ruthless new work merging stand-up comedy, theater, and physicality. Billing himself as “Seattle’s first Black talk show host,” choreographer and performer Markeith Wiley unveils a new, no-holds-barred persona as an engaging, brutally direct entertainer and loquacious dancer. Featuring live guests and a house DJ, It's Not Too Late is a timely capsule of emotional resignation around race immediately following the 2016 presidential election.
Comedian/musician/captivating storyteller Ahamefule Oluo leads a team of talented musicians in a grand-scale experimental pop opera about keeping it together. Drawing from darkly funny personal stories about illness, despair, and regeneration, Now I'm Fine ranges from intimate to epic, featuring a 17-piece orchestra and a spectacular cast of performers including Okanomodé Soulchilde, Samantha Boshnack, Josh Rawlings, Evan
Big Dance: Short Form is Big Dance Theater, distilled. BDT returns to its dance roots for its 25th anniversary celebration, theatrically re-imagining the conventions of a dance repertory program and presenting the company’s unique blend of dance-theater on an intimate scale.
A fierce band of Seattle-based artists presents an intensely visual, music-driven theatrical event. Predator Songstress is a modern-day fairy tale of an anti-heroine in search of her stolen voice, set in a world where the tools that are used to stifle and control are appropriated as means for individual realization. Prepare your eyes and ears for otherworldly visuals, gorgeous vocals, incredible costumes, merrily creepy earworms, and a singular butoh-meets-anime vision.
Theater artists and longtime friends Marcus Youssef and James Long sit at a table and play an invented game called winners and losers. In it, they name people, places or things— Pamela Anderson, microwave ovens, their fathers, Goldman Sachs, Mexico — pronouncing each one winner or loser. Their game turns personal as they mercilessly dissect each other's families, privileges and class backgrounds. The competition quickly heats up, resulting in an intimate and blisteringly honest performance.
Enter a surreal fever dream in this psycho-erotic tale from modern Japan. Overworked and undersexed, a fatigued student’s brain conjures the bizarre tale of two brothers and their un-nameable erotic fantasies. Their comically claustrophobic world plays out on a candy-colored, meticulously constructed miniature set replete with pig faces, giant phalluses and secret compartments.
Christopher Walken falls off a ladder in Russia and is unable to perform his Chekhov-inspired solo show. Karen, who apparently proofread the script once, is asked to go on in Walken’s place. A precarious bilingual performance duet ensues between Karen and her Russian interpreter, Leo. There There is a wildly unpredictable theatrical roller coaster about being the completely wrong person in the totally wrong place at the exact wrong time saying and doing all the most wrong things.
Writer/director Tina Satter draws on Chekhov’s letters, translations, and perverse sense of comedy to consider anew the darkness, beauty, and history of Chekhov’s iconic play The Seagull and its resonances with her Half Straddle ensemble. Seagull (Thinking of you) is a personal look at performance, failure, and attempted love — ultimately an unexpected meditation on why we ever try to say something out loud. With a Russian folk metal-influenced score.
