Media Reviews

Theatrically speaking, there are few things in this town that are a sure lock of enjoyment. Anything from New Century? Sure. Putting Bobbi Kotula on stage? Hell yes. And any of the "Twilight Zone: Live!" productions from Theater Schmeater? Damn Skippy! The tall, dark and brooding master of the bizarre, Rod Serling is back to take us into another dimension. A dimension of sight, a dimension of sound and a dimension of a kick ass night of eerie 60's fun that definitely qualifies as one of those sure locks I spoke of.

And for our consideration we have three classics. But then, aren't they all? In, "I shot an Arrow Into the Air" we take a trip with an early manned space mission that goes awry and strands its crew on a deserted planet with no hope of rescue. "It's a Good Life" shows us the blissful yet forced world created by the mind of young Anthony who just might wish you into the cornfield if you upset him. And to balance the macabre with the charming, "The Night of the Meek" offers up a drunken department store Santa given the chance to be the real thing.

The shows often focus on one main actor being the focal point of the evening and this time they picked Corey McDaniel. Not only does he have an effortless kind of delivery but he manages that 60's Zone style perfectly. Whether he's barking out orders, placating a demonic son or teaching us the true meaning of Christmas he engages like no other but plays it all quite close to the vest which makes it all the more intense when he does let go. Beyond McDaniel, director Tim Moore (who also plays Rod Serling to a scary T) always manages to


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Theater Schmeater has got a knock-out production on its hands with “The Gingerbread House,” written by Mark Schultz and directed by Julia Griffin.

The play tells the story of “Stacey” and “Brian,” played respectively by Sara Coates and Tom Dewey, an all-American couple who decide to sacrifice everything, including their children, in order to achieve the elusive American dream: expensive cars, a fancy high rise penthouse in the city, an express ride up the corporate ladder, and exclusive membership into “The Club,” where they can hobnob and rub elbows with the crème de la crème of corporate execs.

The creative set design by Michael Mowery is composed of numerous screens on which video and animation are projected depicting primarily scenes of B Collapse

It's a comedy about two selfish parents who sell their children. At least the first act of The Gingerbread House at Theater Schmeater is somewhat comedic and tongue-in-cheek. But it darkens as it goes along.

A capable cast, directed by Julia Griffin, takes on this uneven script by Mark Schultz and perhaps makes it better than it was written. Sara Coates and Tom Dewey are a striving duo - Stacey and Brian - who have gotten into a rut. Brian has decided that their kids are holding them back from all they looked forward to in the past and all they want in the future.

He has been lured into this kind of thinking by a co-worker, Marco, with a mysterious power of persuasion, played by Daniel Christensen. At the end of the play, Marco seems revealed as an embodiment of the witch in the woods who lures Hansel and Gretel into the gingerbread house with the intent to kill and eat them.

YUPPIE WANNABES
Schultz's play is broad strokes: Brian clearly wants things - expensive toys, a beautiful high-rise apartment, membership in the 'club.' And the second act displays those things as hollow and not providing the Collapse

The current production of Mark Schultz’s “The Gingerbread House” at Theater Schmeater is the darkest, most twisted play I’ve seen in some time. It is not, however, cynical, nihilistic or existential, but rather an intense, sobering and terrifying experience of the consequences of thinking that personal choice is “no big deal” and then discovering that it is both a big deal and utterly life destroying. Julia Griffin directs an intimate, committed cast to a performance that is gripping to the point where at times it feels like it has you by the throat, and still manages to make these people feel like people we know, or even perhaps people whom we sometimes are.

The play opens in an ordinary home cluttered with the scattered debris of Collapse

To say that the current production from Theater Schmeater, "The Gingerbread House" by Mark Schultz, is intense is somewhat of an understatement. In fact this modern day fable doesn't just tell its story so much as it beats you over the head with it. A little long winded at times, this gripping tale will leave you shaken to say the least. In fact I think as I was leaving I said to my theater companion, "I'm a little messed up after that", although I used a more colorful epithet.

Schultz takes an absurdist modern day twist to the familiar tale of "Hansel and Gretel" as we enter the world of Brian and Stacey (Tom Dewey and Sara Coates), a suburban middle class couple with an unusual opportunity. Brian's friend Marco (Daniel Christensen) works with people in Eastern Europe willing to buy Brian and Stacey's two young children. What will happen to them once they reach their new home in Albania is debatable. Maybe they'll be making sweaters, maybe they'll be living in the lap of luxury or maybe something unspeakable may befal


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Seattle-based Arouet bills themselves as a company inspired by the work and passion of Voltaire. Productions are created not just to entertain but also inform the audience and perhaps even inspire some action on their part. Collapse

“It’s my hen night and we have the small matter of a hangover to prepare.” With that, Una (Colleen Carey) and her Dublin girlfriends, Kelly (Kelly Johnson) and Triona (Ellen Dessleer), mix up Bitch Whiskeys out of Jack Daniels, Kahlua, and full-fat milk – a combination as lethal as inviting your future mother-in-law to your hen night, otherwise known as a bachelorette party. Collapse

If there was a lesson to be learned from ACT’s regrettable 2011 production of Lieutenant of Inishmore it was simply that performing Martin McDonagh’s material isn’t as easy as it looks. A production has to accept the heightened stakes, for one thing. If the play asks the director to milk laughs out of having the protagonist torturing the hell out of somebody in the first scene, that is done by having the torture be so visceral that there is no choice but to laugh, squeamish audiences be damned. Play the comedy too broadly, and the violence in McDonagh’s plays becomes pointlessly gruesome; alternately, focus too much on the violence, and the humor that is supposed to make all of this seem human disappears.

As if all of that weren’t daunting enough, there is the dangerous element that the playwright’s characters are supposed to bring forth. McDonagh has a penchant in writing characters—there is usually one, though Inishmore was populated with nothing but these types—that are generally dangerous motherfuckers compared to the average civilized human being. They might be able to charm the pants off of you, but they are just as liable to cut your jugular on a whim. Think Lisa Viertel’s Ms. Blonde in Theater Schmeater’s Reservoir Dolls, or Titus Andronicus‘s Aron. These are people one should not take one’s eyes off of for an instant; they bear watching.

It’s a wonder McDonagh is produced at all, but seeing as he’s treated as the British Tracy Letts Collapse

What might Franz K. make of Anglo-Irish dramatist Martin McDonagh’s highly theatrical sense of perverse absurdity? Would he find a kindred spirit?

“A Behanding in Spokane” is not as psychologically or metaphorically suggestive as earlier McDonagh forays into profane and bloody, topsy-turvy realms. So let’s just call the play, at Theater Schmeater, a gleeful heap of outrageousness with an existentialist glimmer or two.

Spearing political correctness at every turn, this caper brings a glowering Spokane native (Carmichael, played by Gordon Carpenter), on an epic search for his missing hand, to a shabby old hotel in who-knows-where, U.S.A.

He’s come to meet with Toby, a fast-talking, minor-league black drug dealer (Corey Spruill) and Toby’s overly chatty white girlfriend (Hannah Mootz). They’ve got a hand to sell Carmichael.

Naturally, the deal goes hilariously awry. Like an Old Testament heavy, lumbering and leering through a Martin Scorsese gangster flick, Carmichael doesn’t take double-crosses lightly. And as Toby tries to cajole and weasel his way out of the jam, and a spacey night clerk (Brandon Ryan) butts into the caper, things just get nuttier and more menacing. (Not to mention more playfully gruesome.)

As bleak and Collapse

What would you do to have an appendage returned? Would you kill for it? Would you keep appendages belonging to other people in your suitcase as a growing reminder that there are millions of missing limbs in the world, and none of them are yours? These are the questions posed by Theater Schmeater‘s A Behanding in Spokane (through February 23; tickets). And when I say “posed” I actually mean hacked-away-by-train.

Martin McDonagh’s play looks at a roughneck, racist desperately trying to find his hand that a group of redneck hooligans heartlessly removed via an oncoming train many years previous. Obviously, it’s a comedy, if you like your comedy in McDonagh style with macabre sensibilities.

Directed by Peggy Gannon, A Behanding in Spokane is uncomfortable and delightful, much like reading internet comments or spending time on Reddit. Gordon Carpenter as the handless Carmichael is low and fierce, with a sick Collapse

Meanwhile, about 6 blocks up the Hill, there’s a different kind of handicap being laughed about…Theater Schmeater’s current staging of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s “A Behanding in Spokane”, the writer’s first work with an American setting. It’s the usual darkly perverse work we’ve come to expect from Mr. McDonagh who isn’t one to shy away grim humor and very comically violent situations, (his play “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” and his film, “In Bruges” come to mind as fine examples).

“A Behanding in Spokane” concerns the efforts of a man named Carmichael to seek retribution for his “behanding”…as a young man, he was brutally attacked where he lost said hand and ever sense has been on a mission to claim vengeance on those who disfigured him AND to physically locate and claim the hand that was severed. (It was apparently kept after the incident as a souvenir.) As the play opens, Carmichael is in a seedy motel in an even seedier part of town, negotiating with a rather dimwitted young couple for the return of his hand while also dealing with a very nosy motel desk clerk Collapse

Behanding in Spokane, by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, has a high level of cartoonish glee, but with a sinister premise—a homicidal, one-handed sociopath named Carmichael (Gordon Carpenter) is looking for his other hand, which was severed by some sadistic teenagers in Spokane almost 30 years ago. The last time Carmichael saw it, the teenagers were using it to wave good-bye at him. When the play opens, Carmichael is in a seedy motel room waiting for a couple of small-time hoods (a boyfriend-girlfriend couple played by Corey Spruill and Hannah Mootz) to deliver what he hopes is his hand. They bring a hand, but it's not his. That's when the trouble—involving a candle, a large can of gasoline, and a suitcase full of other people's hands—begins.

The play is full of implausibility: Carmichael's hand was apparently severed by the teens holding it onto a track in front of an oncoming train. How, exactly, does that work, logistically speaking? And why does he still think his hand is actually around after three decades? And that some dumb pot dealer could find it intact for $500? No matter—McDonagh's gift has always been locating Collapse

Like Ahab seeking revenge for his lost leg, a middle-aged thug named Carmichael is obsessed with finding justice for a lost limb. Twenty-seven years earlier, some "hillbillies east of Spokane" pinned his arm down on a train track, then waved his own severed hand at him as they disappeared into the distance. Fact? Fiction? Delusion? Rationalization for violence? Does it really matter? In the grand Irish narrative tradition, filtered into Martin McDonagh's 2010 play, the height of the tale is paramount; this is the tale Carmichael believes. Collapse

“Or,” has the flavor of a Shakespeare comedy minus the convoluted plotlines and crowded stage. Like the bard’s comedies, this one has hidden identities and cross dressing, and it is playfully risqué. The language is poetic. It slips in and out of rhyme, and manages to sound contemporary while reflecting the speech of 17th century London. There are fast costume changes and a lot of comical surprises. Whenever a character goes into a bedroom or a hallway or a closet, you never know who is going to appear next. Collapse

I love a good dark comedy. There's just nothing more fun than laughing at things you really shouldn't. This is probably why I like the plays (and films) of Martin McDonagh so much. Not just that they deal with people with nefarious pasts doing dark dealings but that he always puts a kind of ridiculous surreal twist on those dealings. And his latest play, "A Behanding in Spokane" currently playing at Theater Schmeater, is no exception. And thankfully the folks at the Schmea have taken it and infused their production with the perfect amounts of stirring intensity and vicious hilarity to amount to a killer evening of theater.

The title for this one kind of tells the basic setup. Charmichael (Gordon Carpenter) has been on the hunt for his hand ever since it was forcibly removed 27 years ago in Spokane, Washington. His search has led him many places and to many people with many different severed hands but never the right one. But now he's come to this hotel room in a small town where two pot dealing lovebirds, Toby and Marilyn


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Theater Schmeater has a hit on their hands. “Fallen Angels”, the satirical society comedy by Noel Coward is funny, hilarious many times, the actors are all right on pitch, and the set is a treat. In a farce like this one, timing is the critical factor because if the director is just a little bit off, it’s bland and boring. But director Corey McDaniel, and the actors do it right!

Sara Trowbridge and Marianna de Fazio in Fallen Angels. Photo by Dave Hastings. It’s gentle production with only six actors: two couples, Julia and Fred Sterroll (Marianna de Fazio and Tim Moore) and Jane and Willie Banbury (Sara Trowbridge and James Weidman), Maurice Duclos (Ashley Bagwell), the French former lover of both wives, all with very fond memories of Venice seven years ago, and Saunders (Erin Stewart), the maid and authority on all matters golf, food, and music. “It’s supposed to be a b natural, madam”, she chidingly tells Julia as she's playing the piano and goes over to show her.

All the action takes place in the exquisite set by Michael Mowery. The grayed-green walls and crisp white trim detailing, the Duncan Fyfe dining set, the Georgian side table, a framed window with bench and the other furniture are beautiful. You’d think you were in a sitting room of a 1920s middle-class couple in England. I was frankly surprised to see such a detailed set in a smaller theater, but they sure showed me! This was a very well done setting. I noticed in the program’s “Thanks to…” box, both ACT and Seattle Repertory helped; maybe that explains some of the elegant furniture.

Sara Trowbridge in Fallen Angels. Photo by Dave Hastings.The evening dress that Jane wears is absolutely b Collapse

The idea of premarital sex may not be shocking in today’s liberal zeitgeist, but for the theatre-going audiences of the 1920s, Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, which revolves around the subject, was a scandalous affair. The play, now running at Theater Schmeater, risks being stale and un-relatable, but the leading ladies of the show emit strong wit and humor, and their perfect comedic timing pushes the play forward, hitting a plethora of still-socially-relevant themes and throwing them into a contemplative but not heavy light.

Set in 1920s London, Fallen Angels follows Julia Sterroll and Jane Banbury (Marianna de Fazio and Sara Trowbridge), two socialites living in boredom with their droll, husbands, Fred (Tim Moore) and Willy (James Weidman). When each of the women receives word that a former French lover, whom they both had pre-marital relations with, is set to arrive while their husbands are on a golf trip, they suck down numerous martinis and descend into dreamy recollection and an uncouth, jealous rivalry. But Fred and Willy return early from the countryside and the women are caught in utter chaos, and hidden truths from the past are uncovered, threatening relationships on all sides.

The basement space of Theater Schmeater is an unlikely Collapse

Manners and tawdry secrets collide at Theater Schmeater with their current production of Noel Coward’s “Fallen Angels”. And Coward’s signature send-up of the upper crust combined with some stunning characterizations and timing from the cast add up to one delightfully funny and slightly naughty evening.

OK, so maybe it’s actually fairly tame by today’s standards, but I’m sure back in 1925 when the play first appeared it was positively ribald as we delve into the marriages and past lovers of two “happily” married socialites. Julia and Jane (Marianna de Fazio and Sara Trowbridge) spend their days dealing with servants and keeping nice homes for their slightly out of touch, golf playing husbands Fred and Willy (Tim Moore and James Weidman). But when the suave Frenchman Maurice (Ashley Bagwell), whom both of the ladies had torrid affairs with prior to their marriages, sends word that he’s back in town, the news sends the ladies into a tailspin of confusion, longing and expectations coupled with too much booze.

Director Corey McDaniel has taken this already funny play and turned the hilarity up to 11 by casting some comedy powerhouses and ensuring the pacing remains a


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The most striking thing one notices when walking into the house of Theater Schmeater’s latest production of Noel Coward’s “Fallen Angels,” is the amazing set-design by Michael Mowery, who also delivered up the wonderful design for the Schmee’s award-winning production of “Live! From the Last Night of My Life.”

Mowery has completely transformed the small, black box space that is Theater Schmeater into an opulent 1920s era London sitting room complete with elegant chandeliers, decadent furnishings, and a piano! The set looks like it could be on stage at one of Seattle’s larger theaters such as ACT or the Intiman.

The beautiful set design is equally complemented with a strong cast to include Erin Stewart, Sara Trowbridge, James Weidman, Ashley Bagwell, Marianna de Fazio and Tim Moore.

This 1925 play is quite modern for its day in that it explores such themes as domestic boredom, deception, women’s liberation, and the banality of middle-class norms. And although, personally, I am not a huge Noel Coward fan, the Schmee has done an excellent job with the play.

With three acts and two intermissions, the play is rather long, but director, Corey McDaniel, manages to keep the audience’s attention even though there is very little plot to follow.

“Fallen Angels” is now showing at Theater Schmeater on Capitol Hill.1500 Summit Ave. The show runs until December 15. Phone: 206-324-5801. Website: www.schmeater.org Collapse

The prospect of a Noël Coward play in a basement fringe theater is a reasonable cause for concern. What should tinkle and sparkle might clunk instead—toasts with plastic martini glasses, whiffs of mildew instead of perfume, last year's debt-ridden theater graduates straining to appear like last century's upper-class Brits. But Theater Schmeater makes it work, nailing the facsimiles when it can (freshly painted wainscoting turns the stage into a creditable drawing room) and exaggerating some elements for comic effect (the characters drawl out some words, like a five-syllable "really," with such severe tonal shifts, they sound like spoken Thai).

Fallen Angels belongs to its women— Collapse