City Arts Magazine: Stretched between newborn spring and mature fall, summer is the adolescence of the seasons. In the latest installment of the quarterly series Seattle Confidential, Unforgettable Summer, presented at ACT, it is a distinctly female adolescence, ripe with blooming breasts, blossoming sexuality and disillusioning discovery of the thorns that lurk beneath new buds.
3 comments:
I’ll be the first to admit it: I clicked on this article because it is about a theatre in Seattle, not because of the content of the article itself. Seattle is a lot like Pittsburgh in that its residents are very proud of their city, though Seattleites are a little less in your face about it. This performance is a series of stories about summer in Seattle, but its use of media and audience interaction turn the performance into a statement about Seattle residents in general. This reviewer likens the performance to a sociological lecture, albeit much more entertaining. The audience is encouraged to use their cell phones to share their own summer experiences should they so desire. I am usually seriously opposed to allowing or encouraging cell phone use at a performance, but this actually sounds like it would actually augment the audience’s experience by encouraging them to draw parallels between their own lives and the stories being told onstage. I wish I had seen this while I was home; it sounds wonderfully nostalgic.
I'll be the second to admit it: I also click on this article because I'm from Seattle.
This piece of theatre does some really new and interesting things with media. I love the interconnection between the story's, story tellers, and audience that the media allows. For example the post show music being chosen by the audience is a great idea. Not everyone's parents let them go off to theatre school, but that doesn't mean they can't help choose a song or two for after the show.
I also really enjoyed the idea of using real story's and data along with semi fictional story's.
Seattle Confidential sounds exactly like the Seattle I know and love. Maybe I'll try to see it if it plays this coming summer.
I love this idea of representing a season by performing what it means to people, not only to those who wrote the stories but also what the actors are drawing from their own personal experience as well as what the audience has to offer in response to what they are seeing and hearing. I think it can be very hard to do interactive theater correctly, and I'd really like to see this for myself to know how it turned out. I definitely find the concept interesting, as I usually do with any piece of theater that is new and different from what you see on the big stages of this world.
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