Jan and I have “Thursday Preview” Season Tickets to the Bathhouse Theatre in Seattle. For those of you who don’t know about the Bathhouse, it’s a very small community theatre on the ever-popular Green Lake. This is our second year having season tickets for the Thursday Previews and I’d highly recommend them to anyone – they’re cheaper than standard tickets, it’s pretty easy to get good seats, and you still gain access to high-quality local theatre.

A representative will tell you up-front that Thursday Previews are a practice run before opening night and that the director may choose to stop the action at any time but it hasn’t happened on anything we’ve seen. Tonight is the preview showing of Bryony Lavery’s ” A Wedding Story.” While I’m sure there will be more hoopla for the Opening Night tomorrow, tonight you’ll get the benefit of a seeing the show with a bunch of budget conscious theater fans, along with the family and friends of the actors. This is a really enjoyable way to get your local theatre and a nice reminder of just how accessible it can be. Here is The Guardian’s quote on Lavery’s “A Wedding Story”:

“A moving story about marriage and the nature of love…with its mix of comedy, tragedy, movie culture and popular song…Lavery is riding the crest of a wave.”

This is going to be incredible.

I’m not the most well-versed theatre-goer you’ve ever met. I don’t know the major playwrights or the “can’t miss” plays that come through town. What I do know, however, is that “Three Days of Rain” (playing through February 24th) is an exquisitely written piece by Richard Greenberg and that the production is ably directed and deftly acted by the small cast.

The opening act of the play occurs in an unoccupied Manhattan loft, the long-abandoned apartment of a recently deceased architect. His two children and step-child have reunited after significant time apart to hear the reading of his will, converging on the town from various points domestic and international. They bring their vastly different psychoses and desire to reconnect to a quick simmer as memories are dredged and old wounds reopened.

Evan Whitfield, playing Walker, really shines as a remorse-filled drifter, saddened by missing the end of his father’s life while in Italy. The act is a series of sharply written familial recollections by Walker; his sister, Nan; and their semi-famous half-brother, Pip. They discover elements of the gloomy apartment that contrast sharply with what they know of their deceased patriarch and speculate on earlier times when their parents used to live there. Their father’s journal, tersely written in cryptic one-liners, fuels their curiosity.

The second act occurs in the same apartment, with the same actors playing their respective parents, 35 years prior. This act is less psychological, more philosophical, as the two men, now playing “soon-to-be well-known architects” debate the merits of various architectural icons and struggle to make their mark with their initial architectural commission while sharing an attraction for the same southern belle, Lina.

“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.” – Frank Gehry

The time shift in the play serves as a really nice literary device allowing the actors to explore how the future will eventually be reconstructed out of the products of the past, with no more clarity than they enjoy in the present. These two stories, played out 35 years apart, weave a very compelling story that reverberates across a generational gap in a novel and enjoyable way.

Go see this play. It’s only here a couple more weeks and it’s well worth it, I promise.

Do yourself a favor and grab tickets for you and a friend to go check out this show at the Northwest Film Forum. It’s only playing this weekend so you’ve got to go tonight or tomorrow. You get “The Puget News guarantee” that you’ll leave with a warm fuzzy feeling.

The show is spearheaded by Drs. Ink and Owning (Rachel Kessler and Sierra Nelson of the Typing Explosion), two scientists exploring the collective answers to scientific questionnaires the audience has filled out on their way in to the theatre. Through the use of music, dance, film, sweets, and live science, the doctors instruct and celebrate our most intimate foibles. While the show had many rough elements, record players being bumped, missing data for one of the demonstrations, and the continuous movement of the overhead projectors, the whimsy and bubbly personalities of the cast more than make up for any temporary awkwardness. The show is disarmingly human and that’s the whole point.

I really don’t want to give away all the pleasant bits in the show, just know that you’ll be doing vocalizations and watching man-dancers. Steel yourself.

Oh, and Rachel, a bunch of us who went out drinking afterwards really wanted to hear you belt out one of those tunes. You’ve got a beautiful and strong voice. Turn it loose!

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