Damsel in DisDress

We didn’t see In DisDress, Marya Sea Kaminski’s one-woman show, when it was part of On the Boards' Northwest New Works Festival last June, but from what we gather, it involved a huge red dress, a television set, and porn. The Washington Ensemble Theatre restaging of that show, In DisDress Now Redux, doesn’t involve any of those things (though porn does get a shout out), and the title primarily exists to allow for the Apocalypse Now reference. Though originally intended to be an expansion of last year’s show, this performance is completely different. As the playwright explains, “I am not capable of and am absolutely not interested in being the person I was seven months ago, even in performance.” Fair enough.

Instead, this work is described several times as a funeral---for Marya’s 20s, for the ideas she’s had that have never been borne out, for the theater, for her father. It’s not nearly as heavy as it sounds. There’s tap dancing, match.com ads, Sex and the City, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," and alternate realities to explore. But the crux of the work is Marya’s stories, heavily detailed to the point of embarrassment. And that’s what really got us: all those details. It’s interesting enough to learn that her first real boyfriend ended up in the navy, but it’s that much better when you know that his name was (yes) Keebler and that they spent most of their first date smoking Now cigarettes in the back of his gold pickup.

More than anything, we’d describe this show as being “intimate” or “heavily personal.” The friendly confines of the Little Theatre adds to the intimacy, but more than that is the degree of connection that Marya is able to make with the audience. Towards the end of the piece, when she went into an impassioned diatribe about the theater, about what it’s capable of, and how some would say it’s in its death throes, we could see that she was tearing up, and though we have no real connection to the theater, we found ourselves getting a little misty too. It’s to Kaminski’s credit that she produced the most genuinely emotional onstage moment that we’ve seen in a long time, if not ever. With the WET in full effect, perhaps the theater’s not so dead after all.

In DisDress Now Redux
Through Saturday the 20th, 8pm
Washington Ensemble Theatre
608 19th Ave E
Tickets: $15