Carver's Pieces @ Youngstown

The Community Theatre is staging performances of three Raymond Carver short stories, What's in Alaska?, Fat and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love at the Youngstown Cultural Arts Centre in West Seattle. Seattlest attended the Friday night performance and can attest that the actors all did a serviceable job of capturing the dramatic awkwardness and tension that fascinated Carver so much. His minimalistic work about shy ordinary people feeling passive and acquiescent doesn't offer aspiring Al Pacino types many opportunities for projectile scene chewing, which is generally a good thing, except for the generally depressing and underwhelming afterglow of wimpy victimhood that envelops you like a bad after taste.

Here's how Carver's work is described on the theatre's site:

A powerful and acute look at the lives of everyday people thrown together in their isolation, desperately seeking a means to make sense of the incoherence of their suffering. Each story - a waitress serving a fat customer, two married couples getting high together, and a group of friends talking about love over gin and tonic -reveals Carver at his best; a resolute and unblinking look at the conditioning forces that scorch people's lives, leaving them helplessly stranded with one another, and causing them to misunderstand life, even when it is plain and simple.

That description would be accurate if any of the characters were isolated, if any of them were desperately doing anything, much less searching for capitol T Truth, and if any of them showed any signs of true "suffering," unless moments of awkwardness when you're stoned or drunk with your friends or having a shitty day at work qualify as such. They're also not helplessly stranded as much as they are just simple, shy and resigned, and they don't seem to be misunderstanding anything. Carver's writing is enjoyable and valuable because it's funny and convincingly naturalistic, but the heavy profundity and gravitas that people seem to want to ascribe to his work just isn't there.

Word to the wise: If you go, be sure to enter from the north side of the building so you can take in all the art on the walls made by the kids who presumably must attend classes there. The paintings and photos of the weird, colorful, bizarre things the kids made (sculptures? masks? kites? Who knows?) are amazing, and there are these class photo banners from previous generations hanging from the ceiling, moving forward in time as you walk down the hall. It's an experience full of life, joy and hope and as such surpasses the formidable talents of mopey sourpuss Carver.