3 Good Things About The Ten Thousand Things
The Ten Thousand Things is a play by Seattle playwright Paul Mullin, showing at WET through June 16. Tickets are $15 general, $10 students/seniors. Shows are Thursdays through Mondays.
Now on to the good things.
1. It's unique. As with most of WET's innovative and intense productions, The Ten Thousand Things creates its own atmospheric weather patterns, dramatically speaking. You don't spend a lot of time thinking This is just like the play we saw at.... It isn't. Nor is it easy to sum up in a Title-Meets-Title format. We tried, we gave up. Not many people have sat down to dramatize deep time, or the conflict between the all-encompassing archive and the eternal now. This is why Mullin will never make it in Hollywood, by the way, even though he does include a favorite Hollywood trope: the unsung, blue-collar artist being baited by the wealthy entrepreneur.
2. It's got Joseph P. McCarthy. This guy pops up on Seattle stages every once in a while, and when he does, you should drop everything to catch him. How is he so authentic? Here he plays a gnomic desert-dweller called OM (short for Old Man). It should be trite Wilford-Brimley-lite , but McCarthy blends his laconic, avuncular portrayal with just enough living-alone-too-long crazy to keep you riveted. Maybe he knows something, maybe he doesn't.
3. It sticks with you. Having mulled the play over for a few days, we still don't know what it wants to say. And yet it breaks down fairly simply: in the near-past, we see a playwright (Marya Sea Kaminski, oddly unfocused) goaded into writing a play about deep time. In the far future, a hunter (Elise Hunt) finds an old man who may or may not be guarding a deep-time clock that is what remains of "our" civilization. Also, the daughter (Emily Chisholm) of an archivist (slash high-priest, David Kubiczky) steals the symbol of the archive, which sort of houses the spirit of Swastika (Kaminski, also doing a lived-alone-too-long riff), the goddess of the auspicious moment. Oh, and Aaron LaPlante is a peculiar, but convincing fisherman.
That the play is 10,000 words, that one changes each performance, and that, therefore, the play is a kind of clock we didn't care so much about. Despite all the deep-time trappings, the play ended up mostly convincing us of mortality, the brief time we have, and how we spend so much of it talking about other things.
Photo: Elise Hunt and Joseph P. McCarthy delve into deep time in the world premiere of THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS at Washington Ensemble Theatre. Photo by Victoria Lahti.
