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One of the funny things about theatre is that it's usually better when it's accidentally relevant; if it's served up on a plate, it's like seeing the wild animals at NW Trek from the tram. Not the same as happening across a wild animal on foot.
The UW Drama department didn't schedule The Quick Change Room (through December 14, tickets $15 general/$12 seniors/$10 students, Penthouse Theatre) in response to our recession, but you can't help feeling a bracing amount of sympathy for the inhabitants of St. Petersburg's Kuzlov Theatre as perestroika brings novel free market thrills like at-will employment to the quick-change room. (Of course, anything that changes can change back.) Set in the space of a few months during 1991 and 1992, Nagle Jackson's play chronicles both the ecstasy of artistic freedoms long awaited by the theatre collective, and the agony of surrendering freedom to the profit motive.
The cast doesn't go out of their way to persuade you they're Russian--by and large they stick with American accents--but the closest thing we have to the maternal bosom of a state bureaucracy-sponsored theatre is a state university drama department, so the actors have firsthand observation of how precious guaranteed lifetime employment is.
At the start, student hottie Nina (Nicole Buckenmeyer, signifying her youth with jazz hands), has just gotten cast as Irina in Chekhov's Three Sisters; her mother the wardrobe mistress Marya Stepanova (Andrea Snow) is proud, but her older "sisters" to-be, past-her-prime Ludamilla (Gwendolen Morton) and wised-up, ex-ingenue Anna (AmyDawn Rufino), are less pleased with the contrast in ages. They turn to the noble artistic director, Sergey Sergeyevich Tarpin (Carl Kennedy), and the audience chuckles knowingly at the offstage politicking and gossip that spills into even the few seconds of a costume change.
Though the laughs never stop, they do get fatalistic as the theatre discovers that inflation brings higher ticket prices, which bring empty seats, which bring less revenue. Party true-believer/electrician Sasha (Noam Rubin) and wardrobe assistant Lena (Marianna de Fazio) face the downsizing knife of Boris (Patrick David Cullen), the box office manager-cum-marketing director whom Cullen portrays sharply as a rainmaker who genuinely wants to help the theatre--and himself--survive.
Playwright Jackson knows of what he dramatizes: he directed a production at the Bolshoi Dramatichny Theater in St. Petersburg in 1986. Director Mark Jenkins, meanwhile, has worked with Stanislavski master Leonid Anisimov in Russia and helped bring the Ilkhom Theatre in Uzbekistan to ACT. The one thing they can't do is make these young actors ageworn and weary, so be prepared for that. Also, the third act strays from its earned, slice-of-life laughter into schticky send-up with a Sprayberry/Madsen musical, Oh My Sister. Whatever Russia was in 1992, it isn't so simple as farce.
Much better is the grimly silly comedy of a prime-office-space struggle between the artistic director and power-grabbing marketing director, in which Kennedy refuses to move from his desk, and Cullen calls for stagehands to move the chair, desk, and artistic director. It's a Chekhovian moment of its own, in which the air the characters breathe is so political that without mention of a czar or Yeltsin, they come to mind as an afterthought.
That said, anyone keeping an eye on theatre around Seattle knows about a troubling coda the play doesn't include: that in a stricken economy, big, designed-to-be-blockbuster works may still not make enough money to cover the cost of live performance. Even selling out doesn't guarantee a sold-out house.
Andrea Snow as Marya Stepanova, Noam Rubin as Sasha, and Marianna de Fazio as Lena in Nagle Jackson's The Quick Change Room, directed by Mark Jenkins. Photo by Frank Rosenstein.
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