OtB Announces 2009/10 Season

Yesterday, On the Boards announced their next season of shows, and we're excited. OtB is the company we most often recommend to friends, particularly if they're not theatre people. It may seem odd at first to be recommending the place that does avant-garde performance art and dance, but that's just it: If you're into Masterpiece Theatre, classic tragedy and issue plays about people coming to terms with things are right up your alley. But a lot of people aren't like that, and for them, the whipsmart contemporary performance at OtB, visually interesting and intellectually stimulating, is going to be a more enjoyable night out, so long as they can get over the initial "it's performance art" thing.

You can read the entire season here, but for our money, the most exciting shows are Young Jean Lee's The Shipment, Bruno Beltrão H3, and Reggie Watts and Tommy Smith's Transition.

One of the Seattle theatre things we have been irritated by is the tendency to limit African-American artists to shows about "black issues" that appeal to white audiences (usually, Civil Rights or slavery). Young Jean Lee, a Korean-American writer and director out of NYC, following the success of Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, was having her own problems with the narrow confines of the ethnic-identity play, and instead broke racial barriers and worked with a group of African-American theatre artists to produce The Shipment. The piece directly plays off the unspoken ethnic stereotypes that inform American race relations but which are more often than not left unspoken. In other words, it promises to be incredibly awkward humor--think The Office, but about stuff. And not so white. (Oct. 1-4)