Solo Performance Festival #4: Frontier: Valley of the Shadow by Ki Gottberg

The following is part of Seattlest’s continuing coverage on the 4th annual Solo Performance Festival: SPF #4 Can You Get My Back? Full event calendar here.

For those not accustomed to lengthy monologues, Ki Gottberg’s Valley of the Shadow may be a little hard to digest. Part of the pleasure of festivals like these is picking a handful of performances and going in without knowing what to expect - to venture outside one’s comfort zone. However, we might have enjoyed Valley of the Shadow a bit more if we had mentally prepped ourselves for an hour-long, autobiographical monologue based on Gottberg’s family history and intertwined with references to Kali, a Hindu Goddess. The monologue is so dense with information that a program insert is deemed necessary to explain all the historical and religious references in the piece. Granted, Gottberg’s theater arts training and performance skill is generously employed to help make the piece easier to swallow; we are just not so sure we are partial to the way that it tastes.