The Secret in the Wings: The Joys of Play

Art comes from limitations. While this is no secret, one must nevertheless remind people of the fact. Creating art of any quality depends upon solving problems that arise during creation. Unfortunately a ritual habit of American theater is to solve by salve - which is to say, by bandaging problems with money. That particular bandage has become so typical that people think the dressing has become essential to theatrical health.

Recent productions prove otherwise. The shows I have enjoyed recently on Seattle stages have all been low on tech, high on imagination. Poverty, of course, is no guarantee of quality but at least in that vein one can make a virtue out of the approach. All it requires is dedication and a little taste.

I take a great interest in student drama for this reason. At their finest, student theater productions work within a strict budget and solve their problems aesthetically. Bandaging problems with money is not an option. Productions live or die by having the requisite imagination to tackle whatever arises.

The choice of Mary Zimmerman's The Secret in the Wings makes perfect sense for a student production. Ms. Zimmerman's texts always derive from familiar sources: Ovid, Homer, Leonardo da Vinci. Many of them originated in university settings. The University of Washington drama program gained a deserved reputation for awhile of preferring exciting physical acting to naturalistic, psychology-based drama. The match between the author and the company would seem perfect.

In The Secret in the Wings, Ms. Zimmerman returns to folklore. Specifically to the dark side of folklore in the Brothers Grimm and an Italian folktale I first read in Italo Calvino's book. And where better to make a virtue of imagination than folktales? The setting, somewhere between a basement and a forest as Ms. Zimmerman says, is unusually realistic, but the realistic element soon disappears when an actor dressed as Paddington Bear jumps out of a basin and becomes a prince in the tale of Three Blind Queens.

Director Julie Beckman has taken great interest in making every single object on stage seem alive and capable of transforming into anything. A clothesline with a sheet becomes a screen for an ombre chinoise (doubtless a tip of the hat to Ms. Zimmerman's renown adaptation of the Chinese tales in Journey to the West). Dryer vent hoses becomes snakes. Tennis racquets become executioner's axes and dodgeballs become severed heads. It is simple, naive theater magic at its finest and reminds viewers of the power of storytelling to take anything at hand and make it meaningful.

Being an undergraduate production, there is a wide range of talent on display. Some of the acting remains unrefined. In the context of this show, this is a positive asset at times. There is onstage a notable lack of ego and a definite feeling of ensemble that make it easier to concentrate on stage action rather than personality. Above all, the actors make no secret that they are playing. If only all people involved in theater could remember to play so joyfully, the theater might recover some of that magic that lies buried beneath the trappings of dull realism.