We were really looking forward to seeing Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice (at ACT through October 5, tickets $10-$55). Ruhl's a Pulitzer prize finalist and a MacArthur "genius" grant winner, and we've long been fascinated by the Greek tale of not counting your dead chicks before they're hatched. Maybe we'd love it; maybe we'd hate it. We didn't expect boredom. But that's what we got. We first meet Orpheus (Trick Danneker) and Eurydice (Renata Friedman), two kids......

Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges plays at ACT Theatre through Sept. 14; tickets $10 (student) to $55. Putting on a full production of Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges seems like a theatre company's attempt to dodge a bad review. With 16 possible endings (in the full script; ACT's production has a max of four), and two actors playing ten characters, with a reported total of 17 hours of dialogue in the script, well if you've only seen......

Michael Bradford's Fathers and Sons plays at ACT through May 25; tix available online here. There's something amazing on stage this month at ACT Theatre that everyone should see: black people, on the stage, in a play, that isn't a tepid exploration of race in America. It's a holy frickin' miracle! Don't take that to mean we buy into this idea of a "post-racial" America any more than we buy into a "post-class" America, but......

The Ilkhom Theatre Festival at ACT Theatre closes this Sunday; tickets for Ecstasy With the Pomegranate are still available here. Heading into ACT Theatre last night for the opening of the Ilkhom Theatre's Ecstasy With the Pomegranate, we were for some reason under the impression that this show--running for one week only, and following a four-week run of White White Black Stork--would be a shorter, perhaps more experimental work, intended for hardcore audiences. Turns out,......

Since the first previews of White White Black Stork on March 14, Seattle's had nothing but plaudits and bon mots for the Ilkhom Theatre of Tashkent, Uzbekistan. (Read the praise: The Seattle Times, the P-I, The Stranger, the Weekly, Seattlest.) White White Black Stork closed April 6, but Ilkhom is presenting a second show with a one-week run starting tomorrow, Ecstasy with the Pomegranate. Like their previous show, Ecstasy is an exploration of sexuality......

ALL-STAR PANEL: The Hugo House 2007-2008 Literary Series presents "Answered Prayers and Other Tragedies," a colloquium with authors Sherman Alexie and Michelle Tea, the Stranger's man-about-town David Schmader, and musician Sean Nelson. All are responding artistically to the question, "Is the only real tragedy getting what you want?" Ben Blum, the winner of the Hugo House New Works Competition, will also be there, wondering if this is what he really wanted. Friday, 7:30pm //......

ACT says White White Black Stork (through April 6, tickets: $15-$55) is a "Romeo and Juliet" story, but that's stretching it. This play says more about what people will do to survive than what they will die for. It's sometimes dazzling, sometimes stark. Pitchers hanging in mid-air disburse surprising contents, characters whirl around a central tree shouting epiphanies, and a courtroom scene pitilessly exposes two families' shame and suffering. Seeing it is oddly like watching......

Monday the 10th, at 7pm, the Paramount Theatre presents Charlie Chaplin's 51st, 52nd, and 53rd films, all from 1916: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, and The Vagabond. They're all half-hour or so shorts from early on in his Mutual Films era, and feature Chaplin's genius for environmental comedy, with mishaps with escalators and fire poles. In his autobiography, Chaplin wrote that his notion of humor was based on "the subtle discrepancy we discern in what appears......

Monday CALL 911! CALL 911!: Political and economic commentator and White House strategist during the Nixon administration, Kevin Phillips talks about his book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. Phillips traces the set of related causes that caused the downfall of historical world powers. That same combination of ills he says -- global over-reach, militant religion, resource problems, and ballooning debt -- is......

This year, Moisture Festival, everyone's favorite local showcase of variety performers and circus freaks, is growing up. This Friday and Saturday, Moisture Fest is hosting four very special "late night" burlesque shows at ACT Theatre. The shows (at 7:30 and 10:30) feature clowns, can-can dancers, vaudeville and, of course, burlesque. Now, we like artsy, retro stripping as much as the next blog group, but we've seen our fair share of burlesque. For our money,......

Act Theatre's latest offering, Miss Witherspoon by Christopher Durang, is the perfect balance to their previous effort, The Pillowman. Both plays feature crucifixion talk and an impending sense of doom, but Witherspoon contains an unlikely amount of hope to counterbalance Pillowman's bleak outlook. This hope is quite out of character for playwright Durang, but the play's first act regurgitates many of his misanthropic tendencies and then easily segues into said hopefulness. It makes sense, though.......

This week's weather was beautiful, enough to justify Seattlest's first bbq of the year. But it's going to be a wet weekend, according to KOMO-TV's Scott Sistek. How will Seattlest keep dry? Read on... Ronald plans a weekend excursion to Snoqualmie to help a colleague move her office overseas and get his hands on various electronics that won't work where she's going. An ideal opportunity to try out Flexcar's new keycard system. Then home to......

ACT Theatre certainly knows how to get a rise out of us. First came the ominous news in January of 2003 that they needed a million dollars or they were going to close their doors for good. Now they're flat out just trying to freak us out with their current staging of The Woman in Black. The folks at ACT are playing it a little safe, given that this adaptation of Susan Hill's book of......