Results tagged “jenniferzeyl”

And that noise is the sound of children laughing. Okay, not children, but 30-somethings and under, drawn to the Seattle Rep's Leo K. theatre by a new play from Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, a playwright so cool and cutting edge he lives in the Mission in San Francisco. And of course having two of Seattle's most talented young-ish actors, Chelsey Rives and Nick Garrison, in lead roles doesn't hurt. Not to mention the scenic design genius of Jennifer Zeyl.

Those crazy kids at WET have put Ibsen's Hedda Gabler on a crash diet -- the subtitle is "A Pistol Fit in One Act" -- and added what they call "dance and circus vocabulary" to the mix. According to the Weekly,

The show is “movement intense,” says director Jennifer Zeyl; actors can and do literally run up the walls.

So it won't be your usual neurotic drawing room drama, where people stand there stiffly and occasionally gesture. Directed by Jennifer Zeyl, the adaptation was written by Matt Starritt, a multi-talented fellow whom we sat next to at a WET performance once and whose existence we can vouch for personally.

Somehow, in between day jobs, practices, live shows, and recording their second album Beehive Sessions (produced by the Posies' Jon Auer), everybody's favorite performance group/art collective/pop band "Awesome" has found the time to put together a new theater extravaganza for all ages. And though it's kid-tested mother-approved, there's still scads of local talent involved: Here's What Happened is directed by WET's Jennifer Zeyl and has a different guest narrator each night--actor Charles Leggett, Almost Live! and Seattle Channel's Nancy Guppy, and man about town Sean Nelson.

The Mojo and the Sayso which opened at ACT last night is four actors and a car, but the car is the thing, the main entity. The car is the set, the stage, and the focal character. It may not have any lines, but it stands in for everything that moves playwright Aisha Rahman's story forward. It's the absent child, gunned down by aggro off-duty cops, it's the broken family, being rebuilt from the ground up with parts scavenged from here or there, it's the hard facts of terrestrial life in the face of the easy fixes of shyster spirituality. Jennifer Zeyl designed the set. She's a genius, we hear.

The first thing we noticed about Crumbs Are Also Bread is that its set is yet another magical emanation from the mind of Jennifer Zeyl. WET's stage isn't large, but somehow the frozen Midwestern town of Breadmouth fits on it: the town square, bedrooms, kitchens, backyards, the icy river. Even a full moon appears. Trees with bare branches, disquietingly, grow upside down.

Saturday we went to go see The Museum Play at WET. We've been musing over what to tell you about it since then. It's a world premiere, see, and why give the story away? So few things these days have the opportunity to surprise us. If you don't care about that then by all means, read this Weekly review, or this bizarre, what-was-he-drinking? one in the P-I. [UPDATE: Here's the Stranger's AW! with a response within shouting distance of ours, and the Times' Misha Berson, with whose review we also find ourselves nodding agreeably.]