3/25/26: The Unknown
What: Studio Seaview presents David Cale's new one-man show starring Sean Hayes, about playwright Elliott struggling with writer's block who finds himself the object of fixation by an actor rejected from the casting of his last play. As the details surrounding this actor become more convoluted, Elliott finds himself equally fixated on his stalker.
And? David Cale is truly adept at writing a showcase monologue (he also wrote the wonderful Harry Clarke, played with seedy charm by Billy Crudup), and this one showcases Sean Hayes very well. Deliberately murky while luring the audience further into the mire with every twist, Cale's play is excellently set off by the subtle but chilling design work of director Leigh Silverman's team. Under Cha See's stark, tight lighting, set pieces by Studio Bent appear and disappear as if conjured from Elliott's imagination. Elliott's hand drifts into shadow and reemerges holding a glass of whiskey. What was the brick backwall of the space now has a looming apartment door. And Caroline Eng's sound design, chilling and subtle, delicately cinches the audience in closer to Elliott's increasingly fractured sense of reality. Is he imagining Joey? Is Joey imagining him? What is true and what is hallucination and what is just hopeful dreaming? Though the play deliberately leaves the ending ambiguous as to whose story we've been watching, it's enough to hear the audience slowly filing out, eagerly debating what the truth could be.
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| Sean Hayes. Photo by Emilio Madrid. |
3/27/26: Trash
What: Perelman Performing Arts Center hosts Out of the Box Theatrics's new play by and starring James Caverly and Andrew Morrill. Two Deaf roommates, at odds with each other and with the hearing world, argue over whose responsibility it is to take out the trash, as well as unpacking the reasons for why things have become such a mess: the trash of their own lives and baggage, and the literal stinking trash can in the kitchen.
And? The storytelling conceits here are fascinating. I was talking to a friend about the challenge of presenting Deaf theater to a largely hearing audience: the need to always accommodate the hearing audience, all the while mainstream theater often offering very limited means of accommodating a Deaf audience. This, then, is reclaiming the narrative by nature of who is telling it: a play written by and starring two Deaf men, and presented by Out of the Box, whose mission is to center stories about marginalized identities, with a focus on people with disabilities. At the performance I attended, at least half of the audience was either Deaf or fluent in ASL. And a huge chunk of the play is communicated only in ASL or the occasional handwritten message on a dry erase board. I could say that this means I am not the primary audience, and I'm probably not; but the truth is, while I don't always grasp the nuance of a particular moment in the way the Deaf audience members do, I am still able to follow the characters' conflicts and emotional journeys. And then there's the slightly fantastical device: a jukebox rescued from an arcade. While outsiders observe that it's odd for two Deaf men to keep blasting music, for the audience, every dollar fed to the jukebox (here embodied by Chris Ogren in a smart black suit) awakens an English-speaking interpreter for the characters signing onstage. For the hearing audience, we are temporarily admitted into the conversation. For the Deaf audience, not much has changed. The show isn't for me, but it is letting me visit. In this way, it's a very generous invitation to the hearing world into what is often a very isolated community, as Deaf people are largely excluded from a mainstream society unwilling or unable to learn their language. One of the questions of the play is if it's worth the bigger lift on the part of ostracized Deaf to try to assimilate as much as possible into an audist world, or if it's better to live where they won't be treated as children or second-class citizens, as people not worth hearing. That's the macro. The micro is how Tim and Jake can bridge their own communication divide, as well as trying to wrangle a lifetime of baggage weighing them down.
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| Andrew Morrill as Tim, James Caverly as Jake, and Chris Ogren as Jukebox. Photo by Rebecca J. Michelson. |
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