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Personal Exploration of People, Personalities and Meaning
Browsing All posts tagged under »Art«
I Never Saw Another Butterfly (Studio East)
Studio East does not shy away from the challenging, unconventional or the controversial. On October 5, Studio East opened a limited run of Celeste Raspanti’s play “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” which wrapped up on Oct 13. “Butterfly” tells the heartrending story of 15,000 Jewish children who passed through the Terezin concentration camp during World War II most on their way to Auschwitz. Their story is told through Raja, one of only a hundred children who survived Terezin, and pieced together from the poems and artwork which the children of Terezin left behind as their legacy. It is a haunting tale made more visceral as Studio East tells it using young people and children. There are two different casts performing during this production and I was attending a production performed by Cast A.
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There were many wonderful touches that increased the experience of the play. In the lobby, I was impressed and moved by the artistic displays the participants in the production constructed to help reflect their experience of Terezin. The music played in the theater prior to the production was spot on and helped to immerse you into the experience. Costumes were wonderfully detailed and the Star of David set design was beautiful and functional for the production; effectively used by the cast during the play (kudos to Master Carpenter Erik Eagleson). The bold and effective use of projections on the wall behind the actors, especially the shots of authentic artwork from the children of Terezin, helped to tie in the illusion on stage with its real world events.
Red (Seattle Repertory)
March 1, 2012
I am struggling with where to start in my review of Red at the Seattle Repertory. I attended the packed house opening night of Red last evening and this morning my mind is still racing, trying to distill the essence of Red; to quantify the take away as it were, but it is just not that simple. You see writer John Logan, director Richard E. T. White and the extremely talented acting duo of Denis Arndt and Connor Toms have conspired with foresight and malicious intent to make anything that I say, good or bad about the play, more indicative of my qualifications as a witnesser of their art, than the quality of the art itself.
Even as the words begin to form in my head, I hear the commanding voice of Denis’ rendition of abstract painter, Mark Rothko bellowing at me, “What do you see?” I am left to question my own understanding, like Connor Toms portrayal of Rothko’s apprentice Ken. Am I human enough to get it? To feel it? I sit here and find myself reminiscing about an earlier time in my own life. A period when time itself seemed limitless and the thought of hanging out at the local IHOP drinking coffee with friends until 4am, wrestling with deep philosophical quandaries, seemed the most important of activities to attend to. I have to wonder; am I just starved for deep and meaningful conversation or is John Logan's writing compelling enough to instill in me a renewed hunger for those college days and to engage in meaningful dialogue with others?
Red compels us to enter and spend an evening treading deep into the forgotten places, Socratic dialogues, rhetoric, discourse and of course, Nietzsche’s profound but fragile balance between Apollonian (reason and logic) and Dionysian (emotion and experience) elements required to create dramatic Art. Before you let that scare you away from attending the show, know that while the show is about Art, it does so through real visceral human interactions, touching upon many of life’s themes. What is Art? Is it truly in the eye of the beholder or is there a more ethereal quality to it? Do we judge it, or does it judge us, the viewer of it?
Scripta Manent 
October 25, 2012
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