Reviews

In traditional Europe, when a young person desired to be a painter or sculptor, he would apply at the studio of a Master. He would sharpen pencils, grind ochre, and clean the place up. He would start with piece work, receiving instruction on one thing, producing that thing repeatedly as part of the cottage industry, then move up. Bit by bit, he would learn the craft, and, at the last, be able to make a portrait, paint a landscape, throw a pot, and eventually set himself up in business. Yet everything produced in that studio bore the mark of the style of the Master.

Every production of Bryan Willis bears the imprint of this Master.

He studied playwriting at NYU, then received a Guggenheim award to study at the Royal Court theatre in London. He spent many years in New York City. I first met Bryan in about 1994 at a production of the now-defunct Theater Schmeater. I was then a budding playwright with The Immediate Theatre, gadding about town and getting to know people. I asked why he had moved back, to Olympia, where he grew up on a pony farm. He said that New York actors put a pause at the top of every line and it was killing his work, whereas the West Coast acting style doesn't. 

So here we are, thirty years later, and I am sitting in the audience watching Bryan’s baby and thinking, this is a Master’s studio. All of Bryan’s productions have a baseline level of competence below which they never fall. It always pulls together into a cohesive whole. It is always subtle, like the Pacific Northwest. It is Realism.

Realism is not easy. In many ways, if you have not mastered Realism, you have not mastered the art of playwriting. Learning to tell a story in this medium is very difficult. The lines have to carry the thought, emotion, and aesthetic structure within recognizable types of characters and do it while maintaining control of the audience’s attention for the duration. It is not like fiction with one narrator — it is many narrators. 

That is a problem I am having with fiction. Too many narrators.

Bryan Willis is able to imprint other playwrights with this most difficult style and to keep the whole shebang of the scene going in Olympia. Young playwrights should hang out in Olympia and be in his orbit to learn the greatest faculty of playwrighting while those of us in this generation are still working and at it all the time.

I should mention John Longenbaugh, whom I met when he did reviews for, what, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer? Prehistory of Seattle theatre goes back a ways, and I was out of town for a decade and engrossed in healthcare for the past few years.

Now, about the play, it is about a house and four generations of a family who live in it, and it is beautiful. The admission fee includes a themed cocktail, excellently prepared by the host, and so apropos. 

Chairs are the theatre seats, the living room is the stage. The actors are all pros and can carry the language. You have to have cut your teeth on Shakespeare — then left — to be able to stand there and hold that language aloft for two hours. All of us in the room went to theatre school. It is what we did instead of money. So we know what they are up to.

I have been so engrossed in entering the gorgeous new work world of healthcare. Then Covid hit. I worked 16-hour days on the Eastside, day after day, sleeping in the car, showering at the gym, and eating at the organic grocery store. I made the hourlong drive to Tacoma three days a week, but the rest of the time, the workplace owned me. It is hard to remember how to be. When I am in Olympia, it is as if awakening from a dream. As James Agee once wrote,

"Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am."

It is so refreshing to remember . . . who . . . you . . . are. We are the theatre.