Author: joannleefariaswriter

I was looking forward to expanding my recent theatre viewing repertoire to the theatre sports production 14/48.

Some of you may know that 14/48 is a stunt somewhere between IMPROV — I FORGOT MY LINES — and WHAT LINES? A few playwrights are matched with actors, given a theme, and expected to stay up all night writing and rehearsing a short play, which goes up on caffeine and adrenaline the next two nights.

In experienced hands, it never palls, by the grace of the tricks of the trade. And that is fun.

I work Saturdays, so, just to be certain, I booked the late show, 10:00 p.m.

The company I produce with, DAMN (Dramatists and Actors Meeting Now), also secures space through Theatre Puget Sound at the Armory for our semi-annual productions, so I thought it would be a breeze.

Little did I know that 14/48 did not make any reasonable arrangements for the fact that the Armory building at Seattle Center closes at 9 p.m. Period.

Nobody shows up at 8:30 for a 10:00 show. It just isn’t done — what are you going to do for that hour and a half? Sit there and drink boxed wine?

I suspect the point of having the late show was to hark back to everyone’s days doing late night theatre on Capitol Hill. We all lived on the Hill, so we walked. The theatre was open if we said it was open. It was raucous and fun, with minimal production values in an old garage or something. Sadly, it is now developed and very expensive. The sites at the Armory are partly subsidized by the City, but the City has Rules, and one of them is, No Staying Out Late.

We are not on Capitol Hill. We are on Queen Anne Hill, and we are expected to pull into bourgeois norms.

I showed up at ten minutes to curtain time, a normal thing for anyone.

The Security Guard waiting at the locked door shook his head and told me to go around the building. I did, checking every entrance. They were all locked. On the third entrance, I found two other theatregoers who were looking for the Center Stage at 305 Harrison, the Armory, for the show. We all stood there wondering if everyone had forgotten about us.

Evidently they had.

One of my old friends, a director/producer, used to say, “Organization is the key to entertainment.”

I got no response from the company 14/48 about the three patrons who were locked out at 9:50 — and no refund for my ticket price. The company’s web site the next day had no mention of the Armory closing at 9, but did have tickets available at 10.

Mendacity!

Did they tell the new patrons about the Armory situation or did they just expect everyone to KNOW?

What was to be done but head over to the Pineapple Bar for tropical drinks?

UPDATE: Tuesday Megan Ahiers of14/48 contacted me to say that they would have better communication next time and that she would refund me my ticket price. I am content and will patronize the theatre again.

The first speculative trading bubble in history occurred from 1634 to 1637 in the Dutch Golden Age, in which the trading of tulip bulbs reached enormous heights, then precipitously collapsed.

Charles Mackay, in The Madness of Crowds, recounts the anecdote of a sailor who mistook a particularly valuable bulb for an onion and ate it. According to Mackay, the sailor was found “eating a breakfast whose cost might have regaled a whole ship’s crew for a twelvemonth.”

November’s show, “It’s about Damn Time,” had a piece in it called “Porn Dogs,” with Chris Mathews, Bridgette Elizabeth Moody, and Thomas Michael Whyte III, written by Mathews.

It was sheer perfection for what it was. I sat there gasping, and said to myself at the end, They’re having a Pulp Fiction moment.

Generative art is not one unending stretch of greatness. Like waves in the sea, where three or four small waves are followed by a large wave, there are highs and lows in the artistic caliber of the pieces.

That is, if you don’t sell out artistically. My friend Andrew Golla used to say that a lot of in-demand directors had a gimmick. Let’s say the gimmick was a parachute. In every production, they would figure out a way to involve a parachute in the set, and when theatres were casting about for a director, they’d say, “Hey, let’s get the parachute guy!” And in he would come, with the same old thing that worked before, but wasn’t really fantastic all the time.

So here we are with this group, DAMN (Dramatists and Actors Meeting Now), that I have only barely started to get to know, and am starting to produce with, even if I am sure that Chris Mathews and I were producing at the same fringe festivals thirty years ago, but not in the same room! So we never met, because I ended up going in lots of different directions and doing theatre in other cities, and it is only just now that I am finding him and his company.

So I was frankly skeptical that they would be able to top that last piece. Like Pulp Fiction, it was such a perfect concatenation of artistic themes, ripeness, casting, and The Right Play somehow, that we must humbly say, Okay. I will not dare to hope for that again.

For another four plays.

But Mathews has impressed me. One Ton o’ Fun was not . . . exactly . . . Porn Dogs, but it was a wise, light touch of meta-theatre, and it really pulled the room together.

In 1667, the Netherlands traded New York City for Suriname.

14th Century

Willem Beukelszoon discovered a method of preserving herring that involved gutting the fish but leaving part of the stomach and internal organs — “pyloric caecae” — intact. These organs would continue to emit an enzyme called trypsin, enabling the fish to be preserved in brine for up to two years. This method was superb in that vessels could pickle the herring at sea, enabling sailors to endure longer trading voyages. It was so pivotal a discovery that the Dutch came to dominate the salt herring trade for centuries, giving the Christians something to eat on Fridays and fast days. Even today, pickled herring eaten in a single gulp from head to tail is a celebrated dish in that nation.

How fortunate it is that someone figured out how to put salt on a fish in a boat.

This important event is celebrated in a church window. (Republic of Amsterdam Radio.)

In the late 1980s, when I was doing Latino theatre in Houston, there was a company called Teatro Bilingüe de Houston headed up by a man everyone called my tocayo — my name twin — Richard Farías. Their big thing was a Christmas play they produced every year at Ripley House called Pancho Claus. It was raucous fun, and filled every seat in the East End community center with its popular bilingual shenanigans involving Santa.

Meanwhile the highly educated and sophisticated Latin American company whose Board of Directors I was on had to struggle to get the message across: Latinos are not just piñatas and Church. We are a culture with Nobel prizes and please be quiet when you are here.

The Miracle Theatre would probably not like to remind you that they started out exactly like me. Founder José Eduardo González y Salazar holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy from a German university, and his wife and co-founder, Dañel Malán-González, holds a degree in Art.

So naturally . . . Theatre!

The earliest seasons I saw here twenty-five years ago had plenty of Pancho Claus interspersed with a tiny bit of high art. That was how they paid the bills, because that was what the audience, both Latino and non-Latino, expected.

A theatre has to fill seats, and as much as you may like to do interesting things, the bottom line is in command.

I have let the theatre kind of rest for the past few years as I have done healthcare work in facilities. Older workers like me have to take whatever shifts we are offered, and invariably it was the weekend evenings I got stuck with, so the young people could go out on dates. It has been a while since I have had regular attendance, so I have not been here for these past few seasons.

Empeños de una Casa is my third show this season, and I have to conclude that this company, my former employer, which has always had so much potential, is now a full-fledged regional theatre. Gone is the slide into rough-ish skit. The work now is careful and aesthetically masterful high art. This season is almost better than the Rep.

Would you look at that? The Miracle finally got free from Pancho Claus.