Reviewed
by Jerry Kraft
Seattle
playwright Stephanie Timm's "Crumbs Are Also Bread" is a darkly comic return to that
rural America where a faint scent of perversion mingles with an inchoate air of
violence, mundane and familiar family life with dark secrets that seem to rise
from the soil like the undead, where sexuality is unsettled, voracious, and
inextricably linked to power. There is certainly something of the lethal
peculiarity of "Twin Peaks," but also something of the essentially
American nature of "Buried Child."
The
play is ambitiously written, not only in its narrative content, but also in the
sometimes beautifully poetic language, the use of overtly metaphoric characters
(a self-blinded prophet straight out of Greek tragedy, for example) and its
free transitioning between comic and frightening relationships. The work is so
packed with ideas and intentions that it tends to trip over itself, and in
spite of excellent acting from the entire cast of nine, and John Langs' solid direction, it ends up
somehow less than the sum of its parts.
There
are several commendable performances. Elise Hunt brings disconcerting presence to
a teenager lusting for passion and experience. The wonderful Alexandra
Tavares plays a
schoolteacher who longs for her dead husband, and finds a kind of solace in a
crippled (shades of Oedipus) young boy student. She also portrays a woman whose
cat is poisoned by a neighbor (Kelly Kitchens), with whom she will later
tangle in a rather passionate lesbian embrace. Lathrop Walker gamely attempts the stranger who
comes to town, but the part is under-developed. Michael Place plays not only the seduced
student, but also an ice-fisherman and, in one of the funnier scenes to appear
in Seattle lately, a flop-eared dog sniffing his way to Tavares' personal
attractions. The kinky humor is continued by Basil Harris as a (barely) closeted gay man
who entertains at home in a bustier, and Mikano Fukaya as a dead cat. True. A dead cat.
The
physical production is incredible. Jennifer Zeyl is an extraordinary set
designer, and here she has created a simultaneously indoor and outdoor locale
that is icy, vaguely dangerous, bloodless and necrotic, accented by trees
painted gray and hung upside down, as if to become subterranean roots. A
chandelier hanging center stage suggests an atmosphere of macabre festivity,
albeit at some earlier time, and now clearly decayed. Fine lighting, good
costumes and a suggestive sound design complete this richly designed
production.
"Crumbs
Are Also Bread" is certainly not a complete success, but it is far from a
failure, either. Stephanie Timm is talented and refreshingly confident about
making unexpected and provocative things happen on stage. Washington Ensemble
Theatre is the one company in Seattle where you can always expect material
that's pushing the boundaries of the expected, and always performed by talented
and fully committed actors. Even this less than fully realized play was more
satisfying than scores of other conventional shows, done by competent
companies, that strive only to be correct. Those shows are the crumbs that
leave an audience still hungry.