The following review, Get Out Today: Tragedy, a tragedy @ the Little Theatre, appeared on the Seattlest.com on Sunday April 5
About halfway in to Will Eno’s Tragedy, a tragedy (2 p.m. April 5, $12), we began to suspect the playwright was suffering from insomnia. There’s a dark, plastic, wandering nature to the play that signals a mind on the edge of–but kept from–sleep. Depending on how recently you’ve been afraid of the dark, you’ll be right back there, hearing your breath, your heartbeat, and strange noises, and the night will seem like a suffocating cold, black ocean, everything and everyone you know a small flicker that is guttering out.
The play doles out bits of biting comedy to keep you on the path: a character says as a child he was given a dictionary and made his way through it thinking it was the “sad, confusing story of everything.” If the story has nowhere all that surprising to go, it’s not fatal–its power is like a ghost story’s. It chills in order to warn, and to warm.
Eno drops a local TV news team into a brooding abyss when the sun sets one evening, and everyone somehow realizes it’s never coming back up. It’s a terrific concept because while it’s easy to chortle at their attempts to “cover” unending night–yes, dogs are still barking, the governor has a statement, and a family may or may not be returning home–the news team is us, our daylight selves, freshly scrubbed and full of can-do optimism, professionals ready to make sense of things.
The Satori Group’s production is anchored by Frank in the Studio (Alex Matthews, visibly shouldering the weight of his concerned gravitas), John in the Field (Anthony Darnell, playing the Action Jim Forman role), Constance at the Home (a stay-pressed, brittle Lindsey Valitchka), and Michael, the Legal Advisor (Spike Friedman, offering bearded analysis, occasionally en espanol).
Set design by Andrew Lazarow and Clare Strasser evokes a Dick van Dyke-era TV studio, and in Monty Taylor’s busy lighting design, spotlights fly about the stage like a restless mind, as the team gradually loses their shit on camera.
Adam Standley and Caitlin Sullivan co-direct the play, and we applaud their work–the whole play is the news team reporting and kicking it back to the studio, and Eno worrying away with linguistic legerdemain and pratfalls, and yet the play walks its attention-holding tightrope. Even when the Witness (a surprising mousy-to-radiant turn by Adrienne Clark) steps forth with an earnest Moral, it isn’t tedious, but simply a reassuring sign that the lights are about to come back up.
The following review, The End of the World - on the Nightly Newscast, by Misha Berson, appeared on the Seattle Times Online on Thursday, April 3 and in the Print Edition on Friday, April 4
“And now, reporting live from the existential abyss … ”
You don’t hear those words in “Tragedy, a tragedy,” a recent Will Eno play that meshes the media satire of TV’s “The Daily Show” with the sci-fi scare of “War of the Worlds.” But you might as well.
Eno (also author of the more pretentious “Thom Pain”) may go on a bit long, but in a vein that’s quite funny, and oddly moving. It blends the utter vacuity of typical TV news dispatches, with the metaphysical whammy of environmental apocalypse.
What’s going down at the end of the world as we know it? News at 11!
Though the piece outruns its concept, the Satori Group has chosen well for their Seattle debut. The young fringe troupe moved here recently from Cincinnati, Ohio, and if this is what they’re capable of, they’re very welcome to hang around.
Eno’s premise: One day the sun simply disappears from the sky, an event earnestly but cluelessly covered by a local TV news anchor (played by Alex Matthews) and his field reporters (Lindsey Valitchka, Spike Friedman and Anthony Darnell).
They start out in cheerily pompous mode, covering the story as if it was the opening of a new mall or a highway traffic jam — but with a lot fewer details
“I’ve just received word that we don’t know anything more yet,” is about the level of reportage they muster, while babbling on brightly.
But the hilariously banal news-speak gives way to fear and awe, as reality sinks in: the Earth has been plunged into eternal darkness.
As an addled newsman opines, this may just be the end of “the long, sad, confusing history of everything.”
Smartly staged by Adam Standley and Caitlin Sullivan, the show also incorporates some aptly hazy video, shot live by Adrienne Clark — who also plays a local denizen unrattled by the encroaching existential void.
A big thank you to all who came out to see our (SOLD OUT!) opening night of TRAGEDY: a tragedy. For those of you who didn’t come, you missed a sold out show followed by drinks and revelry and such. Good times all around. I think co-director Adam Standley said it best when he said, “I kinda can’t believe that this play which I’ve had in my head for a year and a half became that show on this night. Awesome.”
So, you missed it? Whoops. But! There is good news! We have more shows!
So come and see the show that someone on my Facebook feed said is “good, and you should see it.”
TRAGEDY: a tragedy, running through April 5th. BUY TICKETS HERE.
Clare Strasser
Whenever I am in the middle of designing a set, that’s exactly where I am. I forget about the end of the process a little bit. I forget about building and painting the set, and about load in. I end up getting lost in the space I am creating onstage, in the relationship between actor and other physical objects onstage.
But then when I approach the end of the process, ie the building and painting part, I rediscover the another reason why I am in theatre: the actual manifestation of the design. The building part of this journey was a little bumpy at times, (I’m not about to go into it here) but now we are to the painting part…my favorite part. 
There is something really satisfying about watching colors mix on a really big canvas. Sure any artist probably gets the same satisfaction as they are creating, but there is something more to scenic painting.
Take the floor I’m painting for example. It has its own story to tell, one that is in service to the greater production, but it needs to stand alone too. Its an old floor, one that has lived through many people traveling in an out of this room. But if you were to look closer, you could see places that are more worn than others, where people have paced up and down, or maybe boards that have been replaced. In a way its telling both the current story of the news team, but is also hinting at the history of the room. Which is kinda cool.
TRAGEDY: a tragedy, a play by Will Eno; March 26th - April 5th
Buy tickets at Brown Paper Tickets Now!
The third in an ongoing series of notes from Caitlin and Adam on the process of creating Tragedy. This post is part of a correspondence between Adam and Jerry Manning of the Seattle Rep. Manning directed Will Eno’s Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) in Seattle in 2006.
-The Static nature of his texts. Obviously no major action occurs onstage in either Thom Pain or Tragedy. Tools I have used to combat the sort of flatlining of energy that can occur in such textual circumstances: atmospheric shifts (many, based in the imagination of the actors, not tech, almost like group beats), amping up the physical presence (The Satori Group has a suzuki backgroud so… we use it), pace… But I guess my question is, are we fighting it to strongly? Could it be that Will’s text needs to sit in the room like a couch, grounded and uninteresting, and do it’s work on the audience osmotically? In short, should Will’s text sound beautiful?
- Gear shifts. In Tragedy, and also in Pain, but less abruptly, there are many quick changes in the actors intention and topic. Gear shifts. For the Tragedy cast, there text at times is, beautifully, more a juxtaposition of thoughts than a process of thoughts. We always joke that these feel like a postmodern Japanese style of a computer meltdown. I find my actors struggling with keeping human amidst these quick gear shifts. Did you experience this in Thom Pain?
- Presence vs. Emotional availability. Both of coarse! Always! But I am finding that setting the performers up in circumstances and actions that allow both during such a castrating style (the style that is the performative structure of a newscaster) to be tricky. I would think that in Thom Pain you might have often asked the question how do we make him as aggressive and acidic as he has to be but also so present that no one can look away. Emotional availability vs. presence. Obviously a slippery egg.
Thoughts coming out of the Workshop process and moving into the rehearsal process from TRAGEDY: a tragedy co-director Caitlin Sullivan
- Media is our Greek chorus. A few weeks ago, I had a very serious “duh” moment. While doing some table work, Anthony and Adrienne noted that Eno’s play is, in many ways, a tragedy in the classic sense. This seemingly obvious observation blew the text open. At that point we were able to find a legit role for the technology that we’re using; our video and projections are a chorus in the sense that they have the ability to show how an audience might perceive the events as they unfold, comment on the character’s action and provide insight into emotion and action that may otherwise be hidden.
- A new look at our language. For me this play has always been about speaking into the void, wrestling with the questions that are too big to be named, “stuck with saying as everyone is the words they already know.” It is a struggle that is essentially, at times heroically, human. Eno’s text does a terrific job of “going to the end of language,” we must do the same. Media is part of that vocabulary for us and would, as Adam previously pointed out, be part of our team’s. It is an essential and unavoidable part of how we communicate and it can be explored and exhausted in the same way the text exhausts our language.
- The arch is key. Projections can easily overtake a space. It is essential that the breakdown of our media, works with and/or illustrates the breakdown inherent the text. It’s a dance. Andrew and I certainly have our work cut out for us in devising an arch that feels at once informed by and of the world we’re creating.
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The text is king. We’re still telling one story. Like doing a Greek Tragedy or Shakespeare, everything else must be in service to the text. A great concept allows you to connect to the language in a new way, but more often than not its just noise. The challenge continues to be striking the balance between fearlessly creating an event as whole and paying heed to the words that drew us in the first place.
And on a somewhat related note: last night’s invited workshop showing was awesome, terrifying and unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It was really fantastic to be able to invite people into our process and begin the conversation now, while the works being made. It was both scary and freeing to perform work still in its adolescence, to let it be seen zits and all (yes, Adrienne, I stole your metaphor) and invite response.
The first in a series of posts from the directors of Will Eno’s TRAGEDY: a tragedy, Adam Standley and Caitlin Sullivan.
I was thinking about frames and how little they meant to me. But then I read this article about “New Media Theatre.” And it blew my brain open to all the things that are frames and all the things that a projection can be. “Interactivity” is where media becomes theatre-worthy, something that can lend clarity and meaning. If Tragedy’s design world is being seen as a functioning, fresh media team, they might be attempting the same sort of multi-media aggressiveness that is Satori’s mission statement. So can we begin to think of Andrew as our media sceneographer. Thinking about how the crew and designers of the broadcast might use the tools of new-media:
-performers in (and moving in) the projection fields
-multiple projection surfaces that are not “screens” (can we buy a role of black scrim (like window screen or something) for cheap and cut it to the sizes that we want)
- performers responsive media (like the weather man)
- allowing visual poetry, dilation and setting
Aggressive “in the world” tools and tactics. Then we can expose them, distort, surrealize the media and projections once things start to fail.
Thinking of the Media as the center mode of expression for the design and the frames can allow for visual organization to localize and compliment, making Andrew’s job much more like that of the sceneographer or art director. Can he present a story board with model box. Can we create the character named “new-media,” and then, like MOJO from X-men, see where and when he needs to appear and build the set and movement of actors to enable in.
The danger will become drawing away from the text. But I think our key is making new-media a part of how this hip news team and it’s designers brand their broadcast.
Written by Will Eno
- March 26 to April 4 at The Little Theatre -
Across the nation thousands of viewers have been transfixed by tonight’s horrifying event. The sun – despite its shining record – has finally set. Will the light of a new day break over the horizon at daybreak? We don’t know, but we are certain in our uncertainty.
Stay tuned as your news team brings complete coverage of the funniest apocalypse of our time.
From Will Eno, “…[the] Samuel Beckett of the Jon Stewart generation.” (New York Times)
The Satori Group, Cincinnati’s award winning theatre company, makes their Seattle debut with the Regional Premiere of Will Eno’s TRAGEDY: a tragedy.
“Satori, an honest-to-goodness experimental theater…” (The Enquirer)
TRAGEDY: a tragedy
@ The Little Theatre
608 19th Ave E
March 26 – April 5, 2009
March 26-28, 30, April 2-4 @ 8 PM
March 29, April 5 @ 2 PM
Tickets: $12 General
Tickets Available Now at Brown Paper Tickets
206.909.1725
