There’s a wealth of women-focused stories coming to Seattle stages this month. Here are seven productions you might want to check out.
The Tall Girls, by Meg Mirosnick, is Washington Ensemble Theatre’s production (5/1-18/15 at 12AA). It’s a grim Dust Bowl era tale of a struggling high school women’s basketball team in the small town of Poor Prairie. Follow this group of young women as they strive for escape from their isolating and vast “grave town” through any means necessary.
Tilt Angel is theater simple’s production (at West of Lenin 5/1-17/15). theater simple does not often mount standard stage shows and is known for inventive outdoor, interactive fun. This script is described as, “Family secrets pitch the world off-axis and a ghost transubstantiates into the garden. How else can you describe a play with music about a ghost-mom, an agoraphobic son, and a heavenly messenger with unfinished business? It opens with a plane crash.”
A world premiere production from Macha Monkey (at Cornish Playhouse’s “black box”), And, And, And Isabella Bootlegs (5/8-22/15) is locally written by Samantha Cooper. Brooklyn turns 17 and her mother asks that Brooklyn and her father stay locked in the house with her for one year. As Brooklyn investigates the murky past behind her mother’s strange paranoia, she uncovers more family mysteries than she ever could have imagined.
The bouncy, fun, widely performed musical, Legally Blonde, holds court at SecondStory Repertory (5/8-31/15). Elle Woods loves pink, her sorority, shoes, shopping and her manicure. When her boyfriend dumps her for Harvard, Elle decides to follow to get him back. This unlikely academic ends up teaching the intellectual elite a thing or two, and finding true love along the way.
Seattle Public Theater mounts Tally’s Folly (5/14-31/15), Lanford Wilson’s highly acclaimed romantic comedy. Set against the bigotry, racism and wartime disillusion of rural Missouri, can a Jewish lawyer and a Protestant spinster find a way to waltz together?
In the first of two Seattle productions (later this year will be at Intiman Theatre), Arouet presents The Children’s Hour at Ballard Underground (5/14-31/15). A single piece of gossip started by a schoolchild turns to scandal and tragedy. Words can hurt you, is the lesson of this classic play.
New City Theater presents MUD by Maria Irene Fornes (5/21/15-6/8/15). It’s a delicate play about passion and yearning; a distillation of lives mired in poverty; a balance of domestic and erotic conflict, cruelty and wit; imbued with a feminism of the most subtle order.
