Recent Stories with tag richard foreman

Faith Helma in Hand2Mouth Theatre's "Undine," photo by Tim Summers.

"What I've always loved about his telling of it was that it was very ambiguous," said Faith Helma of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's 1811 fairy tale novella Undine. "Like, 'The Little Mermaid,' you read the original version of it, it's a pretty dark story. But this one was even more so. All of the characters are very ambiguous, and none of the characters are all bad or all good. Even the most creepy, scary character, you can kind of see his point of view. He's not a villain. And then there's the spirit world, which is frightening but also beautiful. And she's presented as this character you can identify with, but who's not to be trusted. There's something a little unsettling about it. That was my experience of reading the story—you can't really decide if you're on her side."

This was last Saturday, and I was sitting in Fresh Pot Cafe in Portland, Oregon's Mississippi district, with Helma and her husband Jonathan Walters. The two are long-time members of Portland's well respected experimental theatre company Hand2Mouth, which Walters founded in 2000. This Friday and Saturday, Jan. 29 and 30, they're bringing Helma's first solo work, Undine, back to Seattle, where it debuted in 2008 as part of the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards. The performances are at Theatre off Jackson, in a co-presentation with Seattle's Satori Group (tickets $10-$12), with a panel discussion about creating new work in the Northwest after each performance, moderated by The Stranger's Brendan Kiley.

While nominally inspired by Fouqué's novella, elements of which Helma admits trying to incorporate into Hand2Mouth's previous shows to little or no success, the piece is not so much an adaptation of the narrative. "I'm obsessed with the fairy tale, so I wind up talking about that, but I feel like it leaves this image in people's minds of, 'Okay, solo performance, fairy tale...'" She trailed off, eyes rolling and chuckling at the image that description must put in people's minds.... (more)

Tommy Smith & Reggie Watts's "Transition," this weekend at On the Boards

Tommy Smith and Reggie Watts don't so much talk to you when they sit down to discuss their work as banter. No doubt this owes something to their process for creating Watts's onstage material, which involves Watts calling Smith up at odd hours with whatever ideas have popped into his head, so the two can discuss, write them down, come back to them later, and maybe somehow turn them into something. That's a lot of talking to do with one another, and so when you ask a question, you tend to get a response from both that trails off into completely different tangents, with plenty of corrections and addenda thrown in.

Monday evening, we were sitting in the dark lobby of On the Boards, where the pair are presenting their 2008 work Transition starting this Thursday, Oct. 15 (through Oct. 17; tickets $18), and Smith was telling me about their first major scripted theatre piece, which also took place at OtB. "We did a show called A Very Reggie Christmas in 2001. It was 38 percent amazing, and the other percentage was just jaw-droppingly bad," Smith said. "The worst part was, we came up with this joke," he paused, chuckling. "Actually, it wasn't mine. It was Michael McQuilken's..."

"It was Michael McQuilken!" Watts agreed before Smith, grinning at taking a rib at an old friend, stated, "I'm going to throw it right out there! It was Michael McQuilken's!"

Then they took a moment to make sure I had the spelling of his name right.... (more)