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Paul Constant

Paul Constant—The Stranger’s books editor—has had his writing appear in Newsweek, the UTNE Reader, The Progressive, and alternative weeklies around the country. He’s also worked at Borders (ugh) and the Elliott Bay Book Company. He became the 2009 I.D. Spring Roll Eating Champion after consuming 23 deep-fried spring rolls in two minutes. Paul has lived in Seattle for more than a decade and likes it much, much more than his home state of Maine.

More Theater Articles by Paul Constant

Section

Date

  • Theater

    Lust and Death

    The first of a six-play cycle called Comedies from the Heroic Life of the Middle Class by German playwright Carl Sternheim (died in 1942), The Underpants has been adapted and modernized by Steve Martin. In this, the first play of the cycle, a German bureaucrat (chauvinistic, arrogant, dreary) loses his shit when his wife (dreamy, smart, charming) accidentally loses her underpants in public.
    Posted on 10/26/2006
  • Theater

    All Predictable, Some Fun

    H. P. Lovecraft, Crushed-Velvet Corniness, and "Naughty" Improv
    Posted on 10/12/2006
  • Theater

    Stöckhölm Syndrome

    Heavy Metal, Light-as-air Play Collide at Re-Bar
    Posted on 10/05/2006
  • Theater

    We Love Everything

    Even Fall Off Night's scene changes are fun to watch: everything happens on a wide-open stage, with very little set, and the only real sign that a scene is beginning or ending is the actors, running across the stage at breakneck speed,
    Posted on 09/28/2006
  • Theater

    Leaping Lennon!

    (Just Like) Starting Over Misses the Mark
    Posted on 09/14/2006
  • Theater

    Imagine There's No Action

    A New Play About John Lennon Is All Talk
    Posted on 09/07/2006
  • Theater

    Just Like Candy

    The Roethke is not just improvisational theater, but poetry-based improvisational theater. It sounds like a match made in hell, but the pairing—surprise, surprise—is a chocolate truffle
    Posted on 07/20/2006
  • Theater

    On Stage

    Six Degrees of Separation is chock-full of Art History 101 and penetrating analysis of J. D. Salinger, but in spite of the cultural capital, the play's main attraction is still the squeamish pleasure of getting played.
    Posted on 07/13/2006
  • Theater

    On Stage

    The set for this facile play by Vincent Delaney, about the distortions perpetrated by embedded reporters and their military keepers during times of war (Gulf War I, to be precise), is a giant sandbox.
    Posted on 06/29/2006
  • Theater

    On Stage

    The worst thing about The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow is its title—it sounds like a pat, cliché-ridden exploration of Asian-American identity with predictable potshots at evangelical Christianity.
    Posted on 06/01/2006
  • Theater

    On Stage

    I know, I know—the opera is doing Verdi's Macbeth and not Shakespeare's Macbeth and Verdi himself never read the original play until after he'd written his version. But as an operagoer more steeped in Shakespeare than Verdi (as I suspect many operagoers are), it's hard to watch Macbeth without wishing it had taken better advantage of the dramatic banquet offered by its source material.
    Posted on 05/11/2006
  • Theater

    On Stage

    In Trigger Kids, Portland solo performer Joe Von Appen strings together monologues of surprising range
    Posted on 02/23/2006
  • Theater

    On Stage

    It pains me to say it, because I see so few driven, aesthetically unified productions of plays by Shakespeare, but this neat little Taming of the Shrew is rotted at its core. Look, we all know the play is bitterly misogynist. There isn't even a "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech
    Posted on 05/26/2005

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