- Chris Bennion
Stephanie Timm writes plays that feel like parables, tweaking fairy tales, myths, and other familiar devices to get at the deeper, stranger currents running beneath everyday life. Crumbs Are Also Bread brought a mysterious stranger to a small town, On the Nature of Dust sent a "normal" teenage girl through a Kafka-like series of metamorphoses, and now Tails of Wasps documents a politician, his penis, and their predictable fall from grace. In a fit of fabulist irony, Timm has named her politician Frank.*
We're all familiar with how a sex scandal plays out in public: the harshly lit press conference, the contrite politician, the humiliated but steely wife standing by his side, the rest of us wondering why the wives never ditch their high-profile philanderers. But Tails brings us uncomfortably close to the action, inviting us into the various hotel rooms where the fall takes place. Instead of renting a large suite for the production, director Darragh Kennan and designer Peter Dylan O'Connor stuck a large bed into an events room at ACT Theatre (whose carpeting, chandeliers, and large windows overlooking a street in downtown Seattle are uncannily hotel-like) and lined the walls with chairs for us to sit in. The lights are so bright, the actors are so close, and there are so many audience members packed into that room that we can't help but watch each other watch the play, making these top-secret intimacies feel as public and embarrassing as the press conference we know is just around the corner.
*Side note that didn't make it into the review: The title of the play comes from a line about lust in The Winter's Tale: "The purity and whiteness of my sheets,/Which to preserve is sleep, which being spotted/Is goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps,/Give scandal to the blood o' the prince my son."
