• Almudena Crespo

It's the experimental theater piece from Argentina that opened last night, runs through Sunday, and sounds amazing.

From the OTB synopsis:

It’s 1999 in Buenos Aires. Mario, Laura, Pablo, and Vicky are in their mid-twenties and ready for careers, love, and adulthood. Over the next decade, Argentina’s economy will collapse and their lives will take a series of unexpected turns. In this fast-paced, multilayered “mega fiction,” director Mariano Pensotti deftly unfolds the lives of these 4 characters....Mariano Pensotti, a young director and writer based in Argentina, has become one of the most noted experimental directors throughout the world. His unique sets and depictions of life are told with a filmic sensibility honed in years studying cinema at the Dramatic Arts Instituto Universitario Nacional de Artes.

From the recent New York Times review:

The Argentine writer and director Mariano Pensotti sets multiple stories in motion in his smart and smartly staged play “El Pasado Es un Animal Grotesco." And they really are in motion: the circular plywood stage, divided into four compartments, revolves constantly (and slowly — you won’t feel seasick), as episodes from the lives of four characters are acted out. Their stories cinematically unspool and overlap as time moves onward and even occasionally backward....“El Pasado Es un Animal Grotesco” considers the way we talk about our lives, the way they become fictions, and then fictions become our pasts — and how alien that can start to feel.

Full info on the On the Boards shows here.

In The Bells at Erickson Theater Off Broadway until the 18th, "Drunks are drinking, the wind is howling, and a successful innkeeper counts his money and watches as his only daughter delicately comes into heat."

Cienna Madrid's review makes it sound irresistible.

• JOHN ULLMAN
• It doesn't look like that ax is going anywhere good.

...and violence and drug use and fog in Tommy Smith's new show, White Hot, playing through Saturday at West of Lenin.

Anna Minard's review makes it sound pretty much irresistible.

• And lighters!

Last summer, Intiman Theatre fell down after a rocky transition from longtime artistic director Bart Sher and longtime managing director Laura Penn to new artistic director Kate Whoriskey and new managing director Brian Colburn.

After the fall, Intiman decided to hire a new, young artistic director (Andrew Russell) and said if it raised $1 million by February, it'd mount a four-play summer festival with 12 actors in all the roles, repertory style.

February 1 came and went without meeting the goal (the theater had raised around $820,000 by then), so Intiman announced it'd wait until Friday, February 3 to make the $1 million. Then it said it'd wait until a board meeting on Monday to decide what to do.

As of a few hours ago, it has decided what to do. Intiman is going forward with the summer festival, which will include one Shakespeare play, one Ibsen play, one unnamed "American classic," and an unspecified new theatrical something by Dan Savage.

Congratulations, Intiman. We're all curious to see what's next.

Yesterday afternoon, as the clock wound down on their deadline to raise $1 million by February or close, Intiman sent out an email:

In just two months, over 500 of you have pledged to Intiman Theatre, bringing our current total to $820,000. These pledges have ranged from $10-$100,000, proving that every investment is significant.

Our campaign to raise 1 million dollars in pledges continues through the end of this week. 1 million dollars will ensure we’ve got all the funds necessary to produce a summer theatre festival celebrating the best in Seattle performing arts and featuring a repertory company of actors. If we don’t reach our goal, we will not move forward.

Intiman's board of directors has scheduled a meeting for Monday, where they will look at how much money they've collected and decide to what to do.

The goal was $1 million in pledges by February or close the doors for good... and today's the last day of January.

As of last Friday, the theater had raised around $800,000.

If you want to pledge some dough, see here.

Lebanon is not the easiest place in the world for an artist to express a difficult truth—or even ask a prickly question. The national government routinely censors any criticism of its past or its policies, but that doesn't stop Beirut-based performer Rabih Mroué. As he explained in a telephone interview last week, if he officially applied to the government to perform his tech-heavy, research-based performances, they would be banned. "So," he said with a casual shrug in his voice, "I perform them illegally."

Publicly exploring controversial ideas runs in Mroué's family. His grandfather, the Arab-Marxist philosopher Hussein Mroué, was assassinated in 1987 for his writing.

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And the winner is... Joshua Balvin who, in 2004, was teaching a course on Roman history at a university in a "square state":

I was asked out on a date by a student via a deaf-relay service. The operator was privy (and central!) to a very awkward rejection conversation between a teacher and his pupil.

He was always the awkward kid in class and didn't have many friends so I took a special interest in reaching out to him to make sure he felt included.

When I got the relay call, the operator sounded like she couldn't have been much older than 20 (and given that we were living in a square state at the time, clearly her first interaction with gay men). His invitation was innocent enough—going out to dinner—but (in addition to being a violation of my contract), I had zero interest.

The operator was clearly taken aback and seemed to lose her ability to talk: "Well... if Friday... we could try... another... or something." Gauging her sudden loss of facility with the English language, I can only imagine her signing must have digressed to borderline incoherence. After about 3 minutes of back and forth—clearly not going anywhere—I made up a lame excuse about getting another call.

He stopped showing up to class after that.

Awkward!

Congratulations, Joshua. Your prize is two tickets to any performance of The Callers at Washington Ensemble Theatre between tomorrow night and closing night on Feb 6. And congratulations to our runners-up Lee Osorio and Demetria Spinrad, whose stories of telephone-operator awkwardness are below the jump.

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With three weeks left in their fundraising—technically, pledge-raising—campaign, Intiman is nearly to the halfway mark.

Folks at Intiman have said that if they raise $1 million by February, they'll try to reanimate the theater. If not, they'll shut the doors for good. The website is here, if you want to donate. And here's a video the theater made:

Got a good story about an interaction—surprising, sexy, bizarre—with a telephone operator at a call center?

Send it to callersticketcontest@thestranger.com by 5 pm today. The writer of the winning story will get a pair of tickets to The Callers, a new musical about telephone psychics and phone-sex operators, opening this weekend at Washington Ensemble Theatre.

• Carol Rosegg
• Evy Ortiz and Ross Lekites in West Side Story at the Paramount

Excuse the old fogeyness, but they just don't make musicals like West Side Story anymore. So if you want a rare chance to enjoy a live performance of this iconic Broadway classic, you'd better quickly grab the few remaining tickets to the national touring company's five-day Seattle run that opened last night at the Paramount.

In truth, they rarely ever made musicals like West Side Story, a show conceived a half-century ago by acclaimed choreographer/director Jerome Robbins along with fellow Broadway legends Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents. You've seen the movie, you've heard the songs, you're well-familiar with the Romeo and Juliet-inspired 1950s New York street-gang setting. A musical that tells its story as much through dance as it does through song or dialogue, this is Robbins's masterpiece. Arguably Bernstein's too. The material deserves every plaudit it has ever received. Let's just leave it at that.

So what about this production, the recently recast touring company of the hit Broadway revival Laurents directed in 2009? Is it worth the price of admission? With one caveat, yes: Just don't expect to see ensemble performances quite as crisp and well-rounded as the familiar film version.

If there's a flaw in West Side Story, it's that nearly every role requires a triple-threat performer—one who can equally sing, dance, and act—and is incredibly challenging to cast. The film version skirts this problem, casting Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer in the lead roles of Maria and Tony, only to dub in more competent voices for the songs. And Robbins was such a perfectionist with the dance numbers, reshooting them dozens of times, that frustrated producers ultimately fired him from the film. Through that, and the magic of editing, every note was perfect, and every dance step was perfectly synchronized.

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This week, Washington Ensemble Theatre opens The Callers, a world-premiere musical by Ali el-Gasseir and Ella Dorband about telephone psychics and phone-sex workers. Andrew Russell, the young gun behind Intiman 2.0, is directing.

Slog is giving away two tickets to any performance (except opening night) with an essay contest: What's the best, worst, strangest, most erotic, or most awkward encounter you've had with a telephone operator at a call center?

Send entries to callersticketcontest@thestranger.com by tomorrow at 5 pm. I'll throw the best stories on Slog and announce the winner on Friday.

Anna Minard on Spring Awakening:

Perhaps the audience wasn't quite prepared for all the humping...

Me on Coriolanus:

The title character is a brave and impulsive warrior, a Roman Rambo, who is also a colossal mama's boy...

Hubba hubba.

Misha Berson thinks Jerick Hoffer is too gay to play Moritz in Spring Awakening, which he's currently doing—and doing beautifully—in Balagan Theater's production of the Tony Award winning musical. Berson's review has prompted a fresh round "Can gay actors can convincingly play straight roles?" dickering. (You know who created the role of Cornelius, the young & straight male romantic lead, in the original Broadway production of Hello Dolly? Charles Fucking Nelson Fucking Reilly.)

But is Moritz necessarily straight? Meaning, is "straight" the only possible and legit interpretation of the role?

Rest of this post after the jump because SPOILERS!

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14/48: The World's Quickest Theater Festival has always been about making it up as you go along—theater people rehearsing, designing, and performing 14 short plays in 48 hours. It's a lot of theater with the lifespan of a mayfly. This year, they've added a new phase to the life cycle: criticism. I'll be at shows this weekend, live-reviewing the short plays in either 14 or 48 words and posting them on this post and the 14/48 blog.

And we're back! The action starts at 8. The first play is The Lighthouse Keeper by Juliet Waller Pruzan; directed by Amy Poisson; starring Paul Mullin, Brandon J. Simmons, Erin Bryn Fetridge, Allison Standley, and Samie Detzar.

I'm sitting in the light booth with a beer and ready to knock out 14 or 48 words in real time. (I changed the format from last night's 14 words or 48 characters—the latter is easier for me but unfair to the artists.) It's an experiment in knee-jerk reactions and pressure-cooker restrictions.

The theme tonight is "delicious indiscretions." I plan on enjoying some before the night is over. The curtain speech by Matthew Richter is coming in 5, 4, 3, 2...

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14/48: The World's Quickest Theater Festival has always been about making it up as you go along—theater people rehearsing, designing, and performing 14 short plays in 48 hours. It's a lot of theater with the lifespan of a mayfly. This year, they've added a new phase to the life cycle: criticism. I'll be at shows this weekend, live-reviewing the short plays in 14 words or 48 characters and posting them on Slog and the 14/48 blog.

7:23 pm

The final pep talk for everyone before they scuttle into the dressing rooms. The shows that have been made today will only be seen twice—at 8 and 10:30. (The 8 pm show is sold out; there are tickets left for the 10:30.) Someone says from the stage that the 8 pm show has opening-night energy and the 10:30 show has closing-night energy, and there's nothing in between. "If you feel tired," says Peter Dylan O'Connor, "raise the fucking stakes!" Much cheering.

7:34 pm

I'm ensconced in the light booth with a generous shot of theater juice. The band was practicing up until the very minute the house opened and the lighting designers are still sussing out lighting details. Some of our artists this weekend, many of whom are probably quietly losing their shit right now—Kaleb Hagan Kerr, Stephanie Timm, Kate Jaeger, Paul Mullin, Juliet Waller Pruzan, MJ Seiber, Jaime Roberts, Carter Rodriquez, Rhonda J. Soikowski...

The theme is "headin' down south." As a half-Southerner, I'm curious how long I'll be able to go without getting into high dudgeon over some low blow or abused cliche. As soon as I walked in the door this afternoon, I heard the band practicing the dueling banjos theme from "Deliverance"—so I'm guessing it won't take long.

And now we begin the 14-word reviews...

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