Ensemble

Sophomore year at Cornish College of the Arts, was all about the ensemble. We did endless exercises, such as "auto-core" to help develop our ensemble building skills. We came to dread the very word ensemble. It had grown and mutated during the course of the year from an innocent little term describing a group of people working together, to a significance laden label that threatened all of our egos and individuality. To be fair the journey through Cornish was full of vocab transformations. words like Action, Risk, Emoting, and Presence, became dark and foreboding and overused.

Out in the real world, several years removed from the Cornish bubble, many of these words have lost their ominous edge. A work of theater employing an ensemble does not have be a balancing act of egos or a white washing of individual talents. It will likely have a few standout performances, but at its heart, a good ensemble is a group of talented people working together to make interesting theater happen.

I had the privilege of seeing this in action last weekend. Two very different plays, two very good representations of ensemble, and both made up almost exclusively of local talent.

On Friday night I went to the Seattle Rep and saw Of Mice and Men. I'd been looking forward to this production, especially since I got wind of a few of the actors involved, and I was not disappointed. While a couple of the performances walked a fine line between truth and caricature, the production was full of beautiful, surprising, moments and images. From Charles Legget's Lenny trying to sneak his new pup into his bunk, to William A. William's melodic whistling and he walked across stage with a guitar, to the many breathtaking sunsets that lighting designer Robert Aguilar played out on Jennifer Zeyl's set. Of Mice and Men is, at its heart, a story of lonely people searching for human connection. Every character is an outsider, every character is lonely, this lends a charge to all the scenes, but a special tension to when a large part of the group is together. They talk about cards, and work, and whiskey, but their dreams are always hovering, waiting to be acknowledged. 

On Saturday night I switched gears and headed to Open Circle Theater's production of  The Rocky Horror Show. Far away from Of Mice and Men's Sweeping Sunsets, and the Seattle Rep's spacious seating, I was given instead the dark interior of a mad man's castle, carved from the dark interior of a small black box theater.  Rocky Horror also dealt a bit with longing, with the search for connection, with feeling uprooted, displaced, wanting to belong, but really, the show is about two things: Music, and Sex, and both are screamingly present in Open Circle's production. The music was loud and heartfelt. The band had a tendency to overpower the singers, despite the use of hand held microphones which were pulled out of handbags, or handed from off stage to whoever needed one. The balance improved, however, as the show progressed. I'm no musical expert, but to my untrained ear, there were a few lovely singing voices, and all the performers filled any gaps in technique with enough attitude to bowl over a charging, cross-dressing, rhinoceros. As for sex, the show was dripping with it, from the fishnets and collars, to the moments of surprising, equal opportunity, nudity. But this was a dark, twisty, ominous sex that permeated the production,  rarely lapsing in to Camp. By keeping things gritty and truthful they stayed, well, sexy, despite the number of men in thongs.

In many ways the two productions couldn't be more different, but they had something more than their strong ensemble casts linking them together: the fact that those casts were made up almost exclusively of local actors. In a small fringe company like Open Circle, that is pretty much par for the course, but that a Big House like Seattle Rep, doing a well known script on their main stage, would cast local is more of a statement. A statement the Rep has been making with increasing frequency in recent seasons. And making to their benefit.