Reviews

I just missed Irene Fornes in the late 2000s in New York. I used to hang around the Intar salon in Hell’s Kitchen on alternate Monday nights. Everyone there knew Irene, who had been associated with the theatre and had many students come to her on account of it. So I never knew her, just knew of her. Her work was produced in Houston when I was there. It was very fun.

I did, however, study with another great LGTBQ playwright, Edward Albee, who was supportive of queer art always. So there’s that.

It is unfortunate that the gems of Fornesia Fest were available for one weekend only. I saw a lot of familiar faces, including the great theatremaker Olga Sanchez who directed my work back in the day. She went on to get her Ph.D. and now teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. Her success is much-deserved. Others of the Old Turks were Meg Savlov, a constant presence in Seattle theatre, and Rose Cano, whose work as a Latinx auteur is known all over the Americas and much loved here at home. 

I attended Friday night and was particularly impressed by the Fornes piece The House at 27 Rue de Fleurus, part of a trilogy that Fornes was unable to finish due to her final illness. It has been “finished” as an homage by Dr. Anne Garcia-Romero — whose work was featured alongside mine in California Scenarios, available from Playscripts-- and, while not showing the master at her greatest height, is a lovely tribute to her life. It concerns the relationship of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas in their home and salon in Paris, and the young artist they championed at the start of his career, Pablo Picasso. 

Picasso painted his famous portrait of Gertrude Stein just as he was leaving conventional western art forms and heading into Cubism. It was the last great work of his Rose Period. The director José Quintero who taught at the University of Houston used to tell a wonderful anecdote about Picasso painting Gertrude Stein. It is known that the portrait took eighty or ninety sittings. Quintero said that what stumped Picasso was the painting of her hands. Every time he did them, he felt the outcome did not convey the raw power of the woman. So he studied African art, and only then was he able to get the hands right, finish the portrait, and from thence, create his own style, an amalgamation of European and non-European approaches to representation. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Gertrude_Stein

New Skid Row Theatre meets in Beneath the Streets, the old city that the current city is built atop. A lot of places are like that. Try digging a well anywhere in Europe or the Middle East, and you may find mosaics worthy of Pompeii. This is the story of Seattle’s subterranean downtown. Tours are available.

https://www.beneath-the-streets.com/

My great-grandfather was a Civil Engineer in the 1910s and 1920s, and while I have no documentation of exactly which projects Charles Morse worked on, I would not be surprised if some of these public works were his or at least known to him. I always feel my family spirit in Pioneer Square. 

There is an old family legend that he stood up for the rights of his Chinese workers to such an extent that when he died, one of his former employees used to keep watch by the family house while his young widow and three small children adjusted to their new life. My grandmother remembers looking outside and seeing a person they called “the Chinaman” in his antique clothing and his pigtail standing at a discreet distance, at dusk, guarding the family. Grammy and the man would exchange a nod, and she would put the children to bed.