Performance: What Ghosts Will You Release This Season?

Fall has always had an enchanted, otherworldly quality to me, and Seattle stages have a roster of upcoming plays that complement the feeling. From the juicy melodrama of a backstabbing wealthy family and a horror about hungry ghosts to an experimental, genre-defying opera melding queer liberation and Catholic mysticism, these productions invite you to consider what’s lurking in your own corners as the shadows grow long.

There’s lighter fare too, like the Monty Python-esque comedy The Play That Goes Wrong at Seattle Rep (Aug 28–Sept 28) and two plays from ArtsWest: The Roommate (Sept 25–Oct 19), about an empty nester who takes on a boarder who couldn’t be more different from her, and Penelope (Nov 29–Dec 21), a one-woman musical in which the wife of Odyseus, patiently waiting decades for her husband’s return from the Trojan War, tells her side of the story.

Washington Ensemble Theatre takes on racism and generational trauma in Keiko Green’s Hells Canyon (Sept 5–21). In this horror play, friends on a group trip arrive at a remote cabin that happens to be near the site of the historical Hells Canyon massacre, when 34 Chinese miners were killed and mutilated by white thieves.

“It’s just a really, really well-executed script,” said director Amber Tanaka. “The way it handles some deep and heavy themes, but it doesn’t feel preachy … if you like the movie Get Out, it’s in that vein. It uses the lens of horror and thriller to make you question what things are actually underlying this and are part of the real horrors of our society.”

The play references the Hungry Ghost Festival, observed in some Asian countries as a time when the veil is thin and it’s possible for spirits of the deceased, especially those who died under suspicious circumstances, to come back. Tanaka says, “The day after we open, the Hungry Ghost Festival starts, which is pretty wild.”

Inebria Me, Sept 11–13 at On the Boards, also features otherworldly visitations. Mexican American artist San Cha draws equally on her backgrounds in Catholic church choirs and Bay Area queer punk performance to make an experimental opera based on her 2019 album, La Luz de la Esperanza, which she always envisioned as a “telenovela set to music.” Mirroring the drama of telenovelas, Inebria Me follows the story of Dolores, a flower picker ushered into a life of wealth by marrying a rich man, Salvador. This rags-to-riches tale takes a turn for the worse when Dolores finds her life unbearable under Salvador’s jealousy and abuse. In saintly Catholic fashion, a genderless being called Esperanza appears to Dolores in her darkest hour, opening a portal to empowerment and queer realization that leads to freedom.

“The title ‘Inebria Me’ is indeed a nod to the Catholic ‘blood of Christ, inebriate me’ from St. Ignatius,” said San Cha. “In the context of this play, Dolores, the protagonist, drinks from Esperanza’s ‘body’—(an) otherworldly, angelic, and genderless love—and asks to be inebriated with their body.”

From October 15 to November 2, director Ryan Guzzo Purcell of theatre ensemble The Feast brings The Little Foxes to Intiman Theatre. This drama about wealthy cutthroat families driven to amass more and more money, no matter what the cost, ties in with Purcell’s recent The Wealth Walk, a theatrical walk through Seattle’s Mount Baker and Rainier Valley neighborhoods, where each step signifies an accumulation of property value.

“The thing that drew me to The Little Foxes was sort of continuing that thread in a way … that is, about understanding why (greed is) so attractive and why it’s almost fun,” Purcell says. “The writing is great, it is kind of pulpy and juicy and fun. And my experience reading it … I can feel myself getting swept up in this stuff, and by the end, I recognize how destructive it is.”

Although playwright Lillian Hellman (“the only woman allowed into the club” of mid-century American playwrights) set The Little Foxes in Alabama around the year 1900, Purcell’s production is a sleek, contemporary makeover, now in-the-round with audiences seated at cocktail tables around the stage. (There will be Southern-themed libations and other fare available.)

Plus, according to Purcell, when it comes to mid-century American plays, The Little Foxes has “two of the best female roles in the American canon,” Regina Giddens and Birdie Hubbard, played by Alexandra Tavares (recently in Intiman’s Crave) and Brenda Joyner (freshly returned from performing in Fuselage at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival), respectively. “I adore both of them as actors and souls,” Purcell said. “I think giving them a chance at those two roles, it’s gonna be pretty fun.” ?