A photo from the 2025 production of Crave: (L to R) Marya Sea Kaminski, Lathrop Walker, Christopher Morson, Alexandra Tavares. Courtesy of Intiman Theater.
A photo from the 2025 production of Crave: (L to R) Marya Sea Kaminski, Lathrop Walker, Christopher Morson, Alexandra Tavares. Courtesy of Intiman Theater.

In a 1998 interview, playwright Sarah Kane said, “I’ve only ever written in order to escape from hell, and it’s never worked. But at the other end of it, when you sit there and watch something and think, Well that’s the most perfect expression of the hell that I’ve felt, then maybe it was worth it.”

A few weekends ago, I learned about Sam Nordquist, a 24-year-old Black trans man who was tortured for months leading to his death. And that afternoon I saw Crave.

On my way to the theater, the thought flickered, “Should I even see this, right now?” Everything I read about Crave indicated it would be emotionally challenging. I had written about it, recommended it, but this would be my first time encountering a piece by Kane in person.

Sarah Kane is a playwright associated with Britain's in-yer-face theater of the ‘90s, a genre that arose partly in response to real atrocities of the day, like the Yugoslav Wars or the shocking torture and murder of the British child James Bulger. Mostly panned by critics in her day, Kane’s works deal in topics that are hard to hold, to say the least: torture, war crimes, rape, incest, cannibalism, and mental health struggles. Kane herself suffered from depression for years, and after her second suicide attempt, succeeded at the act when she was only 28.

2005 production of CRAVE: (L to R) Lathrop Walker, Mikano Fukaya, Marc Kenison, and Marya Sea Kaminski. Courtesy of Washington Ensemble Theatre.
2005 production of CRAVE: (L to R) Lathrop Walker, Mikano Fukaya, Marc Kenison, and Marya Sea Kaminski. Courtesy of Washington Ensemble Theatre.

Crave, first premiered in 1998, is the fourth of five plays by Kane. On the page, Crave is devoid of stage direction and reads like a long poem, with different characters—A, B, C, and M—assigned different lines. Uttered memories of family abuse entwine and enmesh themselves in current identities, characters seek reprieve in substances and sex, shriek and sob that they feel nothing, and in anguish confront the fact love can save as well as destroy.

“It's a play that I respect and love so deeply,” said director Roger Benington when he sat down to talk with me last month. This is actually Benington’s third production of Crave, the first being with Tooth + Nail Theatre Company in Salt Lake City in 2003. “I will say that I am no less terrified of it than I was when I first encountered it. It's a very hard play. Yet, as dark and heavy as it is, Sarah Kane said herself that it was the most hopeful of her plays. I do think that there is a release that comes. The play lights up and expands. And I think we found a way through the design to create that.”

Crave first came to Seattle in 2005 by way of the newly-founded Washington Ensemble Theatre (WET). The team at WET consisted of classically trained grad students, actors, and designers determined to bring an elevated touch to theater typically labeled “fringe.” They knew Crave would be a hard sell, even in Seattle, but the production was met with critical acclaim.

What makes this season’s Crave particularly intriguing is that most of the original creative team from WET is back, including Benington and Jennifer Zeyl, co-founder of WET and now Intiman’s Artistic Director, movement director Mark Kenison, sound designer Matt Staritt, costume designer Heidi Zamora, lighting designer Jessica Trundy, and half of the original actors: Marya Sea Kaminski and Lathrop Walker.

For WET’s 2005 production, Zeyl put the four characters in a cage, seen through a letterbox-style frame. Over the course of an hour the cage filled with nearly a foot of water, emphasizing the script’s “suffocating accumulation.” Since the bottom of the cage was obscured by the frame, audiences didn’t fully see the water, but heard splashing and saw the actors’ clothes clinging to their bodies. The design helped garner Zeyl’s win of a Stranger Genius award in 2006. This year, she pays homage to the letterbox aperture while taking the idea further. Yes there’s water, but in a different way than the cage of 20 years ago.

The new production remixes actors as well as stage elements. Actor Lathrop Walker played B in 2005 and now plays A, which Kane referred to as “Author or Abuser.” (Secondary meanings included Antichrist, Aleister Crowley, and Arsehole.) Kane guarded against rigid definitions of roles, but admitted these were how she imagined the characters for herself. Marya Sea Kaminski, who played M—or Mother—in the WET production, returns to play C, a role Kane saw as Child. Throughout the play, Kaminski/C clutches a tape recorder (an item absent in the previous production) that she periodically rewinds and fast forwards, its abrupt whirring and squealing pulling us out of linear time, subjecting viewers to back-and-forth whiplash through emotional time. Christopher Morson, an actor and producer with plenty of Shakespeare under his belt, as well as appearances in Netflix shows like Everything Sucks!, joins the cast playing B, a younger man. Alexandra Tavares, an actor with a long list of appearances at Intiman, Seattle Rep, and Seattle Shakespeare Company, plays M, a mother or older woman in heels, with a cigarette.

The play opens with characters seated inside a long, white-edged box (we’re inside the letterbox of WET’s 2005 production now), facing the audience. For most of the play, A, B, C, and M are speaking—often shouting—at the audience. It’s a rare exception that they turn to address each other, leaving the viewer feeling as though forced to witness the unfolding emotional hellscape head-on.

Benington and the creative team inserted breaks and transitions where there are none indicated in the script, with characters periodically switching seats, crowding around each other, and interludes where the set floods with blue light and abrupt action cuts into the dialogue. For a script devoid of any action, this production bristles with cramped, caged physicality.

Marya Sea Kaminski and Lathrop Walker. Courtesy of Intiman Theatre.
Marya Sea Kaminski and Lathrop Walker. Courtesy of Intiman Theatre.

With the actors seemingly suspended in the letterbox, it’s not until later in the play that we notice a pool of water below and in front of the box. There’s a moment where the water is intentionally disturbed, casting a ripple of light across the frame. As the play reaches its end, the actors enter the water, partially disrobing, splashing it over their faces and bodies as though in collective cleansing or baptism. For Zeyl, it was important that the water was hidden until the right time, revealing that we’ve been inside the letterbox all along.

Michael Place, one of WET’s founders (but not part of either production of Crave), noted at one of the play’s after-show talkback sessions that there was more mainstream space for raw and confrontational works in the ‘90s—the decade that didn’t shy away from grit, where films like Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction dominated cinema.

Kane’s work, Crave, and the cast and creative team at Intiman have succeeded in creating a space for such confrontation in the present day, challenging the viewer to witness without turning away. No doubt, if Kane were writing today, she would be writing the same kind of plays, addressing the horrors of genocide, racism, transphobic violence, and the rise of fascism. She would put it on stage, no matter how grisly.

If you stick with it to the end, there can be catharsis, Kane suggests. But only if we force ourselves to see, and not look away:

A: Free-falling

B: Into the light

C: Bright white light

A: World without end

Mark Van Streefkerk is a freelance writer, journalist, and editor. He is currently the Arts, Culture, & Community Editor for South Seattle Emerald.