| The Strawberry Theatre Workshop opens its third season of confrontational works at Richard Hugo House with The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a play for puppets and actors, opening September 8 for a limited run. The play is adapted from the 1928 novel by Thornton Wilder, who later became a seminal playwright in the American theatre when he completed Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). But it was this short existential novel which was his first literary triumph, earning him the first of three Pulitzer Prizes when he was just thirty years old.
As in Strawshop's inaugural piece, This Land: Woody Guthrie (2004), bunraku-inspired puppets will share the stage with actors to form the world of the play. This device will allow the author's delicate narrative to be read as authentically as possible from what Edmund Fuller (New York Times) called "One of the greatest reading novels in this century's American writing."
Set in colonial Peru in the 18th century, The Bridge of San Luis Rey interweaves the stories of five people who die when an ancient rope bridge breaks and sends them plunging into a gulf. The book opens with an account of how a Franciscan monk witnessed the accident and spent his subsequent years amassing evidence to explain why God singled out these five for premature death.
Strawshop Artistic Director Greg Carter first considered adapting The Bridge of San Luis Rey when he was the Production Manager at Book-It Repertory Theatre in 2001. "Like most artists, the violence of September 11 left me wondering how I was supposed to respond. I was so immersed in literature when I was at Book-It, that I couldn't hear my own voice. Instead, I kept hearing voices of other artists who had made my life worth living." Carter was not the only person who heard the voice of Thornton Wilder at that time. Two days after the 2001 tragedy, British Prime Minister Tony Blair read the final chapter of The Bridge of San Luis Rey aloud in Parliament. Wilder's final lines serve as an individual search for meaning in a communal loss of life:
We ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
As he emerged as a force in the theatre, Wilder resisted calls to dramatize The Bridge of San Luis Rey in his lifetime. The Strawshop production was only made possible after a protracted negotiation with the Wilder estate, which considers The Bridge of San Luis Rey such a precious example of the author's philosophy that they have remained very protective. Strawshop's body of work including the faithful adaptation of Charles Dickens, called Fellow Passengers, convinced the family that The Bridge of San Luis Rey would be well served on stage in Seattle. The Hugo House production is thus a world stage premiere of a work actually written for readers eighty years ago. Carter says, "Our argument was that the novel is about the value of communal experience, and that having that experience in an assembly of people would bring more meaning to the language."
Further endorsement for Strawshop is from the Jim Henson Foundation in New York, the pre-eminent supporter of American puppetry, which awarded The Bridge of San Luis Rey a project grant in 2005. The work is also supported by 4Culture and the Cornish College Faculty Development Fund.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is directed by Sheila J. Daniels. Daniels is the Artistic Director of Baba Yaga Productions, literary manager at Capitol Hill Arts Center, and an adjunct faculty member at Cornish College of the Arts. Recently, Daniels has directed God's Country, Waiting for Lefty, and Arcadia at CHAC, Shock Brigades at Baba Yaga, Macbeth at Wooden O, and Marisol at Cornish. She got her first experience with making stories with bunraku when she appeared as a puppeteer in This Land: Woody Guthrie at Strawshop in 2004. The cast is led by three of the city's most accomplished puppeteers: Douglas N. Paasch, the master puppeteer at Seattle Children's Theatre, who has created most of the memorable puppet characters there for 16 years; Margaret Savas, who trained at Tears of Joy (Vancouver, WA) and performs as part of Spyglass Theatre in Seattle; and Greg Carter, the puppet designer/director responsible for This Land: Woody Guthrie who learned puppetry at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre in Minneapolis. Savas and Carter were performers this year in the acclaimed experimental puppet show Infinite Noir, which Paasch wrote and directed, and which was chosen to close the Pacific Puppetry Festival in Tacoma in August.
Strawshop continues to bring highly professional actors to the small theatre: Amy Thone (Seattle Shakespeare, Seattle Children's, Book-It) recently played the lead in an all-female King John in the upstart crow production at CHAC; Timothy Hyland (New City, Seattle Children's, Seattle Shakespeare) ended a six-month run in the two-man Stones in his Pockets at CHAC this summer and was recently featured in Piledriver; Hana Lass played major roles in Little Women and The House of Mirth at Book-It last season; John Farrage played the slain radio host Alan Berg in CHAC's God's Country (directed by Sheila Daniels) and directed Rhinoceros at CHAC; and Tracy Repep, who recently finished a run as Ophelia in Wooden O's summer park show, Hamlet, and also appeared in King John.
Designs for The Bridge of San Luis Rey are by Ron Erickson (Seattle Opera), Robert Aguilar (Washington Ensemble Theatre), and Greg Carter. Live music is by Rick Miller.
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