By Misha Berson
One of Seattle’s most inventive theater directors is inviting you to a wedding — in the loading dock of a warehouse. It’s not his own nuptials that Ryan Guzzo Purcell is celebrating, but the union of a young couple conjured by the great Spanish poet-playwright Federico García Lorca (in a translation by the Black American poet Langston Hughes).
A band will play. Paella and sangria will be served. The dress code: casual. What else would you expect from an affair that takes place outdoors in the arty, post-industrial section of Georgetown?
All that’s needed is a pay-what-you-want ticket that admits you to the workshop version of Blood Wedding, a classic play the adventurous Purcell is reconfiguring as a sense-a-round community experience. Held outdoors Aug. 2-4 — outside Equinox Studios, a former World War II-era factory converted into artist studios and galleries — Blood Wedding will be “a street festival, as much as a theater performance,” he explains.
And it won’t be the first time Purcell, a former Fulbright scholar and Princess Grace Award-winning director who is quickly establishing himself as a compelling and daring younger theatermaker, has transformed a venerable drama into an interactive event.