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Repertoire
The Feast doesn’t do traditional theatre seasons where you do a set number of plays each year and then never do them again: Making plays just to leave them behind is economically inefficient, ecologically irresponsible, and artistically insufficient. We can’t make big plays with big paychecks under those conditions.
Rather than making our process cheaper, The Feast wants to make our offerings less disposable. In our project-based producing model, we work on ideas repeatedly until they’re finished, and then find opportunities to share these projects with audiences repeatedly.
This means that instead of listing our “history,” we’re listing our “repertoire.” We want to do these plays again; they’ve got more to give our artists and audiences.
Orpheus Descending
2014
The Berwind Purcell House, 808 Lone Oak Road, Longview WA
2015
Co-produced with Intiman Theater, 12th Avenue Arts
Photo Credit: Joe Carpenter
Orpheus Descending
By Tennessee Williams
Williams’ rarely-done work asks how a town becomes a lynch mob. In his riff on the Orpheus myth, a charismatic musician stumbles into a conservative southern town and begins an affair with the wife of a shopkeeper. Our 2014 workshop and 2015 production used an ensemble of eight, working across racial and gender lines, to confront Williams’ own unexamined prejudices and those of this “nice southern town.” Finally, we experimented with the audience and actors constantly shifting relationship in each of the play’s three acts.
Having further developed our design process and aesthetic since 2015, our vision for a future iteration is to heighten the theatricality and aesthetic language employed by the eight person ensemble, creating a bracingly alive approach to a “familiar” playwright.
Creative Team:
Director: Ryan Guzzo Purcell
Designer (2015 only): Ryan Dunn
Stage Manager (2015 only): Adrienne Mendoza
2014 Cast:
Chinasa Ogbuagu, Charlie Thurston, Rebecca Gibel, Max Rosenak, Richard Prioleau, Tangela Large, Grant Chapman, Lee LeBreton
2015 Cast:
Kemiyondo Coutinho, Charlie Thurston, Rebecca Gibel, Max Rosenak, Richard Prioleau, Tiffany Nichole Greene, Grant Chapman, Lee LeBreton
Photo Credit: Truman Buffett
Gross Indecency
By Moisés Kaufman
Why do we love queer art but hate queer artists? In 1895 Oscar Wilde went, in a day, from being the most celebrated artist in London to public enemy number one. He was put on trial for sodomy, costing him everything: his fame, his fortune, his family, the love of his life, his freedom, and ultimately his life. Moisés Kaufman’s docuplay—pulled from trial transcripts, contemporary media, and first-hand accounts—tells the story of Wilde’s fall from grace.
Our 2023 workshop used five actors, five cameras, and projections, creating a media circus in the language of social media, TV, theatre, and a courtroom drama. It’s aesthetics are queer, sensational, and digital, presenting this gay icon and the violence he faced within a 21st-century gaze.
Our vision is to create a traveling media circus that can present this work to audiences all over the country. Our audiences for this show were queer, multigenerational, and deeply engaged. In a moment when theatre is splitting between existing audiences (who are often older and more familiar with classics) and new, younger audiences. This project bridges the divide.
Creative Team:
Director: Ryan Guzzo Purcell
Production Designer: An-lin Dauber
Video and Projection Designer: Nick O’Leary
Stage Manager: Tori Thompson
Cast:
Grant Chapman, Ricky Spaulding, Nicholas Japaul Bernard, Jomar Tagatac, Rebecca Gibel
Photo Credit: Jeff Carpenter
Blood Wedding
By Federico Garcia Lorca, Translated by Langston Hughes
Our 2018 production of Blood Wedding (by Frederico Garcia Lorca and translated by Langston Hughes) was staged site-specificlally in an industrial art space, creating a festival atmosphere that immersed audiences in different realities.
The first act asks the audience to travel between rotating dioramas, each one telling a portion of the domestic story of the characters.
The second act brought the entire audience together for a music-, dance-, and poetry-filled wedding.
The final act brought audiences into a gravel pit filled with shipping containers and trashcan fires. The actors came from everywhere in the chaos of the wilderness.
Our vision for this work is to commission a new translation and produce it as a major site-specific public art project in Seattle.
Creative Team:
Director: Ryan Guzzo Purcell
Production Designer: An-lin Dauber
Composer: Shenandoah Davis
Musicians: The Thoughts
Stage Manager: Juliana Brei-Crawley
Cast:
Reggie D. White, Brittain Ashford, David Samuel, Mia Ellis, Rebecca Gibel, Tangela Large, Leicester Landon
Photo Credit: Marcia Davis
The Time of Your Life
By William Saroyan
Why do certain characters show up again and again in “classic American stories?” The Feast used William Saroyan’s slice-of-life comedy to explore what these archetypes (or stereotypes) say about American identity. William Saroyan’s slice-of-life comedy explored that question by placing as many classic tropes as possible inside one bar: Nick’s waterfront saloon in San Francisco. In 2019 The Feast explored what happens when classic “American” characters like the cowboy, the slumming society dame, the Horatio Alger, and more than 20 others are explored through the prism of multiple actors. With eight actors each playing all the parts at different times, The Feast destroys, explores, rebuilds stereotypes that have shaped the way we talk and think about Americanness.
Initially performed site-specifically in a bar, our goal in future iterations is to build upon that workshop experiment by turning a theater into a functioning bar for audiences to get up close and personal with the stories Americans tell themselves.
Creative Team:
Director: Ryan Guzzo Purcell
Associate Director: Reggie D. White
Designer: An-lin Dauber
Stage Manager: Maria J. Gray
Cast:
Kemiyondo Coutinho, Max Rosenak, Grant Chapman, Lamar Legend, Madeleine Lambert, Lee LeBreton, Richard Prioleau, Dedra D. Woods
The Baldwin Canon: Blues for Mister Charlie and The Amen Corner
2016 & 2017
Photo Credit: Bruce Clayton Tom
The Baldwin Canon: Blues for Mister Charlie and The Amen Corner
By James Baldwin
James Baldwin, in addition to being one of America’s moral and literary masters, might also be our most underappreciated playwright. In his two plays, The Amen Corner and Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin uses his singular poetic understanding and intellectual rigor to illuminate major American questions. In Blues for Mister Charlie, he uses the tragedy of Emmett Till as a template for excavating the roots of American racism. In The Amen Corner, he uses the church of his youth to create an allegory for the struggle to create a liberated spirituality.
In 2016 and 2017 with Blues for Mister Charlie, and in 2022 with The Amen Corner, The Feast proudly introduced the first professional production of both of these masterpieces to Seattle audiences. We toured Blues for Mister Charlie to both a church and a high school, bringing together audiences of students, theatre patrons, and congregants. We also facilitated in-depth post show discussions, making the conversations between community members part the art itself. In 2022, we co-produced The Amen Corner with LANGSTON.
Our goal is to bring these incredible but rarely-produced works to as wide an audience as possible.
Blues for Mister Charlie (2016 & 2017)
Director: Ryan Guzzo Purcell
Production Designer: Pete Rush
Stage Manager (2017 only): Tori Thompson
Music: Roebuck (2016), Aaron M.D. Norman (2017)
Cast:
Nancy Moricette, Max Rosenak, Grant Chapman, Ryan Williams French, Lee LeBreton (both years), Jude Sandy, Rebecca Gibel, Charlie Thurston, Lateefah Holder, Lorenzo Roberts (2016), Rafael Jordan, Brenda Joyner, Leicester Landon, Alexis Aisha Green, Reggie D. White (2017)
The Amen Corner (2022)
Co-Produced with LANGSTON
Director: Reggie D. White
Set and Costume Design: An-lin Dauber
Lighting Design: Robert Aguilar
Music: Aaron M.D. Norman
Stage Manager: Alyda Sorm
Cast:
Maiya Reaves, Adrian Roberts, Cathleen Ridley, Anthony Holiday, Dimitri Woods, Amaya Zhané, Anjelica McMillan, Felicia Loud, Malcolm J. West
History
Projects whose life cycle is complete:
Photo Credit: Marcia Davis