Something Like Summer is a sometimes delightful, sometimes heart-wrenching look into how identity and acceptance both informs and complicates our love lives. Directed by David Berry, the movie follows the trials and tribulations of characters that folks might be familiar with from Jay Bell’s Something Like series.
At the Neptune, in a theatre full of beautiful Black and brown people, words were spoken that allowed many of us to heal. I saw my fellow trans and QPOC community members laugh and cry. I can only imagine that they felt the same chills creep up their spines as I did, as the beautiful truth, the beauty the is being trans and black was laid out before us.
Kimball Allen, host of the glitz-camp variety show, Triple Threat, slated regularly at Seattle’s Triple Door Theater, has lived in the Emerald City just a handful of years. Yet, Allen is well aware of the talent pool the city has to offer. And the skillful artists that saturate the city move him so that he knew he had to bring them regularly under one roof – and so his show, some two years ago, was born.
In her most recent theater project, San Francisco drag icon Peaches Christ brought a new show to Seattle last week. “9 to 5 Inches ”— based on the Bechdel Test champion film “9 to 5” — was true to the movie’s theme of sisterhood, empowerment, and dismantling a repressive capitalistic patriarchy from the inside out.
Phillip Chavira, recently hired as the new Executive Director of the Intiman Theater, has a motto: “Keep color on stage.” And he means it. Prior to moving to the Emerald City some three-and-a-half months ago, Chavira produced Eclipsed on Broadway in New York City, which featured the first-ever all-female cast, playwright and directing team on the famous theatrical thoroughfare.
Barbeque, written by Robert O’Hara and directed by Malika Oyetimein, is a breath of fresh air in a city which so desperately tries to prove how progressive it is. It’s a hilarious and honest performance that will leave you fucked up just like your family did.
Seattle filmmaker Wes Hurley recently debuted his newest project, Little Potato, to cheering audiences at SXSW. Metaphorically, the movie (co-directed by Nathan Miller) is a story about suffering repression and experiencing relief. Literally, though, the story is about Hurley and his mother leaving a dangerous and corrupt Russia to find freedom in America.
Last Thursday Gay City Arts premiered a play entitled Rising Up, a work that openly condemns gentrification and displacement in the Central District by sharing the QTPOC experience and the importance of chosen family. The debut work from playwrights Sara Rosenblatt and Ebo Barton, directed by Barton along with Neve Andromeda Mazique-Bianco, depicted an honest and personal representation of the QTPOC experience in Seattle.
Frankly, it’s hard to look through the festival schedule without seeing something worth attending or watching. But, for those who can’t commit to attending 10 days worth of films and activities, we’ve put together a Totally Unofficial Guide of our picks.
Miss Coco Peru has been there and done that – all in a shoulder-length, red flip hairdo, naturally. Unlike most drag performers, Ms. Peru forewent lip-synching and dancing and instead made a name for herself as a monologist and creator of one-woman shows. A period of successful performances in New York’s cabaret circuit eventually led to stints in film and television.
With a composed, sweet, and measured voice, the woman behind the spastic, exaggerated femme persona known as Cherdonna Shinatra describes her upcoming projects. The tone of the conversation is markedly different compared to the character’s at-times cartoonish physicality, but the woman behind Cherdonna, Seattle’s Jody Kuehner, has no problem with the concept of dichotomy.
It must be hard being Lady Bunny, always being surrounded by people who don’t get that her brand of shock value humor isn’t meant to offend. Constantly having to explain that it’s her audience’s job to not be offended by her jokes, rather than her job as a performer to edit what she says out of decency and human kindness, must be tiring.