The Swan

Saw this the other night at the Northwest Actors Studio at 11th and Pike. Despite a couple of mishaps (detailled in an article studiously unlinked to here), I thought the whole thing worked pretty damn well. The play itself is fairly potent stuff, with a kind of metaphorical fog built around the questions concering the man/bird character, mental illness and theatricality, mimicry and authentic and inauthentic language and then the connection of all this to love both human and potentially divine. Some of the lines fall flat (when Bill the Swan finally speaks, he says, "I'm depressed", which, come to think of it, is pretty funny), but some of them are brilliant (as in Bill the Swan's flights of poetry and descriptions of 'fields of lovelessness'), but on balance I think it works very well. The performances are all quite good, and Lyam White in particular is brilliant. The guy in charge of props did an especially fine job; his execution was really quite stunning. I hope they're paying him a lot of money.