Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 6, June 2004

Copyright 2004 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

Community theater alive and well at Green Lake

By JEAN CHEMNICK

Green Lake is a sunny-weather destination for in-line skaters, parents with strollers, and dog lovers alike. It is the sight of political demonstrations and crew regattas, a place for neighbors to meet. It is also home to a little brick building that Seattle Public Theater's artistic director Shana Bestock calls, "a great place for telling stories." The resident storytellers these past few years have been the Seattle Public Theater.

The Parks Department's decision in the late sixties and early seventies to convert old swimsuit rental buildings to arts spaces has afforded three Seattle neighborhoods 34 years of access to art. Under the recreation department's cultural arts director, a Thrust Grant for 60,000 was allotted to transform three facilities in the Green Lake, Seward Park, and Madrona neighborhoods into a theater, an arts center and a dance facility, respectively. The Bathhouse Theater, located on the west side of Green Lake, quickly became home to the Bathhouse Theater Company, which existed for 29 years under the direction of Arne Zaslove. When the Bathhouse Theater Company went under financially in 1999, the Seattle Parks and Recreation department instituted a search for a new steward and tenant of the building, and it passed into the hands of SPT, who now share it with the lifeguards every summer.

The theater space inside the old bathhouse is unique. The stage cannot be lit without light spilling over into the audience, creating a sort of campfire effect. If sound is made anywhere in the building it is heard on stage. This extreme intimacy creates obvious limitations, but a clever director can make use of it, too. In a recent production of "The Winter's Tale," for example, actors rubbing their hands together through the thin walls provided the sound of a storm. The space brings the audience and performers together on its own somehow. "It's a magic space," Says Bestock. "And I'm not a woo- woo person."

Seattle Public Theater was chosen for the Bathhouse Theater partly for its community activist mission, which Bestock characterizes as "building community through theater." The fringe theater company came to the Bathhouse in 2000 after a decade of turning out socially conscious theater in temporary spaces. When the group was started in 1990 it existed out of a rickety little space on the fourth floor of the Oddfellows Hall. Productions like "Peacemaker"(1991), set at a nuclear misile silo in Nebraska, or Timber (1991), an hour-long "living newspaper" piece about the logging industry delivered a message while steering clear of the avante-garde style many alternative theaters favor. Accessibility to the audience has always been a guiding principal for SPT.

In 1993 the young company was evicted from the Oddfellows Hall and took up temporary residence in at Jack Straw Productions, also popping up at the Northwest Actors Studio and other spaces from time to time. The company continued to produce works like "A Nail in the Sole," a production about Holocaust resistance created in collaboration with Kadima Community School.

The group's social mission and work with youth earned it the Bathhouse lease, but when it arrived at Green Lake in 2000 it started to run into problems. Productions like the three-and-a-half-hour saga "Ghetto" cost more than they brought in and with the new rent costs the theater went into debt. By that fall it seemed likely that SPT would follow the Bathhouse Theater Company into extinction. The artistic director had left. A grant for the summer children's program had been used to keep the doors open. Board members were leaving. The ones who were left wanted to close before the holiday show, "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever," was to open.

Bestock went to the board and asked it to keep the doors open, "and we'll make theater." She would direct the Best Christmas Pageant Ever, taking a percentage of the box office in lieu of upfront payment. Bestock remembers the low production values of that show fondly. "It was community theater, and it was great," she says. The community came in numbers, and the production brought in much more than it cost. It relaunched SPT.

Since that production, SPT has increasingly seen itself as the community's theater. Bestock became artistic director, and entertainment became a high priority. Bestock says the theater seeks "not to hit people over the head, but to embrace them. The goal of the theater is to entice people to come back into the space." The commitment to social consciousness lives on in the theater's youth programs, which include one-third scholarship students, and in projects like collaboration with Sanctuary Arts Center dealing with the issue of homeless children.