Creative Chaos

Intiman’s startlingly young new director stirs up high hopes – and trouble.

On March 3, Kate Whoriskey officially takes over the directorship of Intiman Theatre from Bartlett Sher. And though he will technically still co-direct Intiman from New York until 2011, Intiman’s leader for the last ten years is letting Whoriskey (pronounced “wuh-RIS-ky”) take the lead, and take some risks as well. “I sometimes was probably a little bit safer in some of my choices – to my own chagrin,” says Sher. “Something like Paradise Lost [Clifford Odets’ 1935 Depression drama, opening March 19] I might not have had the nerve to do.”

Illustration by Hallie Spurgin for City Arts

“I don’t find it risky,” says a chipper Whoriskey during rehearsals of her new Broadway show, The Miracle Worker with Abigail Breslin. “We’ll find out!” But she admits, “I’m not Bart’s clone. Bart’s work tends to be very elegant, with clean lines. My work is probably a little bit more rough-and-tumble. It has more chaos.”

“She’s very politically motivated,” adds Sher. The Odets play “speaks very much to the recession,” says Whoriskey. Her most famous production, Lynn Notage’s Pulitzer-winning 2008 play Ruined at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre (opening at Intiman July 2), is about the current Congo war. Whoriskey points out that Sher is political too, but in a different way. “Ruined looks at a political event and humanizes it,” she says, “and [Sher’s] South Pacific takes something inherently less political and kind of pulls out the politics in it.”

Whoriskey, 38, has never run a theatre. “Bart can teach me that portion of the job,” she says. “He can say, ‘Well, this is how you should guide the ship. If you’re going away from this idea and moving to this other thing, then these are the steps you have to follow.’”

If Whoriskey suggested, say, an all-nude production of The Bald Soprano starring Mike Daisey look-alikes, what would Bart say? “That would be interesting,” says Whoriskey. “I might pick that one up! I’ll tell you honestly, there was a play I had in the season that I thought would be great, and he thought, that’s really terrible.” So she agreed not to do it this year. But she won’t reveal the title, because she still hopes to do it in a future Intiman season.

Even before Whoriskey’s first day on the job, she inspired a politically motivated controversy: some Seattle theatre people complained that she would have an anti-local, New York bias. “Perhaps there are people who prefer their live performance culture crammed down their throats from 2,700 miles away,” grumbles playwright Paul Mullin (It’s Not in the P-I). Stranger critic Brendan Kiley also raised the issue.

Bart struck back at his January 30 going-away bash. “Brendan Kiley,” he told the crowd (since Kiley had already left the event), “there is no such thing as local theatre. There is no such thing as national theatre. We come to Seattle to do great work, we don’t come to Seattle ’cause we’re out to kill you all!”

Kiley tells City Arts that he’s not a “rabid, parochial localist” or an Intiman hater, but that local theatre does too exist. “A city’s theatre scene, like its music scene, will have its own character. If we want radical homogeneity, then by all means, let’s let the local starve by denying it exists. Then we can spend our money on imports instead of development, get all our music from one national radio station and let sameness rule. To suggest that a Scot Augustson play, written and created here, is no more or less local than a touring production of Xanadu is either slightly obtuse or slightly stupid.”

“I feel prematurely attacked,” says Whoriskey. “In Paradise Lost we’re casting nine or ten local actors. We’re doing a local play [The Thin Place, opening May 14].” This month, all Seattle will get a chance to decide if she’s really one of us. •