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<\/a><\/p>\nRapp\u2019s scenario is a bleak examination of the need for intimacy. It explores the consequences of a night two former college friends spend with a beautiful young prostitute in Amsterdam. \u201cSure, it\u2019s not a very cheery play,\u201d Sloniker explains, \u201cbut I identified with these lost, broken, human characters. A good play doesn\u2019t necessarily have to give you a catharsis.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy personal curiosity about biology is what draws me to theater,\u201d says stage director and fellow co-founder Desdemona Chiang, who received degrees in both disciplines. Chiang shares Azeotrope\u2019s artistic leadership with Sloniker and has directed all of its productions. \u201cI like to do plays about guts \u2013 in both the metaphorical and the literal sense. Theater, like biology, is a study of life. The Greeks knew this in their devotion to theater. You only live so many years on this planet, and life passes like a flash in the pan. There\u2019s something very exciting when the stakes bring you back to what\u2019s essential.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sloniker and Chiang first met as graduate students in the University of Washington\u2019s drama program. Their mentor Jon Jory, a celebrated figure in the regional theater movement and creator of Louisville’s Humana Festival, encouraged members of their class to form a company. \u201cFrom Jory we learned that art is for the audience to decipher,\u201d Sloniker says, \u201cand that what we do in the theater is a craft, something we pour hours of sweat and work into.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRed Light\u201d is the play he and Chiang chose to launch Azeotrope when they started the company in 2010. Impressed by the production, ACT\u2019s artistic director Kurt Beattie invited Azeotrope to participate in ACT\u2019s Central Heating lab initiative to develop a new work.<\/p>\n
The result was one of the most searing fringe productions in recent years: the Seattle premiere of Stephen Adly Guirgis\u2019 “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train” \u2014 a drama about a young Nuyorican facing murder charges in the Riker\u2019s Island prison. Last year, the production took home four Gregory Awards, including Outstanding Production and Outstanding Director (for Chiang).<\/p>\n
This past summer Azeotrope performed the oddly touching two-character play \u201cGruesome Playground Injuries\u201d by Rajiv Joseph at Washington Ensemble Theatre\u2019s Capitol Hill space. \u201cGruesome\u201d is the nonlinear story of a boy and girl both prone to injuring themselves. As they grow up and encounter each other over the decades, their efforts to connect in a more lasting way falter painfully. It all makes for a play that\u2019s more haunting and effective, in my view, than Joseph\u2019s ambitious \u201cBengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,\u201d which WET recently staged.<\/p>\n
For their return to ACT, Azeotrope decided to tackle a new level of challenge by presenting two plays in rotating repertory, using the same actors and production team for each. \u201cIt\u2019s an incredible way to flex so many different muscles. Not just for the actors, but for the designers, the tech crew and for me as the director,\u201d explains Chiang.<\/p>\n
And, she might add, for any audience that wants a chance to see the company’s diverse range.<\/p>\n
The double bill opened last week in ACT\u2019s most intimate theater space, following an intensive five-week rehearsal period. Both works are driven by what Chiang calls a \u201cmasculine energy, pushing ahead from one point to the next.\u201d But in contrast to the meditative moments in \u201cRed Light Winter,\u201d \u201c25 Saints\u201d pulses with a brutal, relentless momentum, its country dystopia juxtaposed with “Red Light’s” alienated contemporary urban setting. Rollins has written an action play about rural Appalachian meth cookers who face off against the sadistically corrupt local sheriff and his cronies.<\/p>\n
Aside from Intiman\u2019s past two summer festivals, this repertory presentation of actors juggling roles in different plays running side by side is a rarity in Seattle\u2019s theater scene. What\u2019s changed since Azeotrope originally performed \u201cRed Light Winter\u201d? \u201cBecause the cast has grown so much individually in the last three years, it\u2019s a richer and deeper performance,\u201d Chiang believes. \u201cThey already have established chemistry, so we just dove right in and got to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sloniker, who reprises his role as the playwright Matt in \u201cRed Light Winter,\u201d adds that this \u201callowed us to start where we left off\u2026. The show is much more moving. More real. And doing this in rep [also] requires me to play a character who is opposite to Matt [in “25 Saints”]. I haven\u2019t been through anything this intense as an actor since grad school days.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is more than one side to a coin, so to speak,” he says. “Specifically with \u201825 Saints,\u2019 meth cooking in Appalachia isn\u2019t solely an illegal endeavor run by criminals. It\u2019s the by-product of poverty, social and political structures, family culture, education. This is a very complex issue that most of America refuses to acknowledge. Although we cannot deal with all of the issues surrounding this culture in our production, we hope to see the humans behind it and initiate conversation about these underrepresented problems.\u201d<\/p>\n This also explains one of the key things that distinguishes Azeotrope from companies like Washington Ensemble Theatre, whose choice of plays tends to be oriented around the strengths of the ensemble. Aside from Sloniker, Azeotrope has no fixed ensemble of actors who reappear. Their focus is above all on the play itself, which dictates who they cast.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t even have an official season every year,\u201d Chiang remarks. \u201cIf we don\u2019t find a play that speaks to us both, we\u2019d rather go into hibernation than be cornered into a slot that has to be \u2018filled.\u2019 That\u2019s such a turnkey way of doing theater, which I don\u2019t think is useful.\u201d<\/p>\n And the plays that speak to them? \u201cI like doing plays about little people in big worlds,” Chiang explains. “This is probably where the idea of the marginalized comes from. If theater is supposed to be a representation of life, then what is the kind of life that deserves exposure or visibility?\u201d<\/p>\n In Azeotrope\u2019s aesthetic, Chiang points out, plays about desperate characters are more compelling than the many commercial plays \u201cabout wealthy people.\u201d Not surprisingly, the playwrights they present challenge audience\u2019s comfort zones and tend to inspire diametrically opposite critical reactions. Their characters are often distinctly unlikeable or tormented by impossibly cross-wired allegiances.<\/p>\n<\/a>A residue of Chiang\u2019s science background, Azeotrope’s moniker was chosen to suggest the company\u2019s mission \u2014 to create \u201ca space where audiences confront the marginalized and obscured, bringing visibility to the invisible.\u201d An \u201cazeotrope,\u201d explains Sloniker, \u201cis the boiling point where a mixture of two or more constituents cannot be altered by distillation.\u201d As far as the issues in a play, the metaphor refers to \u201ccomponents that cannot be separated from each other\u201d when the boiling point is reached.<\/p>\n