Those of us who lived in Seattle back when the sitcom Frasier was still on the air used to get a kick out of the shows many geographical gaffes. We would laugh, shaking our heads when some character arranged a meeting at a diner on 14th street because we knew that not only was there no such restaurant in Seattle, there was no such street. The film Sleepless in Seattle offers similar hilarities. Characters casually stroll from Pike Place Market to Gas Works Park, and in one scene a dreamy distracted Tom Hanks paddles his son in a canoe from Portage Bay to Alki Beach: not an impossible feat, but nearly so seeing as the trip would be some twelve and a half miles by water, one-way, and require the canoe to pass through the Ballard Locks and major ferry lanes. He should have at least worked up a sweat during the four or five hours it would have taken him.
Frasier’s apartment has a lot in common with the apartment in The God of Carnage, which opened last night at the Seattle Rep. It’s beautiful, meticulously appointed to indicate tasteful wealth, and it simply does not exist– because it could not exist– in Seattle. As a private residence window cleaner in Manhattan for three years, I have seen plenty of apartments like the one I saw last night on the Rep’s stage. A few in SoHo, a couple in the Village, but really nearly almost all of them on the Upper West Side. As a resident of Seattle, on and off, for seventeen years I have never once seen such an apartment here, and certainly not occupied by an upper middle class couple with two young children. The very notion is absurd. (And not the good Ionesco kind.)
The play proffers “Meydenbauer Park” and “the 405” and “Tukwilla” as obvious and, frankly, clunky substitutions for the actual places meant before the play’s rapid import from Broadway, namely Central Park, the FDR Highway and Long Island. Why do I care? Well if it were a Frasier episode on the television I wouldn’t, but this was yet another play for, by and about Upper West Siders forced down the guffawing gullets of Big House theatre goers who in reality live 2,700 miles and tens of thousands of dollars of annual salary away from the action of this play.
Some aspects of parenthood are universal. Of course. But in a play like Carnage the devil is in the details, those aspects which are deeply specific to the city where one lives with one’s family: the tiny hopes and niggling fears for your children, the snobberies and slights, the lines of attack and defense. My wife and I moved back to Seattle from New York City shortly after our first son was born precisely because we understood these deep existential differences between raising kids there compared to raising them here. I think every parent in that audience last night shares a similar understanding, and implicitly understood further that the play they were seeing, as funny as it was—funny as Frasier frankly– had very little to do with their actual lives.
So here’s a crazy thought, if you are going to take the trouble to substitute out words so that you can pretend a play takes place in Seattle, why not go a few steps further and substitute all of the words. Have it written such that the story clearly lives here, thus giving your audience the genuine and irreplaceable thrill of seeing their actual experiences staged instead of those of some Upper Class Upper West-Siders. And if you’re going to do that, then here’s an even crazier thought: have someone who lives here wright it.
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