Tag: Jillian Vashro

Jan 28-Feb 18, 2011 | Fri-Sat at 11 pm
$10 gen / $5 TPS/senior/student
Industry Night (PWYC) Mon Feb 14, 8 pm
Pay What You Can Feb 11/12

The scandals that rocked the Catholic Church finally come to roost at St. Benedict’s: The diocese has its very own pedophile. Someone’s got to take the fall. As reporters dig into the past, the ever-greedy Father Jones and tyrannical Sister Bernadette fight to control the present—including missing relics, rebellious underlings, incriminating videotape, and a lonely Mormon missionary. Sister Candy and elderly Connie Sullivan face unexpected pregnancies; Sisters Jenny Memphis and Mimi Coco wrestle with inappropriate desires; and young Adam learns some unwelcome news about his parentage. Mix in a couple of dance numbers and some surprising guest stars and you have the latest episode of Annex’s late-night serial comedy, Penguins!

Written by Scot Augustson and directed by Bret Fetzer.

Featuring Daniel Christensen, Chris Dietz, Katie Driscoll, Karen Heaven, Sophie Lowenstein, Jenny Schmidt, Jillian Vashro, Lisa Viertel, and Clayton Weller

“Augustson’s late-night serial comedy Penguins is a breath of fresh, filthy air…its balls-out devotion to depravity is executed by a talented, canny cast.” – The Stranger

“The cast is nearly faultless. Bret Fetzer’s direction is excellent. … I had seen two of the prior installments in the series, so it wasn’t a shock to see a nun acting sinfully, but I still laughed and I wasn’t alone.” – Seattlest

Check out a very different late night mass this summer and enjoy communion libations in our fully stocked bar. You can always confess about it later!

August 7-August 27, 2010 | Fri-Sat at 11 pm
$15 gen

The bloody feud between nuns and priests gets set aside in the face of a greater threat: Other churches! Everyone thinks the Bishop’s illegitimate child can be used to their advantage, so the bastard’s baptism becomes a war zone filled with forbidden love, strange addictions, May/December romance, schizophrenia, radical atheists and musical numbers. Come see the bullets fly in Penguins, Episode III: The Bishop’s Bastard!

Written by Scot Augustson and directed by Bret Fetzer.

Featuring Daniel Christensen, Chris Dietz, Katie Driscoll, Teri Lazzara, Sophie Lowenstein, Jenny Schmidt, Jillian Vashro, Lisa Viertel, and Clayton Weller.

“Augustson’s late-night serial comedy Penguins is a breath of fresh, filthy air…its balls-out devotion to depravity is executed by a talented, canny cast.” — The Stranger

Check out a very different late night mass this summer and enjoy communion libations in our fully stocked bar. You can always confess about it later!

written by Scotto Moore | directed by Kristina Sutherland
Apr 23 – May 22, 2010 | Fri-Sat at 8 pm
Industry Night: May 10 at 8pm
$15 gen | $5 stu

“When I Come To My Senses, I’m Alive!” is a near-future sci-fi story about a technological provocateur who invents a method for capturing emotions as digital information, as part of a project to “chart the emotional genome.” She develops a cult following of fans who download her very addictive “emoticlips” – each delivered with cryptic, poetic file names like “the surprise of an unfamiliar memory” – and play them back in hobby-built receiver helmets. The experience is not full blown virtual reality; instead, emotional responses & sensations are triggered, and each fan experiences something unique. A seedy television executive tries to coopt her technology to syndicate the emotions of TV stars, hiring an elite P.I. to figure out what her weaknesses are when she refuses to sell out… but in the meantime, publishing digital versions of her emotions to the internet has unexpected consequences amongst the botnets of the world.

SeattleActor.com review:

Scotto Moore‘s new play, “When I Come to My Senses, I’m Alive!” is the best kind of science fiction, the kind where speculation about the future feels like something you could wake up to tomorrow morning. In this World Premiere production, director Kristina Sutherland has kept the ideas fresh and intriguing and the performances finely finished and compelling. The acting is brisk and, at least for the enthusiastic opening night audience, it’s premise and articulation is easily embraced by a generation for whom the globalization of information, media and personal experience meld into our shared online identities…. [The play] is a lot of fun, at least in part because it is so confident and thoroughly considered in its ideas and equally finished in its theatrical savvy for putting them on stage.

Seattle Times review:

It’s not hard to be captivated by Moore’s provocative premise about a leap in information technology that makes human emotions a downloadable, vicarious experience. The story’s late turn toward suspense — with the spectral rise of freethinking, artificial intelligence on the Internet — certainly ups the ante in unexpected, spooky ways…. Director Kristina Sutherland keeps the action brisk and crisp, and knows how to nudge the audience’s imagination.

The Stranger review:

One wants to see more plays like this in Seattle—smart science fiction about the amazing world we have found ourselves heading toward.

Seattle Gay News review:

Fun, fascinating, thoughtful and delightful.

[Note: omnipotent self-aware botnets click here]

Jade Justad in When I Come to My Senses, I'm Alive!

CAST

CREW

PRESS

written by Scot Augustson, directed by Bret Fetzer
LATE NIGHT: Jan 29 – Feb 12, 2010, Fri-Sat at 11 pm
(no show Friday, Feb 6)
$10 gen / $5 stu

A gang war twixt nuns and priests!

Episode 2 of Annex’s smash-hit Penguins, about a gang war between nuns and priests in the Catholic church that rocks the dioceses!

CAST

CREW

SPECIAL THANKS

Lynn Jepson, Jen Moon, Deb Skorstad and the UW Costume Shop, Seattle Children’s Theatre, and Theater Schmeater.

written by Scot Augustson, directed by Bret Fetzer
LATE NIGHT: Nov 27–Dec 19, 2009, Fri-Sat at 11 pm
(no show Friday, Dec 4)
$10 gen / $5 stu

A gang war twixt nuns and priests!

Annex Theatre’s smash success, Penguins, returns! To consolidate his power over the parish, Father Jones decides to rid himself of the meddlesome Sister Bernadette – setting off an ecclesiastical turf war of biblical proportions! Featuring blasphemy, heresy, dancing, guns, organ music, puppet sex, and much much more, Penguins will shock and delight Catholics and non-Catholics alike! Written by Scot Augustson (Sgt. Rigsby & His Amazing Silhouettes), directed by Bret Fetzer (director of Small Town by Kelleen Conway Blanchard), featuring Daniel Christensen, Chris Dietz, Teri Lazzara, Sophie Lowenstein, Jenny Schmidt, Jillian Vashro, Lisa Viertel, and Clayton Weller! See the first episode before the second rolls around in January!

“Brawny, brogue-brandishing badass Sister Bernadette (Lisa Viertel) demands some basic rights for nuns, which triggers a priest/nun gang war that makes last year’s pitiless Cannes winner Gomorrah look like an afterschool special…We’re talking Doubt on Ecstasy, smack, and aerosol cheese…The hour-long show felt like half that, and I wished Penguins: Episode 2 would have begun immediately after.”
— Seattle Weekly

“Ultra-lowbrow, extreme Catholic camp…[director] Fetzer keeps his cast moving full-tilt…You wouldn’t think there’d be any thrill (perverse or otherwise) left in priest-and-nun exploitation, but [playwright] Augustson mines the veins of altar-boy molestation and convent lesbianism with such fervor, he might win you over.”
— SunBreak

“A bottomless well of depravity…Helping things immensely is the cast, a uniformly excellent crew…Chris Dietz cements the show’s comic tone with his masterful performance as Father Jones…a dark comic marvel.”
— The Stranger

“I thought it was absolutely fucking great…If all late-night theater were like this, it would devour prime-time theater, which would be fantastic.”
— monologist Mike Daisey

Stage Manager — Jillian Vashro
All-Purpose Tech Stud — Ian Johnston