Lawrason driscoll biography of christopher

Local one-act premieres joined by works of noted regional writers

By Key City Public Theatre Provided This Preview.

Feb. 05, 20110

PORT TOWNSEND — The curtain is up on the 15th Annual Playwrights' Festival at Key City Public Theatre with a full slate of events Tuesdays to Sundays through Feb. 27.

The centerpiece of the festival is the production of three of the winning plays from the Port Townsend Arts Commission's 2010 One-Act Play Competition. This year "Ransom" by Richard Weston, "The Glass Kingdom" by Judith Glass Collins, and "How My Big 5-0 Turned Toxic" by Deborah Daline light up the Playhouse beginning Feb. 11 on Friday and Saturday evenings at 8:00 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m.

Weston's "Ransom" is a dramatic tug-of-war between two strangers. A son (Scott Nollette) has lost his mother and visits her empty apartment with his wife (Lillian Kuehl), but the apartment isn't empty. An older man (Lawrason Driscoll) is living there, claiming to have been the mother's lover. How close was this man to the mother? How close was the son? This is the second year that Weston's work has appeared at the Festival, as his "Meeting Denny" received a staged reading in 2010.

Collins' "The Glass Kingdom" is a memory piece about life, art, and letting go. The storyteller (Patricia Earnest) remembers the life of her sister the glassblower (DD Wigley) with her husband (Peter Wiant). A glassblower knows that in order to blow glass, you have to "lean into the heat." Collins is a third-time winner, having seen her plays "Veteran's Day" and "Taste" presented in the 2008 and 2010 Festivals.

In Daline's comedy "How My Big 5-0 Turned Toxic," a woman (Catherine McNabb) wants her fiftieth birthday to be as blissful as the childhood parties her mother gave her. She invites five Facebook friends to her

Phoebe’s Father (2015 | USA | 95 minutes | John Helde)

Released previously in 2015, Seattle filmmaker John Helde is bringing his film Phoebe’s Father back to the Northwest Film Forum to play in its virtual cinema and then become available on streaming formats. This is all good news because Phoebe’s Father is a hidden gem of a movie that affected me deeply. Between 2015 and now, Helde also directed another movie I loved called Brown’s Canyon.

For her entire adult life (and probably most of her adolescence), Phoebe (Marie Lazzaro) has carried the pain of having her mother abandon their family without any explanation or closure. Her father Ben (the late Lawrason Driscoll, he’s outstanding) was left on his own to raise Phoebe and her brother Whit (Eric Jordan). She’s gotten by through some unrewarding jobs but that trauma has kept her from thriving in any real aspect of life. Early in the film, she gets a part time job as a bookkeeper for a bicycle shop. Despite not having much initial interest in cycling, the job helps unlock something inside of Phoebe she didn’t know she needs.

As a survival technique, Phoebe convinces herself that if her mother was a normal person, the only possible explanations for her vanishing are that Phoebe and/or Whit caused her to leave, or Phoebe’s father did. Phoebe chooses to hold her father responsible and has kept him from her life. There is a scene between Ben and Whit, where Ben tells his son something like “It’s hard when you love someone but they don’t want to love you back” that reduced me to tears. For what it’s worth, that seems to happen to me a lot these days. But Ben understands that he has fewer days in front of him than behind and he wants to make end of life arrangements with his two children. Whit is eager to help Phoebe and Ben reconcile, though he has his own demons to deal with and his motives may not entirely be altruistic. He tells people that he carries a flask (and

By Christopher Sharrett.

I recently happened upon a very good Studio Canal DVD of the John Flynn/Paul Schrader film Rolling Thunder(1977). The film, of some distinction at least as a symptom of profound problems within US ideology in the 70s, has always been to me, in Norman Mailer’s words, a “dark fascination,” and one of the more interesting films that attempt to “deal with” (that is, help the American psyche overcome) the US invasion of Southeast Asia. The film manages to condense a number of tendencies and genres of the post-Vietnam cinema. The essence of the disaster film is figured in the idea of the disintegration of the American family/community in the Vietnam/Watergate years. The vigilante film, so prominent in the 70s (Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Walking Tall), is also embodied in essence through the hero’s never-verbalized rage, and the sense that his ultimate violence is somewhat free-floating in character, with the targeted bad guys perhaps merely hypostatizing his own turmoil.

I should say at the outset that I view none of the Hollywood films about the Vietnam incursion to be in any way honest in dealing forthrightly with policy toward Southeast Asia (we must note that “Vietnam” really means that nation plus Cambodia and Laos), and certainly not the enormous suffering of the Vietnamese people and their neighbors. The body count of US troops and the number of POWs/MIAs are always subjects of discussion (Noam Chomsky has remarked that the total number of MIAs in the two world wars and Korea far surpassed those in Vietnam – the issue here is the U.S. agony over losing the war, and being forced to confront, with great resistance, the consequences of the US barbarism). The US has been successful in resisting confrontation with its amorality, always speaking of the attack as a noble mistake, or some such, but the number of dead in Vietnam – something like three million – is of no concer