Burien Little Theatre – News Blog

Brand new works by Washington State playwrights
In festival at Burien Little Theatre

$10 ticket gets you in to see 2 plays!
Twice the plays, half the price!

For the price of a movie theater ticket, you can see two—count ‘em, two—live, brand-new, award-winning plays by Washington State playwrights in the 2013 Bill & Peggy Hunt Playwrights Festival.

From May 3 through May 26, Burien Little Theatre’s (BLT) Festival offers 4 weekends of new shows.  Pay just $10 to see a performance of two plays — a one-act followed by a full-length. The one-act Bottom Line is paired with the full-length Undiscovered Places May 3-12. The one-act 17B is paired with the full-length Parsing Race May 17-26.

After each play is performed, audience members are invited to give their opinions and ask questions of the director and playwright. These talk-backs provide playwrights with fresh ideas, valuable comments, and honest audience response.
Continue reading →

The impetus for this play was a series of interracial “dinners” (really, afternoon snacks) over a two-year period ending for my wife and me just after 9-11. These monthly get-togethers were sponsored by the Urban Enterprise Center and supported by the City of Seattle.

My interest in participating was in wanting to learn more about how minorities, particularly black people, viewed a number of issues affecting their community, including: “gangster” rap and clothing, crime, drug use, teen pregnancy, educational quality, police profiling, and more. What we both learned was that the minority participants were more interested in communicating their grievances with the white majority than in educating us (although certainly this did occur).

Since that time and in writing this play, I began to understand that talking about recent issues only scratches the surface of what makes open and honest communication between blacks and whites so difficult. Recently, I read a book by Tracy Thompson called The New Mind of the South. One passage seemed to me to explain the avoidance that marks communications between blacks and whites:

“Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation’s history,” asks writer Philip Dray. Thompson adds this thought: “Today, we’re like partners in a marriage that has suffered a profound trauma, and who have decided to just pick up and go on without ever grieving or speaking out loud about the terrible thing that has happened. But the terrible thing won’t go away.”

The continuing influence of this “terrible thing” lurks beneath the words and actions in Parsing Race.

Bill and Peggy in “I’m Herbert!”

Why the Bill and Peggy Hunt Playwrights Festival?  Who were Bill and Peggy?

Bill and Peggy Hunt were longtime Burien residents, a married couple who worked in all phases of local theater for over 30 years.

Peggy joined what was then called Workshop Theatre of Burien in 1959.  (Workshop Theater of Burien became BLT in 1980.)  Her first leading role was in 1960, playing a “dotty old lady” in “Harvey,” when she was still quite young.  It’s the type of role she perfected in dozens of plays, and inspired a reviewer to call her ”the grand dame of Burien theater.”

Husband Bill soon followed Peggy into local theater.  At first, on stage when an actor was needed for a bit part.  (There are no small parts, just small actors.)  Soon he was using his expertise as a Boeing engineer to help the growing theater with organization, planning and design work.  Bill designed the “roll away” seating, still used at BLT, which was necessary to maintain the multipurpose function of the theater for the other uses King County and later the City of Burien made of the space.  Both Hunts served on BLT’s Board of Trustees, as well as working on play production.
Continue reading →