THEATER
Kate Whoriskey
Artistic director
Kate Whoriskey doesn’t look like Intiman Theatre’s new artistic director. The petite 39-year-old arrived at our interview wearing a hoodie and carrying iced coffee. Quick to laugh and chattering animatedly, she could have passed for a caffeinated college student. This is the director The New York Times calls “formidable and exacting”?
“They saw me in rehearsal,” she said with another big laugh.
Don’t judge Whoriskey by her hoodie. She comes hand-picked by her predecessor, Tony-winning director Bartlett Sher, and bears an impressive resume that includes directing the off-Broadway hit Ruined and Broadway’s high-profile revival of The Miracle Worker, starring Abigail Breslin.
Though Intiman has long been associated with the golden touch of Bart Sher, Whoriskey has already made her mark with a 2010 lineup of classic and contemporary work, including a Molière comedy, new adaptations of Paradise Lost and The Scarlet Letter, and Ruined, the Pulitzer Prize–winning play about a whorehouse-as-sanctuary in the war-torn Congo. Her future plans are ambitious: Collaborate with Pacific Northwest Ballet and the Seattle Symphony. Create an international cycle of shows. And import Broadway talent, including veteran composers Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ruined ) and her husband, actor Daniel Breaker, who just finished his run as Donkey in Shrek the Musical.
“I’m really interested in having everything be more diverse—not just the casting, but the writers, the directors, the staff,” she said. “It feels like the makeup of Seattle is changing quite a bit, so I want to support the folks who are coming in and let them have a voice in the theater.” Expect to hear 12 of those voices question their faith when Intiman debuts Seattle playwright Sonya Schneider’s The Thin Place in May. Based on interviews of Puget Sound residents by KUOW journalist Marcie Sillman, the one-actor performance switches among characters that may include “an atheist who found religion, a Jew who became Muslim, and a woman who replaced her biological father with her heavenly father,” Whoriskey said. It’s a formidable plot—though, by now, that should be expected. —LD
The Thin Place, May 14-June 13, Intiman Theatre, 201 Mercer St, Seattle Center, 206-269-1900; intiman.org
Published: February 2010
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