Theater in Seattle: What’s happening in the season so far?

Live art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. At its best, theater reflects back to its audience the hopes, fears and anxieties of its time — both the time it’s written, and the time it’s produced. A theater season, made up of new plays and old plays, dramas and comedies, all in conversation with one another, reflects those feelings writ large.

Taken as a whole, this theater season in Seattle so far feels like a crossroads — major issues of nationalism and identity are percolating, as well as the sometimes stark divide between who we are and who we want to be. 

From Sept. 6-21, there was Reboot Theatre Company’s affectionate yet gimlet-eyed look at the Americana of 1955 musical “Damn Yankees” (where, by the way, Jessie Selleck sang the hell out of the lead role of Joe Hardy), set in the baseball-mad midcentury and centered on a very real deal with the devil. In the end, Joe isn’t willing to sacrifice everything for continued glory — the hopeful path of the crossroads. 

Add to that the slim, eight-person version of Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot” at Village Theatre (running through Oct. 13 at its Issaquah location and Oct. 19-Nov. 10 at Village Theatre Everett), distilled down to the love triangle at the story’s heart, which dips its fingers into the brackish waters where personal desire conflicts with political duty. King Arthur, determined to lead his kingdom into a time of peace and justice, refuses to ever publicly compromise his values, but that choice could be what brings the kingdom toppling after all. What’s the right choice? And for whom? 

But the biggest unifying thread, as it’s manifested so far, seems to be complicity. 

Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth’s new cult-flavored play “Cowboys with Questions,” which premiered at Washington Ensemble Theatre and closed on Sept. 15, is peopled with desperate folks looking for a place to belong, and excavates what they’re willing to do, or overlook, to keep it. 

ACT Contemporary Theatre went overtly political with “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” (running through Sept. 29), a headfirst dive into the gender politics of power and the dilemma of those behind-the-scenes figures whose livelihoods rely on supporting an idiot leader. “POTUS” doesn’t burble with any particularly hard-hitting ideas (nor does it try to, it’s very much a comedy), but it does gently pick at an intellectual scab many of us carry, the worry that we’re propping up systems we don’t believe in, perhaps actively, but usually passively. And often, we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s OK, because we don’t really have a choice, or because it’s not really that bad. 

In a very different take on the propping up of awful political systems, Rajiv Joseph’s play “Guards at the Taj,” co-produced by Pratidhwani at ArtsWest and running through Oct. 6, features two government employees in 17th-century Agra, India, who are asked to carry out a horrific task. They do, and they had little choice, if you consider that the punishment for treason in those days, we are told, is death by elephant. But watching the emotional fallout for these two men — both catastrophic, in very different ways — investigates the sometimes impossible price of going along to get along. 

Christopher Chen’s “Passage,” presented through Sept. 28 at 12th Avenue Arts by Yun Theatre, is very loosely based on E.M. Forster’s novel “A Passage to India,” but stripped of any identifiers: All we know is Country Y is a colonial power within Country X, where our story is set. Much of the conflict arises between locals and émigrés from Country Y, who are upset at not being welcomed more effusively into a country they’d heard was so friendly. After all, they’re not the government! We can likely all recognize the desire to separate the personal from the political when we feel, consciously or not, that it’s to our advantage.

In writing “My Lord, What a Night,” running at Taproot Theater through Oct. 19, playwright Deborah Brevoort riffed on the very real friendship between Albert Einstein and famous contralto singer Marian Anderson, two exceptional outsiders who became symbols larger than themselves. When Anderson, who was Black, was denied a hotel room after a sold-out concert in Princeton, N.J., Einstein (who had been in the audience) offered her a room in his home. (Mark Emerson is charming as the rumpled, principled physicist.) It turns out the owner of the hotel that denied Anderson a room is a big donor to Princeton University, which leads a faculty member to beg her and Einstein to keep the unpleasantness quiet. We can all easily identify that as the Bad Choice — an interesting message to receive from an art form dependent on donor funding. 

To be clear, that’s not a dig; it’s an acknowledgment of a complex, confounding problem. How much sway do donors have over any organization, and how much should they have? Asking that question leads to even bigger questions of complicity: How are we, personally, perhaps propping up systems we don’t believe in, and where do our expressed values and lived values part ways? What can we hope to do about it? 

Theater company The Feast presents “The Adding Machine: A Cyborg Morality Play,” which uses artificial intelligence technology to help adapt Elmer Rice’s 1923 play “The Adding Machine” and runs through Oct. 6. Of this season’s offerings, this play explores the most specific and current anxiety — the encroachment of AI technologies — in a way that is actually anxiety-inducing, because you can never be quite sure what this nascent tech, being used in real time, is going to do. What you can trust is this cast, uniformly strong, but especially MJ Sieber, who is giving one of the best performances in town. 

Now, ethically, can you just explore the idea of AI in your art without being complicit in the technology’s advance? I’m not a tech ethicist (thank goodness), but this is an interesting question to ponder, and one of many I’m looking forward to thinking about more deeply, as the season goes on. 

Because, for my money, theater is never about answers, it’s about questions. I’ve already had my metaphorical socks knocked off more than once this season, thinking about these plays and what they’re asking of us. There’s a lot to mine here, and I’m sure there’s a lot more to come.