Seattle Shakespeare Company has commissioned its first play: A world premiere by local playwright, screenwriter, and performer Keiko Green. Ms. Green, who splits her time between Seattle and Los Angeles, has crafted a fast-paced comedy that takes place on a college campus and centers on three roommates, one of whom is having boyfriend troubles that lead to a series of schemes in attempts to solve the problems. But, as in all great comedies, the best-intended plans are waylaid by misunderstandings, miscommunication, and even mistaken identity.
Ms. Green’s play, The Bed Trick, delivers plenty of all these elements with laugh-out-loud, razor-sharp humor and plenty of wit. The play also successfully leans heavily into pathos, poignance, and a direct look at some serious subject matter: Gender and relationship dynamics, consent and non-consent, and existential questions about life, success, and happiness.
The title of Ms. Green’s play refers to a device that Shakespeare famously used in All’s Well That Ends Well. A “bed trick” involves a substitution of one partner in the sex act with a third person (i.e. going to bed with someone whom you believe to be someone else). In a common form of the bed trick used in many classical plays and stories, a man goes to a sexual assignation with a certain woman, and, without his knowledge, that woman's place is taken by a substitute. A bed trick can also involve a woman who unknowingly sleeps with a man whom she presumes is someone else. Think Uther Pendragon from the Excalibur story who, disguised by magic, satisfies his lust by raping Igraine through deceit, while she believes she is lying with her husband, Gorlois, and becomes pregnant with the future King Arthur. Or Zeus, who disguises himself as a swan and rapes Leda, the Spartan Queen who becomes pregnant and later gives birth to Helen of Troy.
Because many classical plotlines involve magic and mythology, one might understand why a bed trick could succeed in a story from the days of yore, but it may seem much more difficult to pull off a believable modern-day version of a bed trick without a heaping dose of skepticism from a contemporary audience watching a play steeped in realism.
And yet believability is exactly what is achieved through the journey of The Bed Trick! The logic and credibility of the plot progression, mixed with the zany, hilarious comedic situations in which the characters find themselves, blended with the personal flaws and imperfections laid bare at some point during the play by each character makes for a complex, nuanced, and multi-layered theatrical experience.
The cast delivers the comedy and the pathos with equal skill and panache. The actresses playing the three roommates (Libby Barnard, Sophia Franzella, and Rachel Guyer-Mafune) capture the buoyant energy and—at the same time—the awkward insecurity of college teenagers as they expertly navigate between loving, hating, betraying, helping, manipulating, supporting, and lying to each other. As the audience, we are drawn in and eagerly follow every whirlwind transformation the roommates go through, waiting to see what will happen next.
