Strawberry Jam: Directors Festival @ Strawberry Theatre Workshop (Seattle – Capitol Hill)
Strawberry Jam is a five-week arts festival dedicated to providing local directors with the opportunity to grow their craft through practice. Motivated by an observation that Seattle’s outstanding acting and playwriting communities are fueled by experimental forums not availabe to directors, SJAM was born in 2022 as a unique public workshop with the director at its center. Now in its second year, SJAM features veteran and emerging artists alike, working with texts ranging from classics to original works. For its audience, the event is a wide-ranging celebration of styles, visions, and voices packed into fifteen nights of relentless energy at 12th Ave Arts. All that makes a Strawberry Jam.
Shows change every weekend. Schedule below (subject to change; see ticketing page for any updates).
Tickets ($17 each, or $49 full-festival pass) here.
June 8-10
Carolynne Wilcox & Hannah Votel direct “The Boxes We’re Kept In.” Original work. A tryptic of folktales sharing the theme of choice.
Andy Lowry directs “Know When to Leave.” Original work. A clown play focused
on the relationship between the violence we commit against each other and the outside forces that perpetuate it.
June 15-17
Nabra Nelson directs “Paint Me.” Original work. Two people on a first date bond over the subject of death, stepping into uncomfortable territory and coming out closer.
Steven Sterne directs “Do Frontier Women Need Husbands?” by Jennifer Dice: On a hot, dry day, two frontier women talk about loneliness and expose the shameful secrets of the local fire-and-brimstone preacher.
Rylie Latham directs “The Resurrectionist” by Ryan Stevens. A dark comedy that confronts the often-difficult topic of death and mourning in a funny, thoughtful, and creative way.
June 22-24
Amanda Rountree directs “Glass. Kill. Bluebeards Friends” by Caryl Churchill: Three new plays craft myths to help us make sense of the cycles of violence that inundate us.
Carly Cipriano directs “Catslut!!!” by Katherine Jana: A young woman is traumatized into finding false agency within hypersexuality, depersonalization, and a pea. Will her spiral ever end?
June 29-July 1
Daira Rodriguez directs “Elyse and Mae Play the Most Epic Game of Life Ever” by Kandace Mack: Elyse and Mae play a game about life’s pivotal decisions, exploring grown-up concepts like careers, marriage, and how to survive in a world that seems stacked against them from the start.
Adrian Prendergast directs “Minutes and Seconds” by Chris Vanderark: When the sun dies out and the apocalypse begins, one family finds themselves on borrowed time as they attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. And quickly.
July 6-8
Tyler Campbell directs “Brotherly Love” by Ean Miles Kessler. The story of two brothers from conservative Virginia who are trying to find acceptance after the one comes out as gay.
Christie Zhao directs “Caught” by Christopher Chen. A play about art that challenges our perception of truth and fiction, exploring the blurred lines between reality and imagination, and questions our assumptions about authenticity and cultural appropriation.