WHEN ACTOR PAUL GIAMATTI was working with film director Paul Mazursky — on the 1998 HBO biopic “Winchell” — he mentioned his formative years in Seattle. Mazursky stopped him.
Every artist, Mazursky said, has a Seattle in their past — that singular place where everything came together, pure and unfettered, before the world got complicated.
For Giamatti, it was literally Seattle, more specifically, a second-floor walk-up on Fourth Avenue in Belltown, where an adventurous collective called Annex Theatre was doing things no one else dared to do.
“It gave me everything,” he says. “I’m not a guy who uses the word ‘magical’ a lot. But it really was.”
He wasn’t alone. Starting in 1986, the boards at Annex boasted an improbable roster: playwrights whose words later helped bring to life the Netflix series “Stranger Things” (Karl Gajdusek) and the musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” (Glen Berger); Wier Harman, who went on to lead Town Hall Seattle; and Allison Narver, who continues to direct plays in major theaters across the country. As Annex’s artistic director from 1989 to 1995, she habitually booked bands nobody had heard of.
“We told audiences they had to watch the play first,” Narver says. “Then they could stay for the music.”
The bands included Nirvana.
It was, as celebrated composer and musician Chris Jeffries puts it, “a pirate ship.” Everyone divvied up equal shares of buried treasure — and the risk.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Seattle was less expensive, failure meant setback rather than ruin, and the city was alive with scrappy little black-box theaters in garages, walkups and former funeral homes.
From a pact made by Bainbridge Island high school students who scattered to colleges with a promise to return with recruits, Annex was born.
Somehow, the pact endured. Recently, founders and current stewards gathered on the Annex stage to compare notes across 40 years. Their spirit, remarkably, is unbroken. The collective model endures — at 1100 E. Pike St. on Capitol Hill since 2007. New plays are still chosen by company vote. The artistic director, managing director and marketing director are still volunteers, each holding down a full-time job elsewhere while running Annex.
Question is, does Seattle still have a “Seattle?”
The troupe remains passionate about presenting new plays on a shoestring, but funding sources have dried up, audiences are smaller since COVID, and live theater everywhere is under siege. As managing director Stephen McCandless puts it, it’s easier to stay home and watch a rerun of “The Office.”
Going forward, Narver says, takes bravery. The same bravery that built something worth inheriting.
“If this is a pirate ship,” says Artistic Director Lucien Oberleitner, “there’s a lot of mercy on the high seas.”
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