Stage Review - DADS (Washington Ensemble Theatre)
Stage Review - DADS
Presented By: Washington Ensemble Theatre at 12th Avenue Arts - Seattle, WA
Show Run: April 25 – May 10, 2025
Date Reviewed: Thursday, April 24, 2025
Run Time: Approximately 90 minutes (no intermission)
Reviewed By: Tucker Cholvin
When Elby Brosch and Shane Donohue saunter down the stairs, through the audience, and toward the stage at the start of their new production, DADS, they don’t hint much at what’s to come. The stage does – with overalls, biker caps, and cuffs hanging on the wall – but as they make their way to the stage in robes and feather boas, they seem like they might be about to launch into a jaunty sister act instead of a complex and rigorous show about fatherhood, masculinity, and the complicated relationships that many queer people have with both.
DADS is a new production from Brosch and Donohue’s artistic partnership, Drama Tops, which blends elements of dance, theatre and performance art to explore these themes. The genesis of the show, as Brosch explained in an interview with the Seattle Times and unpacks directly in a monologue near the show’s end, was his father’s death at age 16 and the grief that he continues to process. But the show addresses a larger agenda, unpacking themes of gay intimacy, trauma, grief and joy.
Brosch and Donohue are intent on pushing limits. They spend much of the production putting themselves through motions and actions that range from awkward to uncomfortable to outright painful. They excel at sliding between the two. In one moment early in the show, the energy of their dance morphs and shifts from sexual to violent to frantic so sinuously that the distinction between them is almost lost.
The emotion and exertion on display is impossible not to feel deeply and take on as an audience member. But at some of the show’s most intense moments, Brosch and Donohue seem to reflexively pull back, as though they’re afraid to come off as too serious. After one particularly grueling sequence, Brosch breaks the fourth wall to walk to the bar inside the theatre, chug half a beer, and then do tequila shots with Donohue. It’s hilarious, it’s honest, and it cuts out any whiff of pretention from the show. But later in the show, as audience members playfully whooped and cheered at moments that seemed designed instead to evoke pain and struggle, I wondered if it was because the audience was having a bit of whiplash from the changes in tone.
Where DADS succeeds without question is creating dreamscapes, and moments within them, that are beautiful, expressive, and poignant. The show’s conclusion finds the dancers inside an inflatable, crystalline structure that evokes Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Much like that imaginary fortress, it’s here that both Brosch and Donohue can strip away the world, its troubles and puffery, and instead find intimacy and peace.
At a time when the national political scene offers little respite – and openly menaces the queer voices who make art like DADS – it’s a vision that feels both comforting and increasingly distant.Like any good dream, you may want to dwell a little longer there before the house lights come up.
DADS, presented by Washington Ensemble Theatre, runs on stage at 12th Avenue Arts in Seattle through May 10. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit https://washingtonensemble.org/.
Photo credit: Erin O’Reilly
