Stage Review - Drowned Cats (Blue Hour Theatre)
Stage Review - Drowned Cats (Staged Reading)
Presented By: Blue Hour Theatre - Seattle, WA
Show Run: September 13, 2025
Date Reviewed: Saturday, September 13, 2025
Run Time: 90 minutes (no intermission)
Reviewed By: Anna Tatelman
To my delight, this current season of Seattle theatre is kicking off with a lot of new works, including Blue Hour Theatre’s recent staged reading of Drowned Cats by Greg LoProto. This one-night only event featured an exciting script with excellent local talent.
Blue Hour Theatre strives to produce plays that, in their words, “tell authentic stories about our self-made messes” with the goal of helping us “survive this chaotic world together.” As they’re a small theatre company, their two most recent events have been staged readings that double as fundraisers to support their upcoming full production next spring.
Their most recent fundraising event featured a new script titled Drowned Cats, which follows a family bracing for the impact of a looming storm. Concerned about her aging mother Emma facing the storm alone, a woman named Taylor brings her husband, her son, and herself (plus her unborn child) to Emma’s home. Although Emma’s not pleased with this invasion, she allows them all to shelter in place inside her attic.
Drowned Cats is a play that excellently fits into the familiar genre of socio-political family dramas while offering something fresh in its setting and build-up. Rather than seeing family members chat, laugh, and argue together over a dinner party or the death of their patriarch, we see them preparing to face a natural disaster that could have devastating, unexpected consequences. There’s love and tenderness in each of the well-drawn relationships, but there’s also years of anger, resentment, and guilt, all of which spills out with increasing urgency as the storm nears. While I did feel there were moments in which the script overexplained what the characters felt or thought, this is a fairly common problem in new plays, and playwright LoProto demonstrates for most of the script that he can deftly handle subtext. I look forward to seeing how this script grows as it learns to develop more trust in its audiences.
Having lived in New Orleans, I’ve been through a decent number of weather alerts, and LoProto brilliantly captures the fluctuations his characters experience in their emotions and actions as they brace for impact. The characters wait around a lot doing what little they can in the final hours before the storm – counting the seconds between thunder and lightning bursts, moving stuff around the attic serving as their makeshift shelter. Interspliced are moments of panic, where the full reality of the encroaching disaster and its many unknowns hit, like when they realize they don’t have any water jugs, or when there’s conflicting information about whether to flee or shelter in place.
Director Jeremy Radick smartly highlights these pacing shifts by fluctuating between moments where the performers speak with more deliberation or where the dialogue frantically overlaps. Although this was a staged reading with minimal production elements, the choice moments that did have blocking heightened the moments of urgency, such as when one of the characters gets a head injury and everyone shuffles around to different music stands as they try to determine the best course of action.
Although the script wasn’t memorized, it’s evident that all five performers took time getting to know their characters. Beth Shields, who plays Emma, convincingly portrays a woman who buries her deep pain, both physical and emotional, in snarky comments and an abrasive attitude (plus expensive wine). One of the most riveting moments is when that façade collapses and she screams at God for putting them through all this heartache and uncertainty. Opposite Shields as her adult daughter Taylor is Annie St. John, who also delivers a heart-rending speech toward the end about all the things she’s not prepared for in the wake of the storm’s devastation. Together, they honestly capture the nuances of a mother-daughter relationship where deep wells of love are masked by anger, exasperation, and fear.
Brian Brooks portrays Taylor’s husband Stacey and shows how this man puts in a lot of genuine, earnest effort with Emma and his stepson Iggy, even when he’s met with resistance or apathy. Simon Quinterro-Sallee plays Iggy, at first seemingly just a sullen “over it” teen, but who Quinterro-Sallee gradually reveals to be someone with a lot of hidden wisdom and empathy. Last but not least is Demitri (performed by Ronan Pirkle), Iggy’s boyfriend, a kid who sneaks into Emma’s attic because he doesn’t feel anyone will miss him at his negligent, emotionally-abusive home; Pirkle easily captures the audience’s empathy as the misfit struggling with both his identity and sense of place. The relationship between Iggy and Demitri bubbles with more sweetness and hope than that between most of the characters, which makes it all the more sad when the storm starts unearthing the tensions between them, too.
Blue Hour Theatre’s staged reading of Drowned Cats made the most of its limited resources by capitalizing on the bounty it did have: a talented local team and an exciting new script. Their rendition of this new play was thoughtful, nuanced, and filled with a sense of urgency that honored the script’s chosen subject of preparing for a devastating storm. All in all, this was a solid one-night presentation that promises good things to come for both this play and the company.
Drowned Cats, which was presented by Blue Hour Theatre and ran on stage at West of Lenin, was a one-night only staged reading and fundraiser event, but if you’d like more information on the theatre company and their upcoming shows, please visit https://www.bluehourtheatre.com/.
Photo credit: Cat Brooks
