(Marilyn, The Misfits). Loss is a subject in all his plays. In an essay written three decades after The Price’s premiere, Miller said he created the play in response both to absurdist theater and the absurd carnage of Vietnam. “Reason itself had become unaesthetic, something art must at any cost avoid,” he wrote. “The Price grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world.” In other words, it’s not just a play about furniture. (Previews begin tonight; opens June 5; runs through June 22.) ACT Theatre, 600 University St., 292-7676, acttheatre.org. $44 and up. 8 p.m.
Brian MIller
The stereotype of butoh includes naked bodies dusted with rice flour performing tiny increments of movement with incredible intensity. And sometimes this is true. But sometimes it’s not. The Seattle Butoh Festival presents as many different iterations of the genre as there are dancers involved in the performances, coming from multiple countries and backgrounds and bringing a wide variety of experience. The commonality is their fidelity to the deeply personal nature of the art form and its kinetic expression of humanity. Taoist Studies Institute, 225 N. 70th St., 729-2054, daipanbutoh.com. $12–$15. 7:30 p.m. (Repeats Sat.)
Sandra Kurtz
Monday, June 2
Geoff Dyer
After Alain de Botton wrote a book in an airport (a two-week residency, not a layover), he decided to start a series of similarly reported stays in unlikely locations. So he asked English writer Dyer, now based in California, where he’d like to fill his notebooks. On an aircraft carrier, said Dyer, never thinking he’d get the gig. He did, and the unlikely result is Another Great Day at Sea (Pantheon, $24.95). I say unlikely, because Dyer’s a somewhat louche, digressive stylist who tends to follow private obsessions like D.H. Lawrence, Burning Man, or the movie Stalker. There would be no drugs aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, no sex, no alcohol, no disrespecting his hosts. Yet surprisingly they agreed to accommodate Dyer in what’s essentially a floating city of 5,000 men and women. It’s a distillation of American values, finds Dyer: racially mixed but conservative; tattooed kids barely out of high school ruled by buzz-cut men in their 40s; a strict hierarchy of class and protocol (officers over enlisted sailors) that nonetheless insists on mutual politeness and respect. Though he complains about the food and marvels at the noise (jets crashing down to the flight deck overhead, tail-hooks clawing at lethal cables), Dyer finds himself in a kind of enforced, regimented utopia, not so far from Burning Man after all. When he quizzes a fighter jock about flying his multimillion-dollar weapon, the pilot speaks of night sorties where “it’s like flying through space. You see stars that you never though you’d see before.” Dyer compares him to Saint-Exupery, living in “a realm of poetry accessible only to those whose world-view is based on technology” and having “the kind of transcendent experience craved by mystics, shamans, seekers, and acidheads.” Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., 386-4636, spl.org. Free
. 7 p.m.
Brian MIller
Tuesday, June 3
Dan Barber
The executive chef at Manhattan’s award-winning Blue Hill restaurant, Barber has written what’s quite possibly the most revolutionary book on agriculture, cooking, and eating to date: The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (Penguin, $29.95). While Blue Hill was one of the first restaurants labeled “farm-to-table,” Barber now challenges that term and the philosophy behind it, concluding that our seemingly improved way of eating actually contributes to our broken food system. Though we have access to fresher, healthier, more locally sourced ingredients than ever, Barber asserts that this “cherry-picking” by chefs—and by extension, farmers—creates unsustainability by exerting control over nature rather than “growing nature.” At the core of the problem is the long tradition of a plate that celebrates a large portion of protein and small servings of vegetables and grains. In this enlightening, myth-dispelling tome that will appeal to Michael Pollan fans, Barber presents an entire redesign of the food system, “the third plate,” which calls on chefs and farmers as arbiters of the change. In doing so, he takes us all over the world—including our own backyard in Skagit Valley, where a cutting-edge “closed loop” grain cycle is currently underway—highlighting farmers, foragers, fishermen, seedsmen, scientists, millers, bakers, and anyone who’s dedicated to the radical transformation of our food chain. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., 652-4255, townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 p.m.
Nicole SPrinkle
E
