Today’s massive new entry comes to us by way of series organizer Robert Mittenthal, who has generously supplied us with a vast collection of recordings from the Seattle-based Subtext Series. Our selection ranges from 1996 to 2009, during which the Subtext Series called three Seattle venues home: Speakeasy Cafe, Richard Hugo House, and the Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center.
Mittenthal writes:
We came up with what turned out to be a sustainable format for the series. Two person readings, once per month, on the same day, for example, the 3rd Thursday, at the same venue. One local writer, and one from out of town. Regardless of what was raised via donations at the door, we would pay the readers a nominal fixed amount, plus a small travel stipend for the visitor. We had no budget and no funding, so we focused primarily on the west coast, & tried to coordinate with writers who were traveling thru the Northwest.
Mittenthal’s “we” refers to series curators Laynie Browne, Jeanne Heuving, Herb Levy, Ezra Mark, Bryant Mason, C.E. Putnam, and Nico Vassilakis, with guest curators including Curtis Bonney, Daniel Comiskey, Joseph Donahue, Kreg Hasegawa, Drew Kunz, Will Owen, and Lou Rowan. Recordings were created for roughly half of the readings over the course of the fifteen years of the Subtext Series by Herby Levy and Bryant Mason.
You can explore the whole collection, which features 93 of the readings, split into sections based on performer, here.
