Role:            Directed
Where:         New Mercury Theater
Playwright:   George F. Walker

Publicity postcard .......Playbill....... Director's Notes .......Cast Bios

Criminals in Love gave me an ulcer almost.  George Walker is a Canadian playwright that got known in America because the Empty Space Theater did him a lot and that is a very famous Seattle theater company. (clip) So I was doing a favorite playwright of another theater company - so everyone in Seattle knows how to do George Walker and I know that.  And George Walker has kind of a relaxed pace and people are kind to each other and polite, but there is an underlying tension.  People are very desperate underneath that. And I knew that and I tried to get that and I never really felt that my cast was willing to work hard enough to layer it like that.  And ultimately two weeks into rehearsal I said, just pick up this pace - just learn your lines, it's a funny play - I at least need it to be funny. And I basically just gave them  "faster, faster, faster" for the next week and a half. Then we went into test  and the review said it was really funny and we built audiences, but the critics very rightly said this is not George Walker.  It was really depressing for me because I wanted to do George Walker.  He is a really good playwright and very hard and I thought that I was ready but I don't I think I ever was really.  JM.com 2007

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Seattle Post -Intelligencer  August 27, 1993 article/review

"Director James Marsters gives the show a bounciness that accords well with his characters' determined resilience. A low-budget setting by Jan Tominaga, however, requires laborious changes that hamper Marsters' helter-skelter rhythm."  Joe Adcock ·  Seattle Post-Intelligencer · September 13, 1993

"Director James Marsters lets the momentum flag a bit (as does Walker's invention) toward the end. But in general he has cast and staged this piece persuasively."  Misha Berson · Seattle Times Review ·  September 3, 1993

"Producer-director James Marsters whips along George F. Walker's comedy about East End Toronto teens trying to escape their dead-end, working-class fate at breakneck pace.  The characterizations are razor-sharp. Every line of the dialogue drives its point home...The production is so effective that I suspect the author would be slightly appalled if he saw it, though he'd' be much too polite ever to say so...the pace and edge of Marsters' staging of Criminals in Love, though not its sensibility, suggest sitcom: there's no room for the characters to breathe, or reveal their quirky, bizarre humanity.  The director's approach to the play seems to be saying: "Will you look at these freaks?"  Roger Downey ·  Seattle Times Review ·  October 1993

"The direction is brisk and playful, and the storyline, luckily, is loose enough to let go."  Stranger review