James O’Barr

James O’Barr

James O’Barr has been a some-time writer for quite some time. While holding down a diversity of day jobs on this or that coast, he’s found reason to write in a generosity of genres, including radio scripts, play scripts, newspaper articles, film and theatre reviews, songs, stories, and poetry. His short story, “Best Teaching” was published in the 2022 anthology Mud Flat Shorts (Mostly Fiction).

Articles

  • Fall/Winter 2024 Print Edition
    Oly Arts Walk * Bucoda Spook-Tacular * Anna Schlecht * Tacoma Film Festival * Enterlope * Eileen Bochsler * OFT & More! You can read our 31st print edition here. It is hot off the press and distributed free in the area plus available online!
  • Review: Our House, an Evening in Three Acts
    The new play Our House by Olympia’s John Longenbaugh is a charming little ramble through the lives of the house and its imagined inhabitants over the course of close to a hundred years. Our House breaks the rules in its own way and enlarges what theatre can be. By all means, find your way to Our House.
  • Preview – Our House: an Evening in Three Acts
    The setting of Our House, written by John Logenbaugh and co-directed by Logenbaugh and Bryan Willis, the stage, is an actual small house in which the story and the action take place. It’s located on the edge of a cemetery, in what was still country and farmland when the play begins in 1934 and Olympia had a population of just over 11,000 people. Produced in Olympia by Battleground Productions.
  • Review: Wonderful Wizard of Oz at Olympia Family Theater
    The Wonderful Wizard of Oz at Olympia Family Theater comprises both young and not-so-young actors, smoothly stirred into a well-tuned ensemble; part of the fun of watching it is the speed and energy with which the story is rolled out, almost like street theater, or commedia, or circus.
  • South Sound Reading Foundation Benefit Brings Ethan’s Smile
    The South Sound Reading Foundation will host its annual benefit breakfast fundraiser, “Readers are Leaders,” at the Lacey Community Center on Thursday, April 11. Keynote speaker Stacy Chapin’s son Ethan is one of the four University of Idaho students murdered in Moscow, Idaho on the night of November 13, 2022.
  • Deathtrap by Ira Levin: Murder Most Queer at the State Theater
    Once the action begins at State Theater, you’ll find yourself in the post-and-beam framed, antique-studded, expensively repurposed barn that serves as the living room/study of playwright Sidney Bruhl. Harlequin Productions’ Deathtrap by Ira Levin is a classic thriller, with five actors, two acts, and one set. And therein hangs a gun.
  • Art in Storefronts: Light Up the Night – Winter Wonders
    “Light Up the Night—Winter Wonders,” an Art in Storefronts exhibit produced by Olympia Artspace Alliance is on view through March 31, 2024 in the windows of The Goldberg Building on Capitol Way S in Olympia. It features artwork by students from four area schools.
  • O Christmas Tea: A British Comedy at the SPSCC Minnaert Center for the Arts
    “Think Mamma Mia with The Three Stooges, plus audience interaction at The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” “Theatre is in its essence an exercise in imagination,” says Alastair Knowles, who plays the eccentric Jamesy. “O Christmas Tea is exactly that, an exercise in imagination, on steroids.” At SPSCC’s Minnaert Center for the Arts on November 25th.
  • Every Brilliant Thing at the SPSCC Minnaert Center Black Box Theatre
    Smartly produced and wonderfully performed, Harlequin Productions’ “Every Brilliant Thing” with Eleise Moore is the best of live theatre, up close and personal. It totally engages us in a story that begs to be told and needs to be heard.
  • Collaborating With Nature: The Installation
    Atop each of the 27 pilings in Toten Inlet is a Boucante figure, bodies mostly made of weathered wood, heads and faces of sculpted stone, distinctively dressed in all manner of antiquated machine and engine parts and salvaged odds and ends. The faces are wide-eyed and staring, the mouths open, the effect inscrutable or spooky, depending on the direction of the light.
  • Airbound Arts
    by James O’Barr If you want to learn airborne arts, there are a number of skydiving venues around the state, or you can join the Army and go to the Jump School at Fort Benning, Georgia. But if it’s aerial skills and circus arts instruction you want, then you need go no further than downtown …

    Read more

  • Preview: Harlequin’s The Revolutionists by Laura Gunderson at The State Theater
    Olympe de Gouges announces at the opening of Harlequin’s “The Revolutionists” that she has an idea for a new play, a comedy, and much of the play follows her attempts to right/write the wrongs of the Revolution in a play “about women showing the boys how revolutions are done.”
  • 2023 Capital Lakefair Grand Parade Saturday, July 15th
    by James O’Barr Olympia’s Capital Lakefair turns 66 this year, but retirement is not a word in the Capitalarian vocabulary. Lakefair Week will run from Wednesday, July 12th to Sunday, July 16th, and every one of those days Heritage Park will be brimful of food concessions, craft vendors, the Funtastic Carnival, and main stage live …

    Read more

  • Lacey in Tune with Heart By Heart
    Lacey Parks brings its popular Friday night “Lacey in Tune” concerts, kids programs, and movie nights downtown to Huntamer Park, kicking off on July 14 with Heart By Heart, the Seattle-based Heart-tribute rock band.
  • Review: The Bengson’s Hundred Days At The State Theater
    “Join us as we transform The State Theater into an intimate cabaret for an uncensored, exhilarating, and heartrending true story about embracing uncertainty, taking a leap, and loving as if you only had 100 days to live. With magnetic chemistry and anthemic folk-punk music, creators Abigail and Shaun Bengson explore a fundamental question: how do we make the most of the time that we have?” – Harlequin Productions
  • SOGO Winter Concert at the Washington Center
    The Student Orchestras of Greater Olympia’s Conservatory Orchestra, with Music Director Cameron May conducting his most advanced musicians, will give the first-ever performance of Olympia composer James DeHart’s “Children’s Concert Overture.” The orchestra will bring the festivities to a close, with clarinetist Alessandro Martinez, a senior at Olympia High School, performing.
  • Review: Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery Harlequin Productions at the State Theater
    Harlequin Productions’ “Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery,” an “adventure in theater making itself,” theater magic itself, that will take children of all ages on a giddy, breath-taking, uproarious ride, over, under, behind, and through the fourth wall, stopping at nothing that does not surprise, astonish, and delight you.
  • Nyx and the Long Night Opens at Olympia Family Theatre
    An original winter folk myth from Olympia Family Theater. Everything changed the day they dropped the sun. Now, the world has been dark for a very long time – an endless winter solstice. Perhaps a young woman named Nyx will be the answer. Part girl, part tree, and raised under the light of the stars, her magic and courage might just save the world.
  • Halloween at Harlequin
    You are about to spend an evening with Edgar Allan Poe in a play by Olympia playwright Bryan Willis, plus a reading of a new short story by Olympia’s own Jim Lynch in a one-night-only Halloween celebration at Harlequin.
  • James O’Barr
    James O’Barr has been a some-time writer for quite some time. While holding down a diversity of day jobs on this or that coast, he’s found reason to write in a generosity of genres, including radio scripts, play scripts, newspaper articles, film and theatre reviews, songs, stories, and poetry. His short story, “Best Teaching” was published …

    Read more

Skip to content