Original play "A Dropped Stitch" at New Space Theatre in North City

Pompous Bertram (Robert Geller) woos a reluctant Bobbie (Manya Vee) as Mother (Elizabeth Pelham) helps out.

"There's a part of him that doesn't necessarily know what he's searching for in life," local actor Robert Geller commented. 

Geller is playing the pompous suitor Bertram in Edmonds playwright Jeff Stilwell's new dramatic comedy, A Dropped Stitch, which opened September 30 at New Space Theatre in Shoreline's North City neighborhood.

"It feels very exciting playing this role," Geller said, "Something I've always wanted to have - a terrific character that I feel very connected to: a conservative gentleman in a modern world with a loving nature." Bertram is the largest role Geller has ever played on the stage. He has been studying acting in earnest for four years. "I am approaching him just the way I've studied: being authentic to his back story, his conflicts, his trigger points, and responding truthfully to what the play brings out in him."

Manya Vee and Elizabeth Pelham

In the play, a very conservative and traditional Bertram falls in love with independent and artistic Bobbie, played by Manya Vee. "Opposites attract?" Manya Vee smiled. Geller sees it a bit differently: "That independence that he starts to see in the woman he formerly saw as subservient; it opens up the world for him. It's a big risk for him to start going in that direction."

A Dropped Stitch is the sixteenth play of Stilwell's produced so far, a career that has earned the playwright a long pedigree of critical salutes, such as Dale Burrows' judgments of Teacup Tipsy: "a trip and a half in a little more than a hour and a half through an Alice-like wonderland and a half; ground-breaking in ways more than one..." and One Tile Short: "an intense dramatic comedy you don't want to miss. It is an uninterrupted 90-minute power pack with something to say and a super-charged cast of four saying it..."

A Dropped Stitch runs Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 pm, through October 16. Tickets ($20) are available at 425-776-3778. 

For more information about the play, read the script and meet the cast, see NewClassicsTheatre.  

The New Space Theatre is just north of the intersection at NE 175th on 15th NE.