Theatre - Mini-Reviews from Ashland

A couple weeks back, the Lovely Bride and I spent a week in Ashland, Oregon. Ashland is this charming little town just north of the California border that is famous for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which runs most of the year and brings in tons of tourists, most of them, its seems, being retired teachers. Ashland reminds me very much of Lake Geneva, WI, but instead of a lake, it has the Bard as a draw.

Not all plays at Ashland are Shakespeare. They do all sorts of flavors of Shakespeare, from cannonical reads to switch-ups in gender roles and time period. They also do what I call "Shakespeare-adjacent" plays, which have some connection with the Bard of Avon, or modernize his words but keep his plot, or use Shakespeare as a springboard (Think "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead" - which does assume some knowledge of "Hamlet".). And there is a big-ticket non-Shakespearean item to bring crowds (this year it was "Hairspray" - we passed on that).

And then there are the indies - plays that are not necessarily part of canon, or canon-related, or big ticket. They're just good plays. This is like hanging out in the Indy game area at PAX - good stuff, sometimes unevrn, but things you're not going to see elsewhere. Sometimes they travel - coming up to the REP, but sometimes they are only to be seen there.

This year, we shied away from the Shakespeares themselves - The comedies being offered were not the Lovely Bride's favorites, and I am still so overwhelmed by the Mac Beth (Shakespeare adjacent) from a few years back that another production of Macbeth would not work for me. We end up with five, two of which were OK, and three of which were really good that it makes my own writing feeling wanting. Here's the list:

Comedia of Errors; This is Shakespeare-adjacent - a bi-lingual version of Comedy of Errors, where Sparta and Ephesus are transformed into the US and Mexico. The original is as close to a sit-com as you get with Shakespeare - short, broad, ridiculous in places (two sets of identical twins are separated at birth, both having the same names, and when one set ends up in the town where the other set lives, wackiness ensues). The overall change into the serious nature of immigration and ICE really casts a realistic and hard pall on the proceedings, and while all the Spanish lines get translated (which is good, and gives the gringo audience the feeling of exclusion that Spanish-speakers often face), it runs up against the broad humor of the commedia dell'arte style.

How to Catch Creation: One of the best of the show, it is about creativity, intentions, and responsibility. The creation may be starting a family or art or writing. All the characters are creators in some fashion, and it deals with pitfalls and relationships, pulling all the characters together. The actors are top-notch and the stagecraft moves us between locations and times wonderfully. Go see it if it shows up around you.

Cambodian Rock Band: Another really good one, dealing with the heartache and tragedy of the Cambodian Genocide. The play is incredibly well set-up. A young woman in modern Cambodia, working on case against the director of a prison camp during the genocide, gets a visit from her dad - who is very dad-like, filled with old grudges and pushy parentalism. But it turns out the story is about Dad, who was once a singer in a rock band and a prisoner in that camp. The director of the camp narrates much of the story with a bouncy, Loki-like flair, and only slowly drops the mask to reveal what a monster he is. It is ultimately the Dad's story, yet after all the suffering, redeems itself with its music. A lot of Dengue Fever, and at the end, the world's oldest mosh pit (in which the LB accidentally body-checked the actor playing the prison-camp director).

Between Two Knees is, well, uncomfortable. Mostly Native American cast talking about the American genocide (yeah, it's been that sort of set of plays this year) of its native population, cast in the framework of a cheesy Indian show. Sort of like most of the skits in the third half-hour of SNL in the 80s. Cringeworthy as it hits a lot of truths and takes some cheap shots (Goes after Indian Schools but targeting only the Catholic versions, which is not quite punching down - mostly punching ANOTHER group that is an easy target). Really redeemed itself after the intermission, as it moved from the history lesson to a more living memory (and the Pine Ridge Reservation Protests of the 80s), But there were more empty seats after the intermission.

Mother Road: Imagine Grapes of Wrath run in reverse. The last of the Joads, the ones that stayed behind in Oklahoma, goes looking for the last of the California Joads, to leave his farm to. He finds that the California branch of the family went to Mexico, and the last survivor is Hispanic. So they drive back Route 66 in a fever dream of distrust, old friends, old grudges, and the racial nature of America. Amazingly good performances, from almost the same cast as did the Comedia of Errors. It captured the episodic nature of On the Road and Grapes of Wrath, and was breathtaking in a lot of ways.

And wrapped around this was a lot of good food and sitting on the patio outside the bed and breakfast with the local cat and way too many fearless deer that invade the town and eat the local gardens. A good trip, and now I am ready for Fall.

More later,

Theatre: Playing Catchup

Party People by Universes (Mildred Ruiz-Sapp, Steven Sapp, William Ruiz, AKA Ninja), developed by Liesl Tommy. Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare, directed by Rob Melrose, Oregon Shakespeare Festival
The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa by Alison Carey, adapted from the play by William Shakespeare, Directed by Christopher Liam Moore, Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Henry V by William Shakespeare, Directed by Joseph Haj, Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Animal Crackers by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, Music and Lyrics by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, Reconceived from an Adaptation (deep breath) by Henry Wishcamper, Directed by Allison Narver,Oregon Shakespeare Festival

So there have been all of three posts on Grubb Street this December - This one, one wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, and one recommending other peoples's stuff. And there's a couple reasons for this sparcity of posts - part of it is a general post-GW2-ship lethargy, concealed briefly by the huggamugga of political posts that were, of course, time sensitive. But another was that I had a lot of things in the hopper I wanted to talk about, particularly play reviews from my now-temporally distances adventure in Ashland with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF). I accomplished two reviews in detail, but have the other six sort of clogging the pipeline. I COULD abandon them, because, really, who wants to read reviews about closed plays?, but they are still out there hanging. But to do so would mean I abandoned a personal goal, and I want to talk about them. And hey, it's my blog, and so here you are.

So this one is to bat cleanup, saying not nearly enough about them, but collecting all my notes.

Party People is a musical about the Black Panthers and the Young Lords gangs from the 60s. No, no, it's really good, in the music comes off the street, fits snugly with acting, has heart-felt, has engaged performances, and attempts to give a well-rounded view of the rise and fall of these community gangs in the 60s. The central theme is 60s revolution as reunion. A lot of old party members are gathered together by two of the new generation, Jimmy (Ruiz) and Malik (Christopher Livingston) both to commemorate and to be confronted with their past. There is not a lot of shirking of responsibility here, nor is there a surfeit of those responsible for the faults and failure of the revolution.

Except the revolution didn't really fail, did it, at least in terms of getting people to the table. The sixties were a messy, turbulent, violent, deadly time, and over the years that followed, it enabled more peoples moved out of the shadows and into the common discourse.The struggles of the era were not for nothing, in that it enfranchised people who were up to that point excluded from body politic.

The other thing I've noticed with both this play and the earlier All the Way was the casual nature of government infiltration. Back in the day, the government swore up and down they were not spying on its own people, yet here we are fifty years later when we are all "Oh yeah, we were spying on our own people". Which begs the question about currently declarations of innocence about federal-authorized crimes.

This was an excellent one, a ground-level response to All the Way. If it tours, go see it.

Troilus and Cressida is half a great play. The first half, the story of the union of the Trojans Troilus (Raffi Barsoumian) and Cressida (Tala Ashe), set against the greater epic of the Illiad, hums with the wit and verve of the best Shakespeare. Their marriage is arranged by Cresssida's uncle, the aptly named Pandarus, who is taken for a great comic turn by Barzin Akhavan. All of this is set against the Iraqi occupation, where the Greeks (Achilles, Ajax, et al) are Americans, and the Trojans are mideastern. Neither of the sides come off well, as the American Greeks are militaristic brutes, and the Mideastern Trojans (with the exceptions of the title characters) indolent elitists. 

Anyway, in the opening acts, Troilus and Cressida are united, Pandarus capers and connives, the Greeks posture and strut, and Cressida gives us the depth we come to expect from Shakespeare's women. And then after intermission, the wheels fall off. The play now concentrates on the Greeks and the Trojans and their war. Cressida is given to the Greeks as the price for her father's cooperation, but her story and that of Troilus gets lost against the backdrop of the war itself. Indeed, Cressida folds in on herself in a manner similar to Kate in Taming of the Shrew, throwing in with her new captors - a turn of events that is played in later presentations as a range from surrender and Stockholm syndrome to a knowing play for survival. But the truth of the matter is that we don't know the intent, and in this presentation, Cressida ends the play in enemy hands, her intent unknown, Troilus is in despair and gives himself up to battle, and the Trojans retreat with the body of Hector. It is a bleak ending that grinds home the merciless and unthinking brutality of war, but in doing so, undermines the work of the first half. It feels as if, in collecting this play, something was left out to bring it together, and as a result it lands with a thump.

The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa falls into the category of Shakespearesque plays - leaving the plot intact, but moving the verbage and setting elsewhere. In this case, picking up the pieces of the original Merry Wives and dropping it into modern, post pro-gay voting Iowa. So Master Ford and Mistress Ford are now Alice and Francie Ford, gay couple, the messages Falstaff delivers are by text, Windsor Forest is now the Iowa State Fair, and the famous laundry basket is now replaced with a recycling bin. And Sir John Falstaff, the brawling, lecherous, drunken antihero, is replaced with Senator John Falstaff, loser of the Iowa caucus.

And for me, that's where it all falls down. The acting is spot-on from all sides, turning Iowa into a mock-Shakespearean wonderland where Slender Shallow, a gender-changed chainsaw artist, sounds like Keaunu Reeves warping Shakespearean verse, and the Mistresses Ford and Paige shoving Falstaff around with great merriment. But Senator Falstaff (David Kelly) is portrayed as Romneyesque - Good hair, tall, charismatic, nice dresser, fast-talking. But Falstaff is also a womanizer, a drunkard, and chronically short of change, all of which cannot be attributed to Romney. So Senator Falstaff comes off as venal as opposed to overblown, a lesser-than-life figure. The end result is a bit of fun, but empty at the core.

Henry V, on the other hand, was one of the highpoints of the OSF, the resolution of the previous years of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. Falstaff was promised to return at the end of H4P2, but the play opens with him dead and the manner of his death recounted by the former members of his court. Something happened here off-stage - I suspect (though do not have the resources to confirm) that the actor identified as Falstaff died or left the company between the two plays, and was so identified he was written out as opposed to recast. If he had perished, it was a fitting testimony to the character, if he had left the company, it was a bit of petty revenge. Someone with more Shakespearean knowledge than I could give a more decisive discussion (because I safely assume that, given the breadth of Shakespearean studies, someone likely has done so).

In any event, John Tufts was fantastic in taking Prince Hal fully into Henry V. This is the play with the great speeches, including the Band of Brothers speech and the positively meta narration of the chorus. There is a culmination here, both in history, in writing, and in acting. This is a moving performance, and one of the OSF's best.

We did, though sit next to a couple who came up from the Bay area just for the day, and they were slightly bewildered at the break about what was happening in the play. I told them that it was as if they had experienced Star Wars by seeing Return of the Jedi first, and then gave them a short potted history of the previous plays, so the scene where Henry killed one of Falstaff's followers suddenly makes sense. It was a great play, and a wrap-up of several years of this series of histories.

Animal Crackers is in the category of the non-Shakespearean Draw for the OSF - the non-Shakespeare play that can put butts in the seats. Pirates of Penzance did it the previous year, and it looks like My Fair Lady fits that category for the coming season. Yes, this is the Marx Brothers movie, and is based on a revival of the Kaufman play. I had a chance to read the revival text, and would have liked to have read the original play itself, just as a purist.

I say that because the play is dealing with so many veils of movie versions and revivals (just look at the credits, above) that the original material, slender as it is, gets a bit lost. The plot is grand dame Mrs, Rittenhouse (K.T.Vogt, Cinderella's Godmother in Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella), scores the coup of snagging Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding (Mark Bedard, or rather Mark Bedard playing Julius Marx playing Groucho playing Captain Spaulding) as a houseguest. Chico (Daisuke Tsuji, brilliant) and Harpo (Brent Hickley, rubber-faced) arrive as musicians for the house party. Zeppo (a versatile Eddie Lopez) is in the movie Spaulding's secretary, but here takes on a slew of roles as the manpower-heavy Broadway production is converted into a smaller revival. That conversion is done with a bit of wink-and-nod stagecraft. In any event whackiness ensues, and the conclusion to the supposed plot is no more sound than in the movie version.

The actors are playing within the expected bounds for the most part. Mark Bedard as Spaulding (as Julius as Groucho as, well, you know) felt weak even for the matinee performance, and he seemed to take some time to warm up to the role. Daisuke Tsuji, on the other hand, brought a Chico that understood that vaudeville is a competition sport, and had an infectious enjoyment. Yes the jokes were old but he delivered them as if they were newly minted. We had nosebleed seats, and the miking on the actors was inconsistent, a rarity for the OSF. Some were miked, others were shouting to the bleachers.

Yet the biggest failing in the production was at the core. The movie version thrived on sending the madcap Brothers Marx into a straitlaced upper class household. Here, the household is as madcap as the Marxes. Mark Evanier, over in his blog, talked about making a Marx Brothers movie where Margaret Dumont was trying to be the funny one. This one did exactly that, and while Vogt neatly stole more than her fair share of scenes, it undercut the entire operation. Looking at the text, it feels like the socially-ambitious Rittenhouse is the only truly honest person in a mansion filled with gossips, art-thieves, impersonators, and, of course, Marxes (Marxi? Marxeses?)

In the end, it was great fun, but the serious Marxist in me (did I just write that?) wanted something a bit more. I'm glad this was not quite the museum piece I expected, but by the same time, felt that it was a bit underdone. Definitely worth seeing in the great pack of OSF plays, but a bit tepid on its own.

So where did it leave me? Loved Henry, Party People, All the Way. Can appreciate Animal Crackers and Troilus and Cressida for what they were. Felt meh about Merry Wives., but STILL found it better than most other theatre. Still looking for an aspiring dramatic student to explain what Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella was all about. And I'm looking at next year's collection with interest.

More later, 

Under Kandorian Skies

Yeah, it is irony when it takes me longer to tell you about the vacation than it did to experience it. But that's what happens when you have a lot of plays involved.

So this is closure, wrapping things up. We left Ashland, stopped in Portland overnight, and then headed up the Columbia Gorge to Marysville, jumped over the border into Washington State, stopped for dinner in Yakima, then home in the evening. The end.

That IS a Doozey!

Oh, all right, the details. In Portland we stayed as the Modera, a small downtown hotel reimagined for an upscale crowd - the rooms are small but original art is everywhere, and the central court is dominated by a green wall of plant cover. The afternoon was spent at the Portland Art Museum, which had a nice permanent collection within a pair of already-existing buildings, creating a large number of cul de sacs and side rooms. Three Monets, four Rodans, a John Singer Sargent.  A very nice collection, and if you haven't been, you should go. The interesting thing was a temporary show of "the Art of the Automobile", which translated into classic cars parked throughout the main gallery. Things like Steve McQueen's Jag, a Tucker, a Corvette Sting Ray, and my personal favorite car of all time, the 1931 Duesenberg (where you get the phrase"That's a Doozey!")

You hear that Portland is a younger and more vibrant town than Seattle, and its downtown has much to recommend. The hotel was awash in young artistic professionals, and walking back from dinner, we passed a group playing D&D on the porch of a game store while a young lady was parked under a lampost using the wifi. In downtown Portland. OK, I can get with it.You're younger and hipper than us. That's cool.

Kate's favorite modern art piece

The day following Portland was a day of hits and misses. We got to the Portland Rose Garden, which was all in bloom. Kate enjoyed the foliage while I considered the idea of roses as genetic intellectual property, and the huggamugga a few years back about patenting a life form. But we missed the Tea Garden. We drove up the gorge to a beautiful overlook to Vista Point, a thirties-era project that looks from afar to be something that escaped from a GRRMartin book, but could not find anything of Maya Lin's Confluence project, which is being developed along the length of the river. We got to Marysville and toured around the great Stonehenge there , but did not get to the museum there because we took the "historic" road up to Vista point, turning a 2 hour trip into a 6 hour one.

Vista Point, with wildfire.

And all under a strange red sky (hence the title of this entry). Oregon was on fire, or rather a chunk of it to the west of Mt. Hood. From Portland it was a grey line across the sky, like a belching smokestack. First I thought it pollution trapped under an inversion, but as we climbed beneath it, we discovered that the ground beneath our feet turned red from the scattered light, and our shadows were strange and shifting. It was a subtle shift as we moved through the waterfalls along the gorge, and gave the sidetrips and small hikes we made a strange quality of another world.

Oh yeah, waterfalls are all along the south side of the gorge, with walks of various length to get there. Personal fave was the Bridal Falls. The Multnomah Falls is higher, and closer to the main road, with the sad result that it was mobbed by other tourists, and parking was a pain. So if you walk, take the long road and hit the smaller falls for a better experience.

The Marysville Stonehenge

Oh, and the Stonehenge (having seen the original in England). It was created as a war memorial for local WWI vets by Sam Hill, whose tomb is nearby. The intent was to underscore that we have not advanced that far since the savage days when the original was set up. Mind you, this new version was a) built with concrete as opposed to individual stones, b) was set up to be what they thought the original "fixed" original arrangement of the henge was, and c) not oriented to the stars like the first one, because at the time they did not know about that feature. But the thought is good.

The end result of all this was about three weeks of extremely upbeat work, almost to a manic point. I was hopelessly aware that I was MUCH too much in a good mood upon my return, and had to back it off a few notches lest I frighten friends and co-workers. But it was so good to take a real vacation. I really should do it more often.

More later,