The Tenth Muse

When I taught my class of undergrads at Stony Brook University, I infused my graduate research in Native theater into my syllabus. I taught plays by Lynn Riggs, Bruce King and Luis Valdez. The impact on my students, especially those of Native and/or Hispanic descent, was noticeable. Students are brought up on a scholastic diet of the Western Canon, which is made up almost exclusively of dead white male writers. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that – in my last review I wrote about the multiple points of access to King Lear. But there’s always a disconnect if the artist doesn’t come from a background similar to that of the audience. My students of Native and Hispanic descent were able to engage with Mummified Deer better than perhaps any of my students of whatever background could with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

So imagine my delight when I opened up my program and found out that The Tenth Muse would feature Indian characters! And not the racist kind that are POC servants who give wise advice to the white protagonists. No, the protagonist in The Tenth Muse is a mestiza. Other characters occupy other positions on the colonial Mexican social ladder. The play itself represents an exploration of the social hierarchy in 17^th century Mexico. “Why, that’s irrelevant to us 21^st century Americans,” you may opine. “Not to me,” I might respond. My own family was colonized in the 19^th century by the United States. Granted, the structure of colonization between California in 1850 and Mexico in 1650 are markedly different: in Mexico, the Catholic Church was a major player and the goal was to enslave the indigenous population. In northern California, the goal was to kill us all, irrespective of anybody’s religion. That said, both Karuks and Nahuas (my tribe and the tribe represented in Tenth Muse respectively) suffered colonization. In both instances, people of mixed-race (like me) constituted a challenge to the racial hierarchy established in the Western hemisphere. So, yeah, this play resonated with me, and it’s not even about the kind of Indian I am. In a theatrical culture where Shakespeare is the bane of the working playwright, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a Shakespeare festival commissioning a new work. And its especially invigorating for that new work to be by a playwright outside of the Anglo mainstream. And that it’s a play with strong Native over-tones? I love it.  

King Lear

Shakespeare has been dead for about 400 years. He wrote for an audience that was just starting to get into colonialism and threw their poop out of windows. Why, then, do we still produce/watch/read/study his plays?

Because they’re stories a multiplicity of people can sink their teeth into. Because they have so many ways to access them. Because of productions like OSF’s close-to-closing King Lear.

My grandpa just died. I loved the guy, and he was the grandpa I was closest to. And grief is a funny thing for me, because I tend to analyze it and over-think it and rob it of its emotional effect by putting it all in my head. Watching Lear and Gloucester get old and die in horribly dramatic ways helped me shed my tears. As an audience member, the play effected me in a way Lear never has before. But as a dramaturg, I have to understand why.

To do that, I want to go back to Aristotle. He holds (and I quote Ingram Bywater’s translation of Poetics) that the “tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear…” (1453b 12) What does that mean? According to Aristotle “…pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves…” (1453a 5-6) Lear and Gloucester make mistakes, but do they deserve the extent of their misfortunes? Does the old Lear really deserve to be cast out by his daughters and wander half-naked and mentally unhinged? Does Gloucester deserve to have his eyes ripped out? They aren’t villains, who knowingly sow discord and destruction like Iago. Nor are they heroes who save kin and country like Henry V. No, Lear and Gloucester are “…the intermediate kind of personage, [men] not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon [them] not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment…” (1453a 6-8) So that’s pity. What about fear, the recognition of one like yourself. King Lear needs to have his train of one hundred knights. “Oh, reason not the need. Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.” (King Lear II.4 vs.267-270) Sometimes old men struggle with the need to give up those things that they’re accustomed to, that give them a sense of independence. “And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.” (IV.7 vs.62-63) It’s normal for people, when they get older, to feel their minds start to slip. And the humiliation that can come from admitting it was clear in Michael Winters’ performance as the titular king.

That brings us to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Any play with as many access points as Lear is easy to do poorly. So how did Bill Rauch and Company do it well? By trusting the story, and not getting in the way of it. The Aristotelian pity is present in the text, but the Aristotelian fear comes from finding the truth in the text. And there’s no recognition of truth without trust. Rauch enunciated it finely in his program note:

“We have chosen a simple, contemporary approach for this production in our most intimate space to minimize any distance between you and the play’s bracing truths. The designers and I are here to serve the actors, and our entire cast is awash in skill and courage.”

It’s easy, as an artist, to get caught up in your own creativity. It’s much harder to let go and trust your collaborators. And Shakespeare, in spite of being dead and not having had a conception of basic bathroom hygiene, is one of the best collaborators a theater artist can work with. There’s a reason his plays remain popular after 400 years.   

My Fair Lady

All three of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival plays I’ve seen this year (Cymbeline, Heart of Robin Hood, and now My Fair Lady) not only feature dynamic female protagonists, but the women playing the protagonists find depth in the most light-hearted plays and humor in the heaviest. 

Everyone knows Lerner & Loewe’s musical adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion. It’s standard fair for community and high school theaters across the country, not to mention a delightful film starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. So one can imagine how it could become over-wrought and boring. That makes it up to the artists retelling this classic to do it in a way that makes it worth going to the theater instead of just popping in the DVD. Rachel Warren, under the direction of Amanda Dehnert, tells the story of Eliza Doolittle in a way that I’ve never considered, and yet perfectly explains my single greatest problem with the script.

Why does Eliza go back to Higgins? He’s clearly an awful, abusive man. For years and years I thought it was just the American happy-ending pastiche – the guy gets the girl, consequences be damned. But Warren found a part of Eliza that I’d never seen before. The simple body gesture of flinching when Alfred P. Doolittle (Anthony Heald) or Higgins (Jonathan Haugen) makes a sudden movement in her direction tells a story of a girl who was beat by her alcoholic father. Her relationship with him, being scared of him and oh so easy for him to manipulate carries over into all her other relationships with men in the play. This is especially true of that with Higgins, but also with Freddy (Ken Robinson) and Pickering (David Kelly). When she leaves Higgins, she jumps right into the arms of the first man who will have her, even though Freddy clearly has nothing going for him – he’s spent weeks literally rolling around on the street where she lives. Why? In the scene after the break-up in Mrs. Higgins’ house (played by Kate Mulligan) she tells Higgins that the difference between a lady and a flower-girl is not in how she acts or speaks but in how she is treated. She denies herself any agency, and puts it all into the hands of Higgins who treats all women like flower-girls and Pickering who treats them all like ladies.

So when she told Higgins goodbye forever and slammed the door behind her, I was happy for her, like I always am. And that slamming door was so final! Director Dehnert approached the story wanting to find the messiness in it, and to that end put the chorus in seats on stage, let the wires hang out, and put all her actors on stage for their warm-ups before the show started. All of this paid off when the huge shop door up stage opened at the end of the “good-bye forever” scene and slammed in Henry Higgins’ face. It felt very Ibsenesque. But where the power of the slamming door in A Doll House is that that’s the end, its power of OSF’s My Fair Lady is that it isn’t. It’s irony that A Doll House, by a playwright who reveled in the messiness of life, has a clean happy ending – Nora gets agency over her own life. But My Fair Lady, a light-hearted musical by the American fantasy-makers Lerner & Loewe, has an untidy heart-breaking ending – Eliza is trapped in a cycle of abusive relationships and this story will repeat itself until she’s dead or becomes Nora Helmer.

The Heart of Robin Hood

I’ve been reading Michael Shurtleff’s Audition this past week. It was a book I was assigned in undergrad but never read. I found it in my parents’ house this summer and, since I’m doing a bunch of auditions again, I thought I might as well do my homework. 

I wonder if I could still get credit for it…

Anyway, one of the tips that Shurtleff has is to play opposites. For example, let’s pretend your character is trying to get Hamlet to stop swinging his sword around Polonius’ tapestry, because, hey, you don’t really want your son to become guilty on manslaughter. What’s the opposite of that? Maybe that you really would like him to kill Polonius because the old creep is basically your homicidal husband’s canary, and it would make sure that Hamlet no longer came near you with his theatrical mousetraps and visions of the dead. If you keep both of those opposites in play, it makes your performance much more dynamic and gives you as an actor much more to work with.

And how does this ties into OSF’s The Heart of Robin Hood? That play is a good example of playing opposites in an entire production. On its surface, it’s a silly play. Almost Monty Python silly. Eduardo Placer’s Bishop of York called Eric Idle’s performance as Pontius Pilate in The Life of Bryan vividly to mind. But what made this play really good was the pervading rot of violence and injustice that the silliness was in constant conflict with. Playwright David Farr wrote a villain with no redeeming qualities: Prince John thinks nothing of rape, infanticide, or using religion to legitimize his misdeeds. Michael Elich sells the role by, once again playing opposites. He does all these awful things, but he does them with a sense of playfulness and glee that makes his character all the more disgusting, and thus the conflict in the play so much more dire.

So opposites. They’re a part of the craft that I never gave any thought to, but now that I do, I see how they can not only exponentially increase the quality of a single actor’s performance, but that of an entire production as well.

I really should try to remember who assigned me that book.

The Blacklist

Judging from the pilot, NBC’s new crime show The Blacklist has the potential to be a well-crafted thriller, but will contribute very little to the genre. I’ll start with the negatives first. I watched the pilot with my dad, and we could tell in the first five minutes what would happen in the last five minutes: the innocent child would be saved, the bad guy would die a dramatic death, and the criminal mastermind and gorgeous rookie would continue as tenuous team to episode two. We even predicted the twist that creator Jon Bokenkamp is probably saving for the later in the season: that cunning criminal mastermind Raymond “Red” Reddington (James Spader) is really the long-lost father of the beautiful and driven young FBI agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone). But we may not be 100 percent on target: the cliffhanger at the end of the pilot caught us both off-guard. 

What’s really striking, though, is the staging. And I am going to call it that even though this is TV because the way that episode director Joe Carnahan blocked it was very similar to how a stage director would set his characters to establish positions of dominance. Of particular note was the central position that Red occupied, such as kneeling on the seal in the center of the FBI foyer with the entire focus of the rest of the ensemble on him, or sitting in the board room centered once again by the FBI seal on the projector behind him as well as by the other characters in the scene. I also loved the staging of episode antagonist Ranko Zamani’s (Jamie Jackson) inevitable death.

Long story short, the writing and acting is compelling and entertaining, but doesn’t break in barriers or contribute anything new to the genre. Carnahan’s directing was intriguing in its use of theatrical techniques, but that seemed to be a one-off gig for him. What will define this show are entertaining formulas that have been tried and true since at least the early 90s with Silence of the Lambs. I think it’ll be a fun but forgettable show.

The Revenants

I’ve found love in Portland. In a basement. Oh, it’s not for me. It’s two other people  There’s a man and a woman. They have chemistry. Their undead spouses are chained to the wall.

The Reformers’ new production The Revenants is about love. There may be zombies inside, and there may be zombies outside, but the story is about the conflicted love that Gary (Chris Murray) and Karen (Christy Bigelow) have for each other and their spouses (Jennifer Elkington and Sean Doran). Murray and Bigelow are riveting. Not to say they’re perfect – some of their lines (on Thursday the 3^rd) sounded learned. But the majority of their performances stuck me to my seat, even with the zombified Elkington looming over me.

The horror genre’s easy to do campy, which sometimes works. And the Reformers could have taken that route and potentially still had an entertaining play. But Murray and Bigelow’s choices – made honestly from a place of love, loss and feeling lost – make the difference between entertaining and enchanting. They treat the play as serious drama, rather than a theatrical homage to a popular genre. Not to say there isn’t humor or gore – there are zombies chained to the wall, close enough to touch me in my aisle seat. A couple times I almost fell into the lap of the guy next to me. But the bulk of the humor comes from the Murray and Bigelow’s attempt to cope with their impossible situation. The rest comes from Caitlin Fisher-Draeger’s awesome effects and movement work with Elkington and Doran.

Long story short, the Reformers chose to tell a love story that takes place during a zombie apocalypse, instead of a zombie story with a love-interest in it. That choice, to ground the fantastic in reality, makes The Revenants an exciting play, and is helping make the Reformers one of my favorite theater troupes in Portland. 

My Introduction to "America's Next Top Model"

I watched America’s Next Top Model for the first time this week. I will never get that hour of my life back. It was one of the most superficial things I’ve ever seen. The overall structure was very internet-y: the cuts between shots gave it an epileptic pace, and the countdown format was like something you would see on Cracked.com (they were counting down the “top ten flirty moments” of their twentieth cycle). The overall theme was not fashion, but cattiness and superfluous drama. It’s appeal is not so much industry like TheSartorialist.com, but rather gossip like TMZ. The stereotyped characters – the flamboyant yet incisive gay, the manic pixie dream boy, the slightly mannish trans woman – also made the show thoughtless noise that stimulates the senses but deadens the mind. I would have had a more fulfilling evening looking at pictures in a magazine.