OSF's Pericles

Shakespeare's Pericles is a heartwarming story of a healed relationship between a father and his family that seems to parallel the author's own angst over his strained relationship with his family.

Written by Shakespeare while living and working in London, while his daughters lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, Pericles is the story of a father separated from his family by the pressures of his job as king of Tyre and the unfeeling tides of the universe. Pericles is written as an empathetic character, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's current production taps into that core quality of the script.

Pericles (Wayne T. Carr) meets his wife, Thaisa (Brooke Parks), while on the run from the villainous Antiochus (Scott Ripley). The pair have a daughter, Marina (Jennie Greenberry), while at sea, only to be separated by shipwreck. The three end up in different cities, but the story follows Marina and her salvation of Mytilene from the vice of lust through her unprecedented chastity. The play ends with the family's reunion at the hands of the goddess Diana (Emily Serdahl).

OSF's Pericles is a compelling piece because director Joseph Haj embraces the fairy tale qualities of the script, allowing Shakespeare's fantasy of a happy reunion with his family to play as such. It allows us to believe the happy end the way we might believe the happy end in any fairy tale: we don't necessarily believe the events of the, but we believe its sentiment. We believe that the Big Bad Wolf gets his just desserts and celebrate Little Red Riding Hood's victory. We are disappointed in the princess's mistreatment of the frog, and celebrate her reward upon behaving correctly. We hope that Pericles, Thaisa and Marina will be all right in the end, and cry just a little bit when they are. Pericles is a fairy tale, and Shakespeare's telling is the most famous one for us in our time, just like the Grimm brother's "Little Red Riding Hood" is the most famous telling of that tale. Shakespeare's Pericles is not an anonymous telling, however, who's author is shrouded behind the curtains of tradition and intermediary anthropologists. Shakespeare is very present in his Pericles, with Pericles' separation from his wife and daughter paralleling Shakespeare's own alienation from his family. That Pericles is most engaging once that central problem begins in the third act speaks to Shakespeare's Pericles' strength lying in the protagonist's role as an authorial proxy: since Shakespeare seems to have identified with Pericles in his struggle for reunion with his family, it's easiest for the audience to identify with Pericles there, too.

The lesson here is for playwrights to write not just what they know, but what they've experienced. The first two acts of Pericles are compelling only by OSF's stagecraft: the play speaks for itself when the protagonist's struggle parallels the author's own experience.

Theatrical Craftsmanship in "Three Days of Rain"

Silas Weir Mitchell brings his technically fantastic acting chops to the technically fantastic script of Three Days of Rain at Portland Center Stage.

Three Days of Rain is fairly standard kitchen-sink realism (the water in the sink even runs), to which Silas Weir Mitchell brings fairly standard acting techniques as Walker and Ned Janeway. So far so bland, but it's the proficiency of Richard Greenberg's script and Mitchell's acting that elevate PCS' production above what could have been prosaic stage-filler to something really exciting.

Three Days of Rain is written anti-chronologically: the first act is set in 1995, and the second act in 1965. Act One deals with Walker Janeway, his sister Nan (Lisa Datz) and childhood friend Pip Wexler (Sasha Roiz) just prior to and just after the reading of Ned's will. Pip's father Theo (also played by Sasha Roiz) and Ned were architectural business partners. Theo died first, and much later Ned. Neither Nan nor Walker were particularly close to Ned: he was a silent man and a distant father. Hence Walker's excitement at finding his father's journal in the apartment where Ned and Theo lived when they began their practice, which also serves as the venue for the entire play. The journal poses more questions than it answers: the evening on which their mentally unstable mother heard Walker laughing and bolted through a glass window, emerging "like a crystal being, then colorized," is entered into the journal simply as "a terrible night." The journal even begins prosaically: "three days of rain." The first act poses these questions and others, and the second act sets out to answer them by allowing us into a critical moment in the relationship between Ned and Theo and the mother Lina (also played by Datz).

Three Days of Rain's protagonists are Walker and Ned Janeway: Silas Weir Mitchell's characters. That means, taken as a whole, the play is the story of the relationship between son and father, and that it falls primarily on Mitchell's shoulders to tell that story. His acting, therefore, is the focal point of PCS's Three Days of Rain, and his presence on stage is a credit to Roiz and director Chris Coleman's bringing him into their prospective collaboration, from whence this project springs. Mitchell's technique as an actor is phenomenal. Currently, audiences have their primary exposure to him in his work as a series regular on Grimm (also co-starring Roiz), but his resume goes back years to his undergraduate and graduate work at Brown and UC San Diego, respectively. Even in minor roles, written as jokes, such as Donny Jones on My Name Is Earl, his technique steals his scenes. The only problem with Mitchell on TV is that we don't get to see enough of him. Three Days of Rain is a fantastic showcase for Mitchell's craft in that it allows us to see him use physicality, voice and methods of receiving information over the course of more than two hours to define two very different characters. Besides just showing us what a great actor Mitchell is, PCS' Three Days of Rain is a testament to the importance of craftsmanship in theater.

Greenberg's script has been performed in LORT theaters since the 90s, and with good reason: it's a technical masterpiece that plays well to Boomer subscribers comfortable with kitchen-sink realism. As such, it's a perfect vehicle for a technically brilliant actor like Silas Weir Mitchell. It's a reminder that if you're doing something well, even if you're doing something as notoriously familiar as kitchen-sink realism, you'll be doing something exciting and special.