Re-telling "A Wrinkle in Time"

Tracy Young's adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, playing at OSF through November 1st, is a beautiful re-telling of a beautiful story about learning to live and let live and love.

Alejandra Escalante

Young, who also directs, is credited in the Playbill as an adaptor, but this play is really a staging of L'Engle's original text, abridged. This devotion to text, already a hallmark of OSF's work, brings L'Engle's classic tale of embracing your flaws and allowing yourself to love directly from the private pages of a book to the public space of the Angus Bowmer theater.

Meg Murry (Alejandra Escalante) is swept away from her suburban home with her genius little brother Charles Wallace (Sara Bruner) and friend Calvin O'Keefe (Joe Wegner) by the three Mrs. Ws (Judith-Marie Bergan, K.T. Vogt on opening night, and an unaccredited actress as Mrs. Which) to save her father (Dan Donohue). The children learn from the Happy Medium (Kate Mulligan) that all good things in the universe are at war with the Black Thing, a heavy evil presence. Some of the best fighters in this war have come from our insignificant planet - Jesus, Crazy Horse, etc. The Mrs. Ws tesser the children through space-time to the planet Camazotz where Mr. Murry is being held captive by IT, a malevolent intelligence through whose influence the entire planet has succumbed to the Black Thing. In order to defeat IT and save her family, Meg has to embrace her flaws - particularly difficult for an awkward adolescent girl - and to discover the thing that "she's got that IT hasn't got."

At its core, that's just what L'Engle's story is - an adolescent girl learning to accept herself for who she is. L'Engle and, by staging her text, OSF invest us in Meg's journey by establishing a binary moral code. This isn't hard for the audience to accept - we're brought up on binary moralities, whether they be God versus Satan or American freedom versus foreign oppression. In L'Engle's story, the Mrs. Ws are the standard bearers for Good, and teach Meg to accept herself as an individual. IT, whose modus operandi is to subvert the wills of others to ITs own, bears the standard for Evil. This simple devise is the key to A Wrinkle in Time's longevity and continued appeal - it encourages us, especially the young adults among us who need it the most, to simply be ourselves and to encourage those we care for to be themselves.

A Wrinkle in Time is a joy to read and a joy to see on the Angus Bowmer stage. People of all ages need stories that encourage them to love themselves. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is deeply invested in English and American theater classics, and A Wrinkle in Time is a welcome addition to the OSF canon.

Clowning at The Cocoanuts

http://osfashland.org/productions/2014-plays/the-cocoanuts.aspx

Oregon Shakespeare Festival's The Cocoanuts demonstrates, paradoxically, the limitations imposed upon the text both by the Marx Brothers' use of film as a medium, and by OSF's use of stage.

The Cocoanuts was originally a Broadway musical written for the Brothers by Irving Berlin and George S. Kaufman (and it's adapted here by Mark Bedard). The Marx Brothers came up in vaudeville, with audience interaction as part of their act. Breaking the fourth wall translates from smaller comedy stages to the big Broadway ones, but doesn't to film. At the same time, Berlin and Kaufman wrote this play for the Marx's clown characters, which limits OSF's clowns (Eduardo Placer, Mark Bedard, Bret Hinkley and John Tufts) with impersonating somebody else's lazzi.

Placer plays Robert Jamison/Zeppo, an aspiring architect making ends meet at the Cocoanuts Hotel while wooing the well-off Polly Potter (Jennie Greenberry). But her staid rich mother, Mrs. Potter (K. T. Vogt) will none of it - she wants Polly to marry the likewise-moneyed Harvey Yates (Robert Vincent Frank). Fortunately for Robert, he's got his employer Mr. Hammer/Groucho (Bedard) in his corner. Oh, Hammer won't pay him his back wages - smart-ass puns instead of amenities do not a solvent hotelier make. But, assisted by Chico and Harpo (Tufts and Hinkley), Hammer instills just enough anarchy to dissolve social distinctions and help this bright-eyed idealist marry the girl of his dreams.

That anarchy includes improvising with the audience, which injects a certain unpredictability that changes the show night to night. What doesn't change are the lazzi, or stock business, of the clowns with the exception of Placer's Zeppo. In the movies, Zeppo Marx is always the straight-man, quite uninteresting compared to his vibrant elder brothers. That blandness gives Placer an opportunity to expand his character's repertoire; a luxury the other three clowns don't have in their responsibility to American comic iconography. This paradox teaches two important lessons about clowning: first, it belongs on stage. Comedy, as a tool of subversion and anarchy, thrives on the unpredictability of direct interaction with the audience. But even semi-rigid texts like Bedard's adaptation of Berlin and Kaufman, not to mention the iconographic legacy of Groucho, Chico and Harpo, limits the anarchy.

The paradox is that the stage allows freedom from the fourth wall, but theatrical conventions of textual supremacy and loyalty to the classics limit that freedom. That's not to say this play isn't good: it's great. The Marx Brothers, even in impersonation, work far better on stage than on screen. That said, Marx Brothers texts are limited by Marx Brothers films in that the films sustain their iconographic lazzi. A better choice might have been creating a full-fledged piece of commedia dell'arte: it would free the clowns from the text while retaining Oregon Shakespeare Festival's classical roots.