"Long Day's Journey Into Night"

In the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's hands, Eugene O'Neill's private anguish in Long Day's Journey Into Night taps into the universal hell of addiction.

Dramaturg Lydia G. Garcia's program notes point out that the experience lived by the Tyrone is autobiographically similar to that lived by the O'Neill family during Eugene's growing up. In the very capable hands of the acting quintet (Michael Winters, Judith-Marie Bergan, Jonathan Haugen, Danforth Comins and Autumn Buck), OSF's study on the social effects of addiction resonates with startling clarity.

The set (by Christopher Acebo) and costumes (by Meg Neville) are both realist: director Christopher Liam Moore keeps any ego out of the way of the play. The opening sequence is almost a laugh a minute, punctuated by moments of tension when one of a character's addictions are obliquely referenced. As these tense punctuation points unfold, a pattern emerges: the tension exists between the three men. Mother Mary Cavan Tyrone (Bergan) brings the much needed levity. Slowly we learn that she has a problem of her own: she's addicted to morphine, and recently returned from a sanitarium. We also learn how easily she can slip back into using in the face of husband James' (Winters) alcoholism, son James Junior's (Haugen) alcoholism and gambling addiction, and son Edmund's (Comins) mysterious illness. It's so easy for her to quietly slip into the isolation of being stoned and escape the others' sicknesses, and her own sense of failure and ennui. Once she retreats into her addiction, the levity is gone and she drifts ghost-like into the background: rarely seen and never distant. The three men are left to their own devises, and explore their own vices in O'Neill's meditative prose.

Addiction, like Mary, is surprisingly invisible for its nearness to everyone. In this study, O'Neill examines the ways in which those closest to us can be afflicted, and yet, because of how isolating addiction is, it may take years before we're cognizant of what ails them. Long Day's Journey Into Night is a classic and unfortunate instance wherein a deeply personal story is in fact universal. Whether you yourself reside in that hell, or simply have to watch powerlessly as those you love sink into it, O'Neill's text resonates.

OSF's team, led by Moore, both allows O'Neill's anguish to reverberate, and gives it body to do so. It can do so because of how familiar addiction's isolation is: if you yourself suffer from one, how can you ever communicate that hell to someone who doesn't? When you watch your childhood friend retreat further and further into vodkas and crans until you can't even see him any more, how can you understand his pain or communicate your own sadness and helplessness to the guy sitting next to you who's never known any of his friends or family to suffer so? By exploring his own anguish, O'Neill taps into the universally isolating hell that is addiction, and OSF brings us into a room together to think about it.

"Head over Heels"

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in its relentless drive towards leadership in all things American theater, is currently premiering the next big thing from Jeff Whitty.

Whitty's new musical, Head Over Heels, juxtaposes Philip Sydney's Elizabeth romp Arcadia with the music of the Go-Go's. As such, it's a perfect combination of the Avenue Q's playwright's chops as a pop culture bard with OSF's dual interests in the existing Canon and in expanding it to include, among other things, women.

John Tufts, as the mercurial fool Philanax, opens the show (playing in the outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theatre), with the obligatory "turn off your cell phones" and an etymological musing on the word "twilight." We in the audience watch the sky change as Philanax explains that "twilight" is Anglo-Saxon for "two lights": that of the day and that of the night. It's about simultaneous opposites. And then the show begins. Basilius, King of Arcadia (Michael Sharon) is visiting The Oracle (Michele Mais), and she gives him four prophecies, all of which have to do with his losing control over his wife and daughters. Oedipally, Basilius leaves Arcadia to seek out Philanax's Bohemian homeland and escape his fate. In tow are his wife Gynecia (Miriam A. Laube), his beautiful daughter Pamela (Bonnie Milligan), and other daughter Philoclea (Tala Ashe), who's "stunningly routine appearance" leaves her in her sister's shadow. She has one suitor, though: the young shepherd Musidorus (Dylan Paul). Desperate that this may be his last chance, he proposes with "I'm Mad About You." Philoclea tells him "no", though, and hits the road with her family. While travelling, Philanax introduces the sisters to a game in which two opposites are written on either side of a card. The object is to embody both at once. Bored with the parlor game, Pamela reads Philoclea and Philanax a poem describing her perfect suitor. Much to the audience's delight, her perfect man is in fact a woman. When she and her lady-in-waiting Mopsa (Britney Simpson) harmonize on "Automatic Rainy Day" together, we know specifically which woman her perfect suitor is. It's here that lovelorn Musidorus reappears, following along like a spaniel. At Philanax's suggestion, and an opportunity presented by the chest of a theater troupe who died of not being able to find a "meaningful message," he disguises himself as the Amazon warrior Cleophila. He rescues the family from a ravenous lion single-handedly, and mother and father both fall in love with him/her. The stage is set for the Oracle's prophecies to all come true and for Basilius and family (and us the audience) to learn about the many nuances and shapes of true love.

Head Over Heels is a fun juxtaposition between Sydney's Elizabethan romance, and the Go-Go's rockin' beat. Jeff Whitty, though, is the man who makes them come together so well. His background in writing socially conscious musicals like Avenue Q, and in playing with the classics as in The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler stand him in good stead in this project. By playing to his strengths, he's turned out an exciting retelling of a classic text.

OSF is a good place for him to initiate this project: they have a strong background in the classics, with an Elizabethan emphasis, but are also doing exciting work to expand the Canon to include voices that have been historically suppressed by a male, Anglo-Saxon and straight hegemony. By juxtaposing the Go-Go's work with that of an Anglo-Saxon male contemporary of the Bard, they acknowledge the Go-Go's cultural relevancy and their deserving admission to the Canon. And, to top it all off, it's a fun juxtaposition! Whitty's fun, the Go-Go's are fun, Sydney's fun - the whole thing's fun! By sticking to his strengths, Whitty's delivered a musical that's simultaneously fun and thought-provoking.

Hero's Journey

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's current production of Much Ado About Nothing makes it clear that the story's real hero is Hero herself.

Much Ado is two stories intertwined into one play: the "Merry War" between Beatrice and Benedick, and Hero's journey from the altar to the grave back to the altar. The Merry War is the perennial crowd pleaser, but Hero is the play's heart.

Much Ado begins with soldiers returning home to Messina, to be greeted by Beatrice (Christiana Clark) and Hero (Leah Anderson). Beatrice immediately starts laying into Benedick (Danforth Comins) before the latter even arrives, but Hero remains passive: laughing good naturedly at her cousin's antics, and allowing herself to be wooed by Don Pedro (Cristofer Jean) on behalf of Claudio (Carlo Albán). Her greatest moment of activity comes when she describes how madly in love with Beatrice Benedick is, while her cousin eaves drops. She loses her agency again when Claudio insults and refuses her at the altar, all on the strength of Don Jon's treachery, and his own fear of women. She's caught in the claws of the patriarchy: when she denies that she had sex with another man on the night before her wedding, her own father (Jack Willis) asks, "Would the two princes lie?" To escape, she has to feign death and then resurrect herself at the Friar's (Tyrone Wilson) suggestion. It's at the play's conclusion that she regains some semblance of autonomy: her public forgiveness of the men's transgressions is what allows the play to end.

The Merry War is Much Ado's entertaining selling point, especially when the belligerents have as much chemistry as Clark and Comins, but it's also the sugar that helps the proverbial medicine go down. Shakespeare apparently spent more time with Hero's journey than the Merry War, seeing as the former is written in verse and the latter prose. For the most part, the Merry War you see is the Merry War you get: Beatrice and Benedick pretend not to like each other, and flirtingly tease each other, but all it takes is a little nudge and they're plastering their own nuptials onto cousin Hero's wedding. The only place we get to see the substance of their rapport with each other is alliteratively not-funny "Kill Claudio." Phrased differently, Hero's journey shows us the substance behind the Merry War. On the other hand, Hero's arc closely parallels the most important story in Elizabethan culture: the death and resurrection of Jesus. Hero is innocent, but nonetheless forced into her grave by the faults of others. Her primary antagonist must confess his sins to her before she returns from the grave and, at least publicly, she forgives him and the other sinners. The differences between Shakespeare's story and the one(s) in the Bible are telling: in contrast to Jesus' masculinity, we have Hero's femininity. While Jews and Romans are responsible in the Bible for Jesus' crucifixion, it's men organized in a sexually immature patriarchy who are responsible for Hero's figurative interment. Hero's journey is a rather forward thinking critique of a society structured around male power and frailties, and constitutes the soul of Much Ado About Nothing. The Merry War's function is to pick up the mood from the troubling, and perhaps blasphemous, implications of Hero's Passion. Telling that story, though, calls for a strong actress: one who can tell a story to a rather cavernous house without saying it. Hero is a repressed female, who only says the sorts of things that her men want her to say. It's her hamartia, since it puts her in a position where living her life at their behest means alienation from them since, for the most part, they're stupid and viciously insecure. Leah Anderson is an actress who can tell that story, and director Lileana Blain-Cruz is a director who knows enough to give Hero's character the attention needed to allow Anderson to do her job. In Anderson and Blain-Cruz's hands, OSF's Much Ado is a compelling narrative about a woman Jesus, the gall of which is sweetened by the sugar of Clark and Comins' merry banter.

Hero is the oft overlooked hero of Much Ado About Nothing, but she's not at all overlooked by OSF. Leah Anderson and Lileana Blain-Cruz are the heroes of this particular production for giving her the weight the play needs her to have.

E Is for Empathy, F Is for Fingersmith

Augusto Boal, in his Theatre of the Oppressed, takes a cynical view of dramaturgy that excites empathy. He describes that the dominate powers in a given society use empathetic theater as a means to normalize systems that reinforce their control. Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, as adapted for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival by Alexa Junge, demonstrates how empathetic theater can be used to assert the rights of an oppressed group in the face of belligerent social systems.

Fingersmith's impact centers on the work of Waters, Junge, Sara Bruner (who plays Sue Trinder) and Erica Sullivan (who plays Maud Lilly). Waters and Junge craft a suspenseful love journey between Sue and Maud, and Bruner and Sullivan deliver grounded performances that inspire empathy in the travails of the protagonists.

The first act is told through the point of view of Sue, a "fingersmith," or jill-of-all-crimes in Victorian England. She's hired on to a con by the Gentleman (Elijah Alexander) to defraud Maud Lilly. The Gentleman is paying court to the heiress whose inheritance is in trust until she marries. Sue is to hire on as Maud's servant to support the Gentleman's suit. Once the pair are married, they plan to dump Maud into a mad house. Her inheritance will go to the Gentleman, and he and Sue will split the take. As the women spend more and more time with each other, however, they develop a friendship that blossoms into an illicit love affair. After a cliff-hanger chapter-end at the end of Act I, Maud takes over as the point of view character. Act II likewise ends in a cliff-hanger, whetting appetites for the climactic Act III.

It's hard not to draw parallels between the drowningly homophobic milieu that Waters writes in Fingersmith with Indiana and Arkansas' attention-grabbing attempts at passing discriminatory anti-gay laws, and Oklahoma's acquiescence to gay-conversion therapy. When gay kids are being driven onto the streets by parents who are too caught up in their own prejudices to love their offspring, when American Protestant morality equates itself with discrimination on the basis of sexuality, we need stories that normalize homosexual love. Fingersmith, at least with Bruner and Sullivan in the protagonic roles, takes the audience on a journey on which we root for Sue and Maud to overcome the homophobic road-blocks thrown in their path by Waters' Victorian England. Whether or not we in the audience are lesbians, we can empathize with this love story. Since non-heterosexuals are gleefully and anachronistically oppressed in the U.S., empathy plays the opposite role in Fingersmith of how Boal describes it. Instead of normalizing systems of oppression, this dramaturgy in Fingersmith normalizes equality.

Fingersmith uses classic empathetic dramaturgy to assert the rights of our homosexual citizens. Since some of our other, more Victorian, citizens, are currently in the process of trying to take homosexual rights away, Waters' story is especially timely.

Music for a Thinking Public

When was the last time you listened to challenging, thought-provoking music in a public space? On the radio dial, only classical and jazz stations elevate the art form above mesmerizing lyricism. On the street you might meet the occasional virtuoso busker, but that's if you're lucky.

Or, you might go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Green Show, where Ghosts & Strings are playing a few gigs this season. "Ghosts & Strings" is the nome de musique of David Molina, joined for the Green Show by Idris Ackamoor. Molina is a sound designer whose music is informed by his interdisciplinary work in theater, film and installation art. Ackamoor is a jazz man. The complicated interaction of their two musical practices forces the public to listen, and to think about what we're listening to. 

The Green Show happens on a small stage between OSF's three theaters, and acts play to an audience seated on the lawn, or standing on the brick walkways to the Elizabethan and Bowmer theaters. At least, they usually do. Ghosts & Strings use the whole space - entering and exiting through the middle of the lawn, Ackamoor walking between audience members blowing his sax. The pair play an eclectic mix of instruments: Molina creates digital beats, plays a banjo with a bow, strums rock and classical riffs on the guitar, and picks the bow back up to play the cello. Ackamoor wails on his sax, and on his Native flute, and plucks a harp, and tap dances with a washboard on his chest and a harmonica on his lips.

The core of the music, though is the jazz: Molina's digital beats, and Ackamoor improvising melodies over the top. The rest of Ghosts & Strings' show distracted from that core. That sounds like a bad thing, but it isn't necessarily. Jazz is a cerebral music: unlike genres that lull the audience into a viscerally thoughtless haze with their lyrical narratives, audiences have to really pay attention to jazz to enjoy it. That goes doubly for Ghosts & Strings' jazz, where we have to listen to the whole spectrum of what they're playing, identify the core of their music, and then listen through everything else to that core. And "we", in this case, means "we the public." The Green Show is free, easily accessible and open to everyone.

As a non-narrative art form, instrumental jazz engages us in a more thought provoking way than the narrative, lyrical music that we are usually exposed to in public spaces. In Oregon, we have very few organizations that promote that deeper appreciate for music by providing instrumental jazz for free to the public. One of those is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Of course, it's up to the public to take advantage of the resources that are freely available to us, whether that means tuning into the jazz station on 89.1FM if you're in Portland, or coming to see and listen to Ghosts and Strings next time they play at the Green Show on October 12th if you're in the Rogue Valley.

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.

Economic Inequity in "Water by the Spoonful"

Daniel José Molina

There's a fine line between creating socially conscious theater and creating theater that exploits the poor. Playwrights writing about a community that's not their own are more likely to cross that line. Quiara Alegría Hudes, in Water by the Spoonful, dodges that bullet. What's less clear is what exactly her play, rooted in economically blighted North Philadelphia, contributes towards a solution to her community's problems.

Hudes starts writing her plays about North Philly by interviewing her relatives who still live there (she lives in Brooklyn). She adds a layer of fiction to protect the innocent, and then writes award winning plays that are being staged in some of the nation's best theaters, like the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. While allowing the disenfranchised denizens of a community where the most viable economy is drug trafficking to tell their stories is empowering, it's not clear that Hudes' "Elliot Cycle" contributes much else to her community.

The first act of Water by the Spoonful is two seemingly divergent stories: one of a veteran affected by PTSD who has just lost his adoptive mother, the other of a chatroom for people struggling with crack addiction. The set, designed at OSF by Sibyl Wickersheimer, is two columns of blue square platforms. The chatroom participants use these as their individual worlds, but the vet Elliot (Daniel José Molina) and his cousin Yasmin Ortiz (Nancy Rodriguez) are freer in their transgressions of the blue boundaries. Towards the end of the first act we discover their connective tissue - both stories are principally located in North Philly, and Odessa Ortiz, a.k.a. Haikumom (Vilma Silva), is both the founder of the chatroom and the birth mother of Elliot. The second act brings the characters face to face with their demons, whether they be Elliot's PTSD or Odessa's guilt over the death of her daughter, and the addictions that their demons bring with them.

While there is a token rich white man in the chatroom (John a.k.a. Fountainhead, played by Barret O'Brien), this is really about poverty in North Philly. Elliot is a soldier, and we know that our military is built on the backs of economically disadvantaged young people. For those who stay in North Philly, the primary means of employment is selling drugs to local addicts and recreational users from other neighborhoods. These problems are rooted in a complex history of race-based socio-economics, including limited opportunities for Blacks and Latinos, and white flight. One play played primarily for middle to upper class whites in Oregon, however, is unlikely to promote equity and better quality of life for denizens of disadvantaged communities. Granted, Hudes' documentary process of writing plays that allows voices from an isolated and blighted community to be heard from New York to Oregon is empowering, but that empowerment does not necessarily create employment opportunities for North Philadelphians outside of the drug industry.

There are two good ways to avoid exploitation in creating theater about disadvantaged communities: the first is to have significant ties to the communities you're creating theater about, and the second is to use your theater to work towards solutions for your community's significant issues. Hudes has deep familial roots in North Philly, so it's not like she's telling stories about somebody else's economically devastated community for financial gain. However, it's unlikely that a play in Ashland can have a direct positive impact on the economy of North Philadelphia.

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.

The Tempest and the American Canon

Denis Arndt

The Shakespearean canon is an Anglophonic cultural cornerstone. In the 19th century, with the emergent Romantic movement, the Bard began to be venerated as the king of English literature, winning that throne even from King James (who has a Bible named after him). His work is perennial taught to school children and college students, maintaining his primacy in the American canon.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival's current production of The Tempest is a theatrical outgrowth of Shakespeare's literary canonization. Director Tony Taccone and dramaturg Barry Kraft give primacy to Shakespeare's text by avoided a pointed director's concept. They do give nods to The Tempest's complicated production history, but don't let any dramaturgy later than the Jacobean dominate.

Alexander V. Nichols' lighting drives the titular tempest along with the actors' movement. Those on board sway as if upon a storm-rocked vessel, and Prospero (Denis Arndt) kneels in the foreground manipulating a toy ship. Dancers (Will Cooper, Tim Rubel, David Silpa and Jordon Waters) are his servant spirits, manipulating the Neapolitans and Milanese unseen. Their heads are shaved like Arndt's, and they are painted chalk white. Daniel Ostling's set is austerely open, with hard monochromatic angles. The storm subsides, and Prospero exposites the information we need to know to understand the subsequent story to his daughter Miranda (Alejandra Escalante). The plot resumes with Caliban's (Wayne T. Carr) emergence. He is painted red and yellow and is bald as well. This is the palette on which Shakespeare's classic fable of forgiveness and discovery unfolds.

Taccone is conservative in his approach, yet gives nods to post-Jacobean dramaturgies in his use of staging, costuming the island's denizens and his casting choices. The open space is a clear nod to Peter Brook's aesthetic, and the Bhutto dancing and make-up are also reminiscent of Brook's interest in Asian theater. The rest of the cast is dressed in the height of Jacobean fashion by costume designer Anita Yavich. Only two black men are cast: Wayne T. Carr as Caliban and Bruce A. Young as Gonzalo. It makes sense to cast either an African-American or Native American as Caliban: he is a Caribbean islander, and such casting calls into focus the colonial origins of The Tempest. But, by casting an African-American as one of the Milanese, Taccone diffuses a postcolonial reading of the play while acknowledging that such a reading is possible and legitimate. These choices serve to educate the audience about the text without taking the text in either of these directions.

This Tempest is a piece of educational theater, meant to reinforce Shakespeare as a cultural cornerstone. It acknowledges Shakespeare's literary canonization by giving primacy to the text, while also acknowledging that his literature is meant for the theater by nodding to potent dramaturgies that are informed by Shakespeare's work. The breadth of Shakespeare's work and its effect on the English language and American stage make it important for Anglophonic Americans to understand and be conversant in. Taccone's direction of The Tempest gracefully reinforces this need by paying homage to its Jacobean origins while acknowledging the evolving readings of this play.

The Comedy of Questions

Rodney Gardiner

Some dramaturgies, like Brecht's, offer answers and solutions. And some dramaturgies, like Kent Gash's in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Comedy of Errors, pose questions.

This season's production of Shakespeare's classic comedy in which a series of erroneous assumptions about people's identities are made and then resolved is set during the Harlem Renaissance. Gash's idea was to bring Comedy's theme of disrupted families into relief by using the fallout of American slavery in which families were separated to sate the marketplace. This juxtaposition is problematic: Shakespeare was adapting a Roman play for Elizabethan England. Neither the Romans nor the Elizabethans shared our interest in racial equality, and issues of American identity didn't even exist yet.

New Orleans is the Syracuse to this production's Ephesus. Egeon (Tyrone Wilson) has illegally entered the Harlem port in search of his lost son (Tobie Windham plays both Antipholi). The set is a vibrantly colored impression of 1920s Harlem, and is dominated by a large clock whose moving hands emphasize that Egeon's time is running out. The majority of the cast is black, but the white Mark Murphey does play Gustave the Butler and the Jailer. Designers Jo Winiarski (Scenic), Shawn Duan (Video) and Matt Callahan (Sound) weave cinematic textures throughout, from the montage illustrating Egeon's expository monologue, to the cartoonishly colored slapstick, to the Young Frankensteinian sound cue every time the word "chain" is uttered.

Comedy is more like a cartoon than a historical drama: it relies on slapstick and broadly drawn characterizations meant to delight and entertain, not educate. And therein lies the rub. It doesn't provide a one-on-one correlation for telling the story of the familial disruptions brought about by African-American slavery. An accident of nature tears apart the family in Comedy, and human agency tore apart enslaved American families. All that suggests that Gash's juxtaposition is a bad idea. But the loose dramaturgy is actually this productions strength. It doesn't quite tell the story of the Harlem Renaissance: if it did, Mark Murphey's Irish cop wouldn't have been nearly as friendly to the black denizens. And it's not a rollicking good time: the black Antipholi own and beat the black Dromios (Rodney Gardiner). But historical errors and stomach-turning slapstick inspire questions about how class and race work in America, and that's this production's strength.

So what is the relationship between race and class in 1920s Harlem? And how does that relate to race and class here and now? The dramaturgical holes in OSF's current production of Comedy of Errors ask these questions while intriguingly offering no answers. And they're important questions to ask: race-based classism persistently unravels America's e pluribus unum, and we can't understand how it works now if we don't know about its history. For all the bad rap that directors get for transplanting Shakespeare into different historical milieus, Kent Gash's Comedy of Errors shows how it can work: by posing compelling questions about the historical milieu in which the play is produced.

Action or Ennui?

Ron Menzel

We live in a world rife with inequality and oppression. Loraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, currently playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, asks us, will you take action and die for the uncertainty of an egalitarian future in which you would have no part, or will you take no action and survive with the certainty of oppression?

A realist mid-century American play, Sign brings us a group of marginalized individuals asking that question. Not one of them finds a satisfactory answer. Therein lies the plays strength: Hansberry asks the question, and, while she may tend towards taking action, she doesn't presume to answer for us.

The story takes place in 1964 Greenwich Village, and revolves around Jewish Sidney (Ron Menzel) and his mixed-race Cherokee wife Iris (Sofie Jean Gomez). Sidney is a leftist agitator who surrounds himself with a cast of like-minds, all in a friendly competition to out-proletariat each other. There's Alton Scales (Armando McClain), a proud black man who is constantly mistook for a white man, due to his mixed-race ancestry. There's Wally O'Hara (Danforth Comins), the political candidate whose sign is in Sidney Brustein's window. And there's David Ragin (Benjamin Pelteson), the gay playwright upstairs. Iris is a showgirl, generally considered within the cast of characters as talentless. Nevertheless, she has dreams of making it big on Broadway. Her sisters, the anti-Semitic Mavis (Erica Sullivan), who is caught in an unfaithful and stable marriage; and high-end call girl Gloria (Vivia Font), who is addicted to pills, round out the cast.

The first act is filled with dramatic dialogue, fraught with characters' objectives and conflicts. Its function is to allow us to get to know these people, and serves as the foundation and context for the second act. It's in the second act that the characters offer their answers to the question of action versus ennui. It's monologue-heavy, with most of the characters laying out their case to Sidney, who is struggling to answer the question himself.

"Monologue-heavy" may sound like code for "pedantic, declamatory and boring," but, in this case, it's not. The monologues are dramatic in that they represent a struggle to between action and ennui. And, in the context of the Freedom Rides and the threat of violent death posed by a monolithic conservative resistance to egalitarian agitators, it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you do, you could be brutally killed. And your death may not matter. There's no way to know that things will change. But if you don't, you'll live, but live oppressed. You will never be able to realize everything you want out of life, but at least you'll still have life.

Loraine Hansberry took action. A black gay woman, she certainly did not fit the description of those who held the key to the kingdom, the white straight men. But she was a playwright - she spoke out. She could very well have taken the pedantic, declamatory, boring route. But she didn't. She wrote complicated characters from a realist perspective, not simplistic caricatures who are little more than propaganda. As humans, their struggle rings true from a human perspective. By showing us people who share our strengths, our weaknesses, our hopes, our fears, she forces us to ask this question for ourselves: action and a meaningful death, or ennui and a meaningless life?

So how do you answer that question? Do you have an answer, or are you still working on it? Because you oughtn't for a minute think the Civil Rights Act solved everything. Class in America is still race-based: the top 1% is mostly white, and the bottom 1% lives on reservations. Our LGBT neighbors are still not afforded equal protection under the law. It's worth noting, however, that going to see plays implies a certain level of privilege. And, as Wally opines, one needs the power that privilege affords to be able to effect positive change. But, if one simply goes to plays that struggle with issues of equality in order to feel progressive, one is little more than a salon socialist. The function of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window isn't to make us feel like good leftists. Instead, it asks us a complicated question that we are then to take home with us and struggle to answer.

Liquid Plain

I went to Naomi Wallace’s Liquid Plain with high hopes. After all, Wallace is one of today’s most famous American playwrights. I left disappointed – my hopes had been drowned in a sea of clumsy playwrighting. 

Plays about slavery in America are in vogue right now, and it felt like Wallace was trying to tap into that for her installment in OSF’s American History Cycle. Wallace seemed to be tackling every single story she felt hadn’t been told about slavery in America yet, and this made the play feel unfocused. She fell into the amateur playwright trap of too much exposition and too much concern for her own prose at the expense of the play’s actability. Otherwise capable actors struggled with Liquid Plain’s seemingly endless litany of expository walls of text.

The weight of failure rests mostly on Wallace’s shoulders – such a renowned playwright should be expected not to present something so unfinished. But, since the dramaturg’s work appeared with such clarity in the copious research that clearly went into Liquid Plain, dramaturg Julie Felise Dubiner also shares the blame. As a new play development dramaturg, her job wasn’t just to provide the playwright with a plethora of stories to write about. Her job was also to encourage Wallace to focus, to find the story that compelled her and then provide research to help her dig into that. Both playwright and dramaturg finished about half their job, and then put Liquid Plain on the boards. Another year in development and Liquid Plain might be ready for an audience, but it wasn’t this season.

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.

Cymbeline

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for as long as I can remember, has had hits and misses just like any other theater. Sometimes they even happen in the same show, and sometimes they’re distinct enough that they can be attributed to specific jobs within the production. Cymbeline is just such a show. 

Image from the Eureka Times-Standard

OSF has always attracted the cream of the crop in terms of actors. This cast is mostly superb, with stand-out performances by Dawn-Lyen Gardner as (the play’s real lead) Imogen, Daniel José Molina as the impetuously fatalistic Posthumus, Kenajuan Bentley as the ever-suave creep Iachimo, and Donovan Mitchell as the adorable little brother Arviragus aka Cadwal. These four actors ground Shakespeare’s ridiculously involved soap-opera of a plot with honest and often playful interactions with the convoluted world in which they find themselves.

Cymbeline loses its grounding in its direction. Director Bill Rauch and costume designer David C. Woolard chose to add “a few mythical creatures to populate a landscape in which miraculous surprise lies beyond every bend in the story” (from Rauch’s program note). The goat-men and pig-men and people with pointy ears confused an already confusing story. That’s not to say it was a bad choice – in fact, I feel it was a good choice used sloppily. Kate McConnell writes in OSF’s Illuminations: A Guide to the 2013 Plays about Shakespeare’s “green worlds”:

“This ‘green world’ (a term coined by literary critic Northrop Frye), separated from the rules and organization of urbanity, gives the characters space to transform (sometimes literally), fall in and out of love, and discover who they truly are. In Cymbeline, the wilds of Wales perform this function….For the characters who travel to this place, transformation and revelation await.”

Rauch could have used his mythological creatures to emphasize Wales as a place of transformation and lent clarity to the story. Instead, this choice read as superfluous at best, and at worst, confusing.

Rauch’s casting Howie Seago as the titular king was also ill-advised. Seago is deaf and communicates via ASL. The way this plays on stage is that he delivers his lines in ASL and another actor interprets for those of us not schooled enough to understand sign-language. The effect is that Cymbeline’s tempestuousity is scattered across the stage, diluting its power and weakening the impact of the play’s main power-broker. Not that Seago is a bad actor – in fact, from what I can see, he is very accomplished in his craft. It’s just that, unfortunately, his lack of hearing is very much a handicap when it comes to acting Shakespeare.

Cymbeline is a play in which Shakespeare revels in his accomplishments as a storyteller by creating a labyrinthine plot that ranges from the improbable to the confusing. With such a play, it’s the artistic team’s job to clarify and ground the plot. OSF’s actors for the most part are successful in this. Unfortunately, they receive no help from their director, whose choices add further layers to an already excessively layered play. 

Pirates of Penzance

                                                   

Every single boy wants to be a pirate when he grows up, and most of the girls too. The reasons are compelling: Peter Pan, Treasure Island, Pirates of the Caribbean these days. And of course the immortal Pirates of Penzance, which is currently playing on OSF’s Elizabethan stage come fair weather or foul.

I got to see Pirates on a rainy night in July (it’s a really weird year, even for Oregon), and not only was it a success, but I want to be a pirate even more than I did before the show. Director Bill Rauch embraced Gilbert and Sullivan’s use of pop-culture reference and unrestrained silliness by infusing their hundred-year-old operetta with some of the popular music styles that have come since then: gospel, British-invasion rock ‘n’ roll, and rap (the police officers do a little rap). Early in the show, Eddie Lopez (who plays Frederick) was standing alone on stage when the rain really started to dump. He tossed his head back and looked straight into the sky. I knew somebody at some point during the show they would have to acknowledge the rain, since it was on everybody’s mind. I don’t know if I was reading Eddie’s mind, or if he was reading mine, but he burst out into an impromptu “Singing in the Rain,” while shooting a guilty “is this okay?” look at the conductor. It was. It brought the house down.

Bill Rauch’s attraction to fun is a real jolt of positive energy for OSF, and they need it this year with the Bowmer almost falling down. His sense of play is a perfect match for this old musical and brings out the best in it and in the splendid cast he’s got performing it. It deserves a rain-drenched standing ovation, and a hearty “Yo ho ho!”

How to Be An Effective Dramaturg

My friend Casey Faubion has been trying to establish a quasi-dramaturgical department at Camelot Theatre in Talent, OR – or at least to develop the role of the dramaturg at Camelot – and as part of that he invited Martine Green to give a talk on “How to Be an Effective Dramaturg” at Camelot. Martine is a mid-career ‘turg currently working at OSF. Her three-hour talk was nicely organized into two-parts (leave it to a dramaturg to instinctively give an informal lecture a pleasing structure).

In her first half, she went over David Copelin’s “Ten Dramaturgical Myths.” I’ve listed them below with my own thoughts on what Martine said.

1.         “Literary managers and dramaturgs tell playwrights how to rewrite their plays.”

While some bad ones might, I already knew from my work at SBU and Native Voices that the good ones don’t.

2.         “Since dramaturgs have raised staged readings to an art form, playwrights have been encouraged to develop their plays to death.”

I’ve heard this before. Martine made an interesting point about following the organic growth of a play. You can tell when a script can’t benefit from any more workshops. Then it’s time to start looking for a place to get it a production, at least so the playwright can see what it’s like on its feet.

3.         “Literary managers and dramaturgs function as ‘objective voices’ in rehearsal.”

Can any human being really be objective? Don’t we all see the world through the lenses we’ve developed by living? Martine says we’re supposed to be a “creative informed objective voice.” I like that.

4.         “As intellectuals, literary managers and dramaturgs want to replace warm human emotions in the theatre with cold abstract ideas.”

I know I like to be an emotional vampire in rehearsal. Just kidding, I like to be focused on making a fun experience for the audience. Martine says that part of the blame goes to the academic institutions that train dramaturgs to focus more on theory than on production. Not all of them do, but none of them should. I think priority should go towards putting plays up, and only theorize about them later.

5.         “Literary managers and dramaturgs are no more than powerless, stage-struck ‘Ph.D. gofers’ with no real artistic talents of their own, reduced to working as underpaid readers and clerks.”

No, because a good ‘turg has to have an artistic instinct and a feel for the theater.

6.         “Dramaturgs interfere with the ‘natural’ relationship between the director and the playwright (of a new play), and between the director and the text (of an older work).”

Our jobs are to help facilitate that interaction, all the time looking out for the story that the primary artist (be they director or playwright) wants to tell. As Lue Douthit says, we’re the “keepers of the story.”

7.         “Literary managers and dramaturgs don’t like most American theatre the way it is. They want our scripts and productions to be more theatrical, more resonant, less naturalistic, less trivial, more aware of the world, better. Can’t they appreciate how wonderful things are?”

No. There’s always room for improvement, and if things stay the way they are, that means American theater has gone stagnant.

8.         “Literary managers and dramaturgs are just critics in very thin disguise. They’re not ream players, they have little sense of performance, and they’re always demanding instant results.”

Maybe the bad ones. A good dramaturg should be a team player and they should have a great sense of performance.

9.         “Dramaturg is such an ugly word.”

Yep. I want to be called “Guardian of the Dionysian Mysteries.”

10.       “There will always be literary managers, because someone has to read all those plays, but dramaturgy is a nasty fad that will go away.”

Not exactly, because somebody always has to keep the story. But it’s true that theaters are cutting literary departments like it’s going out of style. Martine gives it maybe two years before only a few special companies like OSF have a staff of actual dramaturgs.

So that was the first half! During the second half, Martine talked about her process of doing production dramaturgy. She talked about note-giving etiquette, which I’m already figuring out pretty quickly on my own. She also talked about the forms she gives her protocols. They’re definitely different from Steve Marsh’s five-part binders. She puts a clean copy of the script, her marked up copy, and other editions of it in her binders. She also creates a glossary based on the questions she has on her second read. I liked hearing about her tricks and am already using them. She showed us OSF’s copy of Love’s Labors Lost which has the Quarto, Folio, and production copies of the scripts juxtaposed line-by-line next to each other. I just did that this morning with the different versions of “Coyote/Cottontail Hunts the Sun,” the dramatization of this Karuk/Yurok/Northern Paiute myth I’m working on!

Love's Labours Lost

I spent last Sunday night swathed in the fragrance of blooming roses, lost in the pageantry of love’s sweet delight. And that was only before 11:00, while I was watching OSF’s production of Love’s Labours Lost!

Shakespeare wrote a linguistic feast, and the Festival has given us a surfeit of visual beauty as well. I’ve always found Shakespeare’s poetry in this play like walking through a rose garden, and it’s as if I found my psychological twin in scenic designer Christopher Acebo! He filled the space with roses: they grew out of the stage, they drifted from the sky. Thanks to costumer Christal Weatherly, they even emanated from the characters! OSF’s Love’s Labours Lost is a pageant of poetry, both aural and visual!

“Pageant,” incidentally, is one of those words that bring out the dramaturg in me. If I were a Soviet sleeper spy, it would be the word that activates my mission to overthrow capitalist empires or something. So let’s talk a little about pageants.

There are places that Love’s Labours Lost is a sleeper, and not of the Cold War espionage variety. Those places are where Shakespeare uses stage techniques that resonated with his audience, but are foreign for us. The masque and allegorical presentation of the Nine Worthies were entirely familiar to 16^th Century Brits. They were used to miracle and mystery plays that presented Bible characters and allegories of different vices and virtues. And they were generally fun! Imagine a life with no TV, no internet, hardly any books. You spend your day breaking your back in a field, or making gloves in a poorly-lit room surrounded by the smell of other people’s shit. Your entertainment is Christian mass and miracle and mystery plays. Your attention span is longer since you don’t have Youtube, and you want to spend as much time watching spectacles as possible anyway before you get back to your miserable life where you only bathe once a year.

It’s kind of fun to imagine, but it’s not our culture. The pageantry we’re used to is J-Pop and The Nutcracker. So while the audience my have been thinking about whether or not they remembered to call the dog sitter during the girls’ little joke on the boys, and what kind of ice-cream they ought to buy after the show during the Nine Worthies, they were there and enjoying it when Dumaine (John Tufts) started singing and dancing his love letter, and they were practically clapping along when the boys came out dressed as Muscovites to Tschaikovsky’s familiar strains.

Is Love’s Labours Lost a labour to behold, hopelessly dated and fit only for the most self-despising culture vulture? No! It’s a beautiful play, as beautiful as an evening walk in a blooming rose-garden. It certainly has potential to become dramatic drivel on stage, but in the hands of OSF’s expert artists, Shakespeare’s poetry lives and breaths and engages our 2011 audience as much as a four-hundred year old play can.