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.

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.

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.   

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. 

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.