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.

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.

Considering the Canon: Blithe Spirit

Classics are supposed to be cultural markers that tell us something timelessly and universally human about ourselves. By such a litmus test, Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit ought not to be counted with the canon.

Blithe Spirit tells us something about ourselves, but it's not timeless, and it's not universal. Coward's farce plays towards audiences' (especially American audiences') desire to feel superior. The tools it uses are often dated, and never admirable.

An English comedy of manners, Blithe Spirit saw its London debut in 1941 and hopped the pond the same year. Charles and Ruth Condomine invite eccentric medium Madame Arcati over for a little séance so that Charles can mine her for details for his upcoming novel. Arcati accidently conjures Charles' dead wife, and hilarity ensues. The jokes include references to lazy Indians, wife-beating and sexual assault, but primarily the humor comes from the characters always being one step behind the audience.

Coward flatters the audience by giving them an easy metaphor and a sense of superiority to the British characters. For American audiences, this is particularly apt. In the States, audiences are fascinated by all things British and aristocratic: look at the popularity of Downton Abbey and Jane Austen's novels. By staying one step ahead of them in Blithe Spirit, Americans are elevated from middle class mediocrity to a place above the fantastically aristocratic Brits. In addition to taking shots at his neighbors, Coward takes cheap shots at Indians ("Well, for one thing [Indians are] frightfully lazy and also, when faced with any sort of difficulty, they're rather apt to go off into their own tribal language which is naturally unintelligible"), and Cockney laborers with the clownish Edith. In addition, the jokes about domestic violence ("ELVIRA: Not at all - you were an absolute pig that time we went to Cornwall and stayed in that awful hotel - you hit me with a billiard cue. CHARLES: Only very, very gently...") and sexual assault ("CHARLES: You let him kiss you though, didn't you? ELVIRA: How could I stop him? He was bigger than I was.") aren't terribly funny.

If Blithe Spirit accesses anything universally human about us, it's our desire to feel superior to our fellow human beings. The tools it uses to make us feel superior are dated 73 years since they were written, and so can hardly be called "timeless."

What Is Portland's Artistic Future?

Theater is Portland's artistic future.

Amanda Hunt and Disjecta's "Portland2014," partially exhibited at Southern Oregon University's Schneider Museum of Art through December 6, respectfully nods to studio art's 2D past while drawing focus to its interactive and performative future.

The body of Portland2014 is 2D: Modou Dieng and Devon VanHouton's Tranquilo references public mural. Travis Fitzgerald represents tapestry with Objects of Permanence I & II. Blair Saxon-Hill's double-sided quilt Shifting Ground and Occupation hangs in the center of the gallery, and D. E. May's geometric musings hang towards the far end. Abra Ancliffe's interactive Personal Libraries Library nestles in a corner near the entry. The its membership card reads,

"The Personal Libraries Library is a lending & subscription library located in Portland, Oregon. The Library is dedicated to recreating the personal libraries of artists, philosophers, scientists, writers and other thinkers & makers. It, and the books, function as a locus for research, connections, convergences, discoveries, curiosity & happenstance.

"The PLL Press produces and disperses printed matter that investigates the material, conceptual, textual and social presence of the Library."

Enhanced white noise emanates from Kelly Rauer's Locate, a triptych of video loops meditating on human movement with its locus in the spine, in the back antechamber. Studio art, dance and video converge in this geographically isolated yet aurally pervasive piece.

PLL and Locate stand out by their difference. In a space dominated by satisfying but ultimately predictable work, these two pose questions: what is a lending library doing in a museum? what is that noise coming from the back? Without ignoring the pedigreed place that 2D art holds in such a venue, Portland2014 guides museum art towards the interactive and performative. Hunt and Disjecta are telling their artists and venues to think theatrically.

We're used to the two dimensional in art museums. There's not a lot of ground left to cover. If artists want to grow, they need to encourage their audience to engage with their work, like Ancliffe. They need to pull divergent media together like Rauer. They need to think like theater makers. 

A Perfect Pairing: "Los Olvidados" and "Marmato, Colombia"

Ramiro Gomez's art, however important, is impermanent. That makes David Feldman's documentary Los Olvidados a crucial supplement to Gomez's practice.

Gomez creates cardboard cut-out pop-up art meant to draw attention the humanity of immigrant laborers in the Southwest. The film documents the creation of an installation that Gomez erected in the Sonora desert of Arizona depicting a family of immigrants gathered around a white cross.

 

Feldman's documentary begins with a description of Gomez's art: he creates cardboard cut-outs of immigrant labors doing the kind of labor that immigrants often do. He then places them in found locations where someone might do the kind of work depicted by the cut-out. For example, he might put a cut-out gardener in a Beverly Hills lawn. Cardboard is an important ingredient in his art: it represents how immigrant laborers are often treated as disposable. This lays the groundwork for his installation titled Los Olvidados, or The Forgotten. Instead of an urban environment, Los Olvidados was placed in the Sonora desert, a high traffic area for illegal immigration up from Mexico and infamous as a deadly crossing. The piece depicts a Latino family standing around a small white cross.

By depicting immigrants in a compassionate light that calls attention to their vulnerability, Gomez puts a human face on a highly politicized and de-humanized event. His installations presumably exist until a property owner has their help clean it off their lawn, or in the case of the Sonora installation, until natural forces deteriorate the cardboard. Their impermanence is one of their strengths, but also one of their weaknesses. Feldman's film quite successfully addresses the problems of the installations' impermanence while not detracting from the story that their disposability tells.

 

David Feldman's Los Olvidados shouldn't be taken as a stand-alone film, but rather as an interpretive supplement to Ramiro Gomez's installation art. Gomez's installations are important in their humanization of a group that often takes second place to people's political beliefs about them. Feldman's film partakes of that importance.

 

Marmato, Colombia perfectly compliments Los Olvidados by placing responsibility for the root causes of Latino immigration to the States in the hands of North American capitalists and their Latino government partners.

Featured second in SIFF's "Ripped from the Headlines" package after Los Olvidados, Santiago Ramirez's Marmato is a series of interviews with the denizens of a Colombian mining community who are allegedly being displaced by an unholy alliance between a Canadian multinational and the Colombian government.

Marmato, Colombia consists of interviews with Marmato's residents, who practice traditional mining that ekes just enough mineral from the earth to make a living without depleting their primary source of income any time in the near future. According to the interviewees, their national government struck a deal with an unnamed Canadian multinational mining operation that is quickly depleting their mines and not paying the Marmatans for their labor. The government allegedly took it one step further and illegalized traditional hand-mining. As one of the interviewees puts it, by taking away their primary source of income, the Colombian government and the multinational are turning "good people bad, and bad ones rich."

Ramirez has struck a vein with his interviews with the locals affected by their conflict with the national government and the government's capitalist partners. It's worth noting, however, that he doesn't reach anything close to journalistic objectivity by including interviews with the leading figures in the multinational or government. By doing so he could flesh out the situation that is displacing the people of Marmato. Still, the interviews with Marmato's residents suffices in creating a companion piece to Los Olvidados by describing how actions taken by North American capitalists can create the conditions that displace Latin Americans from their homes, setting them, perhaps, on the road for America.

SIFF's curation is exquisite in placing Marmato, Colombia after Los Olvidados. It expands upon the story that Ramiro Gomez tells with his cardboard cut-outs by providing a platform for Colombians still in Colombia to say why they need to leave their homes. SIFF ought to be commended for their dramaturgical approach to telling one story with two films.

Free Syrian Army Propaganda

Propaganda's hard to spot when you agree with it. Let's say, for example, that you're into democracy and everyone having an equal say in affairs of state. Well, that doesn't mean that films that give exclusive voice to the democratic side of a conflict aren't propaganda, it just means that they're propaganda that you agree with.

Matthew Van Dyke's Not Anymore is interviews Mowya, a Free Syrian Army commander, and Nour Kelze, a journalist embedded with Mowya's battalion (and who's sympathies clearly lie with Free Syrian Army.) It's safe to say that Not Anymore accurately reflects Mowya and Kelze's experiences in the Syrian Civil War. It would be disingenuous to claim that it paints an accurate picture of said war.

Trigger warning: Not Anymore contains footage of a slain soldiers getting shot and killed, and a bomb or mortar blast in a crowded square.

 

Van Dyke and co-producer Kelze have created a propaganda piece to appeal to American's sentiment that democracy as a universal good. It feels disingenuous for Van Dyke and Kelze to call themselves journalists in context of this film. In other productions, perhaps they are able to interview more than one commander of one battalion of one side of the chaotic Syrian Civil War and a reporter embedded with said battalion. Not Anymore, while well meaning, feels coercive in its one-sidedness.

However much the American audience may agree with the sentiments expressed in Not Anymore, it is misguided to think that this film educates one about the multifaceted civil war that is spilling across Syria's borders. Even as propaganda it's incomplete: it doesn't tell its intended audience what it would like them to do. Should we write to our congress people demanding immediate military intervention in Syria[1]? Should we donate to this, that or the other charity? In the context of Not Anymore, Van Dyke and Kelze oughtn't be considered journalists. "Activist filmmakers" is a more apt moniker, although even as such their work is incomplete.

---

[1] Not Anymore was completed in 2013, before America's involvement in Syria in opposition to ISIL.