The Tempest
by William Shakespeare

Director Tony Taccone should be ashamed.  This Tempest not only lacked insight and sharpness, my group of friends was struggling at intermission to recall a more juvenile, poorly executed production.  Most of us went back to junior high school to match the feel of the opening night evening.  What a disappointment.

The Tempest fails in the same way as last year's Lear.  In Lear, the true goodness of Cordelia was not communicated to the audience so the father's spurning of his rebellious teenage daughter seemed reasonable and not the act of a deluded old man. Inept acting prevented the setting up of the major premise of the play.

In Taccone's Tempest there is no magic to drive the action.  The lead character, Prospero, played by Denis Arndt, was mostly inaudible in his opening speeches and maintained mumbling-level projection throughout the evening.  We were in Row A, Seats 2-6, and we could not physically hear much of what came out of Arndt's mouth.  Unless you knew the story ahead of time, you couldn't guess at  Prospero's magical power.

Really?  The magic is central to this play?

A key component of Shakespeare's story is simply not communicated, and the evening fails.

The morning after the opening production I heard Taccone in an hour-long Q&A that's part of the festival.  From that session I learned some of the rationale for things that seemed incomprehensible last night.  But, I don't feel that the incomprehesive-abilty of the stage craft is on me.  Taccone needs to address every audience to explain the symbolism and high art on stage. For example, I now know that the acres of red shag carpet represents Prospero's fever dream.  Or, something like that. But why or how Taconne envisions the play as a fever dream needs more explanation. Ideally, in a private therapy session that I don't have a ticket for.

Taccone's artistic gems just don't work.

Here's an example: he populates the stage with four talcum power covered dancers who act as contortion art.  They aren't in Shakespeare, but Taccone said they embody physical power and reach the audience in a way that mere actors couldn't.  Taccone in his talk offered that they are his version of Butoh boys.  He gave more explanation, but I got lost in it because in the theater I found the dancers a distraction, not an enhancement. On stage starting 30 minutes before curtain, they were sort of pretty boys in a "But, why?" way.

Taccone's most telling revelation was that he always considered The Tempest a difficult play to direct because the text is disjointed.  He didn't need to confess his feelings in public.  The current  production lurches from one storyline to another with no sense of connectedness.  I felt slapped with one distracted scene after another, and the fact that we often couldn't hear the protagonist was enhanced the chopped up texture.

Yes, the volume and rapid-pace delivery apparently are intentional.  In response to complaints about not hearing Prospero, Taccone explained that Arndt hates Shakespeare when it's declaimed in a formal way. So, the actor deliberately mumbles and makes the words less clear. They've had discussions about keeping the speeches non-didactic, Taccone reported, and Arndt isn't going to change.

Why, yes.  The inmates do run this asylum. 

Poor choices in design run through all crafts. In particular, the costumes were distracting. The royalty were dressed in weirdly puffy outfits which made the actors look like they came directly from the Mad Hatter's tea party. I'd blame the costume designer, but they are no doubt just an extension of the director's flawed vision.

Some of the actors make their scenes work, in an isolated workshop way. Kate Hurster projects as much magic and majesty into Ariel as she's allowed (but I wish they hadn't made her into an Angels in America angel in one scene… and I wish a friend hadn't so quickly and cheerfully nailed that description of that scene's design.)  Richard Elmore is a good drunken Stefano. The young lovers Miranda (Alejandra Escalante) and Ferdinand (Daniel Jose Molina) have matured since  their stints as Juliet and Romeo, and they now can be on the same stage without seeming to repel each other. Armando Duran and Jeffrey King are solid, too, but they are all stuck in Taccone's bad dream.

Only Wayne T. Carr as Caliban breaks out and genuinely owns the stage.  He is muscular, flexible and powerful both visually and in his movement and speech.  He is enslaved in an artistic nightmare, but he keeps his focus.  Finally Caliban, like the audience and Shakespeare's script, is freed by the fall of the curtain.

Of course, complaining about the odd clothes, off-the-mark set design, and wrong-play Angels moment just piles on. The Tempest is truly doomed this year because the audience isn't clued in to Prospero's magical powers.  At least one great magical scene is cut, and the opening orientation is mumbled into oblivion.

If I had already bought Tempest tickets I wouldn't turn them back in. Caliban and other performances are enjoyable. On the other hand, I would not buy a ticket unless I'd seen everything else, and some alternatives a second or third time.

Ozdachs Rating

A Streetcar Named Desire
by Tennessee Williams

When a complicated, difficult story plays out flawlessly and naturally, the review of the performance can only lift up a part at a time.  Any look back on OSF’s A Streetcar Named Desire will fail to capture the depth and flow of the production which needs to be experienced as a whole.

Each of the characters presented on stage felt strong and authentic.  Danforth Comins (Stanley Kowalski) feels young, strong, frustrated, insightful, and horrible at just the right moments in just the right way.  He would steal the show if he wasn’t paired with an equally accurate Stella (played by Nell Geisslinger) and a supremely on target Blanche (Kate Mulligan). There are no actors in this play, instead a real-life family drama unfolds in front of 600 voyeurs.

There is no sign that director Christopher Liam Moore laid a hand on the evening.  There is no evidence that he had a vision which he gave the cast to fulfill. Emotions and actions happen naturally throughout the performance without any bumps that take you out of the moment.  The consistent feel that you’re viewing an inevitable story is true testament to Moore’s firm guidance and creativity.

Nearly every actor and craft were in top form.  The performance I saw had understudy Ted Deasy playing the painfully basic Harold Mitchell, but even with a stand-in every component still meshed. 

I especially loved the ornate simpleness of Christopher Acebo’s set.  My friends found flaws with the way the audience saw a very New Orleans facade with incomplete walls that made real the tenement jumble and its lack of privacy.  They didn’t like seeing actors in the background moving to be in position for the next scene, and they complained about not knowing the route inside from the street (one scene allowed a pathway from the street that seemed inconsistent with all others).  But, to me the chaos and lack of clarity wonderfully accented the dialog and action.

Less controversial were the clothes.  Alex Jaeger’s costumes were perfect in time, class, and expression. 

Also non-controversial, but a bit off the mark, was a gratuitous look at Comins’ nude butt in an early bedroom scene.  We didn’t need to see the flesh, and the story didn’t need the visual. The lack of audience complaints about the unneeded nudity no doubt stems from the fact it was a very pretty butt.  The scene is innocuous evidence that high-brow theater goers allow prurient interest to derail their normal logical examination of a performance!

Even with its minor flaws, this Streetcar is definitive. The mood, the chemistry, the pace were right. When I see the play again in the future, I’ll be measuring the actors to Comins’ Stanley, Nell’s Stella, and Kate’s Blanche. 

Ozdachs Rating

King Lear
by William Shakespeare

I guess it’s a relief to discover that Artist Director Bill Rauch can stumble as a director.  After seeing one amazing Rauch production after another, year in and year out, it is cathartic to experience a badly-focused, inconsistent performance in which many actors and crafts still excel but which, overall, disappoints. Bill Rauch is a fallible human after all.

The intimate space of the Thomas Theater is perfect for the play’s intense family interactions.Unfortunately,  there is no uniting vision in this production, and so even a very good Lear — played by Jack Willis at the production I saw — couldn’t create a coherent or compelling narrative.

A major weakness is Sofia Jean Gomez’s Cordelia.  Gomez didn’t show power on stage.  In the opening scenes where the “good” daughters Goneril (Vilma Silva) and Regan (Robin Goodrin Nordli) are supposed to cynically kiss up to their father while the really pure and loving Cordelia refuses to spew platitudes of affection, Gomez’ character comes off as oddly standoffish.  She’s truly cold, not virtuous.  In fact, Goneril and Regan are played so convincingly that, if you didn’t know what was coming, you would have thought that the old king was correct in how he divided his kingdom. Gomez completely failed to communicate her character’s love and honesty. The opening scene, designed to set up the whole story, was botched.

How can a director of Rauch’s caliber fail to get a key plot point in front of the audience?

Speaking of pointlessness, two bits of stage-craftlessness annoyed throughout the evening.  The most universally distracting issue was the hodge-podge, phony, inconsistent, not-from-any-country-on-this-planet accents of any character who was supposed to be French.  First, there is no need to put on an accent to convey that you are from a different faction or country.  The text supplies that information and there are better, more subtle ways of reinforcing the foreignness, if you need to go there.  But, seriously.  If you are going to have your French characters have an accent, could it be French (best choice) or at least the same from character to character?  The Jamaican patois of one actors was most out of place for me, but the whole mishmash from Tony DeBruno and every other “French” character was just terrible. The only voice missing was that of Pepe Le Pew. 

Didn’t the director LISTEN to the production he created?

The other serious distraction were the costumes designed thrown out on stage by Linda Roethke. Some characters were dressed in almost-modern generic royalwear. But, others (army officers?), were made to wear cartoonish outfits whose look was stolen from Captain Crunch cereal boxes.  Still others (mostly ensemble) wore black coveralls that reminded me of  maintenance workers in Sci-Fi flicks.  Yeah, the differences among the classes of people were sometimes reflected in the category of dress they wore.  But, the differences didn’t make sense.  Moreover, at least one costume was poorly made: royal Regan in one court scene is draped in an ill-fitting, poorly put together white thing which made her look like the unfortunate model paired with a Project Runway loser.   Costumes were yet another part of the production that didn’t hang together.

And, Rauch allowed a striking, straight-forward continuity error.  This production starts off with Lear acting like an alcoholic.  He’s guzzling whiskey during the initial tiff with Cordelia, and there’s a glass at hand during most of his early scenes. Lear’s rages caused by alcohol:  an interesting take!  But, as Lear descends into deeper psychosis the alcohol simply disappears.  The old drunk neither renounces booze nor falls into the bottle.  The initial cause of his irrationality simply disappears.  Huh?  How likely is it for an alcoholic to neither hit bottom nor to succumb to chemically assisted insanity? Director Rauch, what happened?

In another judgment mistake, this time as Artistic Director, Rauch decided to switch out actors playing Lear, alternating between Willis and Michael Winters in successive performances .  It’s a move that feels contrived to get the audience to buy two tickets to basically one production.  Maybe if Lear was simply better I would have been tempted to see a different take on the title character.  But, Rauch’s work doesn’t wow, and the different actors on different nights instead feels like a sleazy marketing gimmick.

In the midst of the general disorder, some artists still shined.  Scenic designer Christopher Acebo does a flawless job in the first two acts of populating the stage with just the right props and leaving empty space to play its role.  His stairway for the royals is brilliant. (The set for Act 3 was intentional mess. Unfortunately, the intentionality of the on-stage rubble didn’t make the look work for me.)

Willis, Silva, and Nordli deserve their praise in previous paragraphs, but Richard Elmore as old Gloucester is the standout performance of the evening.  From the start to his terrible end, Elmore’s character retains a distinct personality.  Elmore’s reliable underplaying creates both tension and meaning when he is powerful and, later, when he is blinded and begging. In a role which could devolve into hysterics, Elmore instead delivers honor.

Daisuke Tsuji as the Fool hit just the right tone, mixing a high level of playful energy with dangerous truth telling.  Tsuji slapped the audience with his wit. Several times at the production I saw he wove in references to fire alarms  — that night Lear had opened 15 minutes late because of a false one. Yet, his Fool easily converted to a loyal and feeling caretaker when appropriate, a split second later in the scene.

Armando Duran as the Earl of Kent in his different disguises also delivered an excellent character. He kept the Earl’s emotional currents and eddies of anger all flowing in the same direction.  Similarly, Benjamin Pelteson shone as Gloucester’s loyal son Edgar.  Even in his crazy moments, this Edgar was on track and accessible. Rex Young as the Earl of Cornwall rounds out the list of well played royals.  Young was consistent, evil, and deserving of hatred.

I participated in the mostly standing ovation in appreciation of Elmore, Willis, Tsuji, Siva, Nordli, Pelteson, Young, Acebo, and the others who tacked together in the director-less storm that was this King Lear.  It was an evening well spent, but an evening which should have been so much better.

Ozdachs Rating

Troilus and Cressida
by William Shakespeare

Most of the flash and bang of this infrequently produced Shakespeare play comes from the modern ordinance that accompanies Troilus and Cressida‘s teleportation into the 21st Century Middle East.  T&C is not bad entertainment, but I experienced no bite, no zing in this deeply cynical tale.

The story of how almost everyone at every level is dishonest or deluded, especially when it comes to patriotic wars, is an always-timely subject.  While the language is clear and the context maintained throughout this performance, only once did I feel truly miserable for an on-stage character as they were being betrayed.  The other instances of cheating and disappointing behavior went by without dramatic intensity.  So she picks up with a new guy at night after swearing undying love for you this morning? So what? Get over it already. (more…)