Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare

In Director Laird Williamson vision, Romeo and Juliet is a farcical melodramatic moral play filled with bawdy clowns.  It’s a slapstick tragedy, a category  underrepresented on modern stage.  The script’s only fault is the pesky obvious rhymes and flowery language that can be best gotten through in a quick pace at high volume. 

Williamson has ordered up so many pelvic thrusts for the hormonal young men that the show is unsuitable for school tours.  What in other productions comes off as witty sexual innuendo, Williamson unmasks as full-on, lowest-common-denominator sleazy talk. He gets the audience giggling at the sex, tittering at the over-wrought emotions, and focused on the comic characters of nurse, friar, and apothecary. (more…)

The African Company Presents Richard III
by Carlyle Brown

The African Company Presents Richard III is a very satisfying vehicle to exhibit extraordinary acting in service of a a not terrible, not overwrought script. 

The play-within-a-play scenes give us some riveting moments as the actors play their characters and then their characters slip into their roles in Shakespeare’s Richard III for a few stanzas. 

Kevin Kenerly (as James Hewlett) is excellent and the dominating presence on stage throughout the evening.  He’s sweet, stupid, overly focused, driven, and practical as Hewlett, and then instantly differently mesmerizing as he goes into actor mode and creates a scene of Shakespeare. Read More about the Performance

Ghost Light
conceived and developed by Jonathan Moscone and Tony Taccone
written by Tony Taccone
directed by Jonathan Moscone

When Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced it was commissioning a play on the shooting of Harvey Milk and George Moscone I was half pleased that gay civil rights would be a topic mentioned in the festival’s 37-play United States History Cycle and half apprehensive about seeing another cover of the Milk assassination already spotlighted very well in Execution of Justice and in the movies The Times of Harvey Milk and Milk.

My assumptions about the play topic set me up perfectly for Ghost Light.  Read more about the Prodcution

August: Osage County
by Tracy Letts

We saw the evening performance of August: Osage County the same day as the matinée of Ghost Light.  With apologizes to the Pulitzer jury and to our many friends who felt that August had the best of all possible characterizations and story, in my opinion August is just too contrived and suffers in comparison to the realness of Ghost Light.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival August production is excellent, and none of my reservations come from the Ashland concepts, designs, or acting.  Director Christopher Liam Moore worked a quality, cohesive structure where the crafts and on-stage talent give us a perfectly blended, unified vision. 

The big, sprawling-but-detailed set moves the open plains into the Bowmer Theater.  Neil Patel’s design is a great hodgepodge of vignette holding spaces, mixed up like the family we’re watching.  

Costume designer Alex Jaeger gives just the right clothing to each person.  There is (mostly) subtle differences in what’s being worn, and the choices reflect the wearer’s personality without drawing unreasonable attention to the clothes.

The acting is a magnificent tour de force of depth and strength. All of the actors have the same understanding of the family and of the play. They work together to expose each character to the audience.

 Judith Marie Bergan (Violet) is spectacularly selfish, hurt, sick, harsh, and funny.  In most venues she would have walked away with the show and you wouldn’t remember who else was on stage with her.  She was natural in her twisted addictions, sometimes even humorous but never too slapstick-y. 

Richard Elmore (Beverly) sets the high standard for the acting with his prologue.  I love his low-key delivery  that lets him slip off the stage without you fully comprehending how he’s set up the rest of the play.

Terri McMahon (Ivy Weston) and Kate Mulligan (Karen Weston) are terrific as sisters, and Catherine E. Coulson (Mattie Fay Allen) puts power into a relatively ditz-prone woman of a certain age.  I have only applause for the other actors, too.

What I cannot applaud is the contrived storyline that sounds like an outline for the most convoluted soap opera ever.  Don’t believe me?  Check out the plot in Wikipedia.

This play is beyond conscientious in making sure that it handles every family complication possible (although they only make a lesbian accusation and don’t really have a sexual minority to prey on).  The plot serves a ratatouille of domestic misfortune and intrigue. I think it’s so uncomfortably over-spiced that it tastes phony.   The narrative isn’t in the tradition of great theater tragedies, it’s from the reject pile for Desperate Housewives.

The author’s attempt at manipulation as he stuffs suicide, drug addition, sibling discord, infidelity, failing health, failing marriages, etc. ad nauseum into one steaming lump of drama leaves me emotionally untouched. He’s written a serviceable vehicle for brilliant acting vignettes, but a Pulitzer? 

There are meaty monolog-ish scenes which will serve generations of aspiring actors as audition material.  Ashland’s talented team avoids crewing scenery, histrionics, and anything vaguely cringe-inducing.  The audience can see themselves or someone in their family here and there.  But, really.  Enough. As a whole, the plot is impossible to accept and distanced me from the performances.

In addition, there were holes in my understanding of the story.  There’s a pouch around the neck that one character talks about early on, but nothing comes of it that I could tell.  And, the Importance (capital I) of that character mystifies me still.  Other friends noted other loose ends, and overall I felt the play still needs editing.

But, we’re still watching Our Town with its simplified corny charm, and the nasty mess of August could become the classic reference of a family in the 2010’s.  Who knows?  For me, though, all the stars are for the actors and crafts that presented August in Ashland. 

Ozdachs Rating:   

The Pirates of Penzance
by Gilbert and Sullivan

What a silly, talented romp!  I cannot imagine a better production of this classic piece of fluff.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival delivers 200% of the music and action of the show. The production is physically dazzling, inventive, and big.  The voices, especially those of Eddie Lopez (Frederic), Michael Elich (the Pirate King), David Kelly (Major-General Stanley), Robin Goodrin Nordli (Ruth), Robert Vincent Frank (Samuel), and Khori Dastoor (Mable) are socks-knocking-off powerful, expressive, and entertaining.  And, yeah, I said “especially” and then named more than a handful of actors… and I feel bad about not singling out more. More about the Performance