Measure for Measure
by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare never tired having his lead characters dress up in disguises and hinging plot lines on the fallout of mistaken identity or secret observations.  I, on the other hand, am weary of boys dressed as girls dressed as boys and kings posing as commoners acting kingly.  Too silly.  It doesn’t help my enjoyment that most of these stories are comedies with deus ex machina happy endings.

Measure for Measure may be officially a “problem play” and not a comedy, but there are enough absurd happy touches for me to decide to pass on seeing more performances.

Except, this year Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production is directed by Bill Raush.  Bill re-envisions tired plays, especially Shakespeare’s too well acclaimed and too poorly re-imagined classics. So, I signed up for Measure for Measure, saw it opening night in February,… and saw it again Memorial Day weekend. 

Bill has come through again.  This fast, 1970’s situated Measure has little to do with 400-year-old literature and everything to do with modern abuse of power, false morality, self-righteousness, and other Fox News staples.  This is not a play created for the rarefied pleasure of the culture elite.  In fact, this production isn’t even work safe. The bawdy humor is not esoteric double entendre;  it’s downright obscene.

Bill’s Measure is hot, alive, funny, fun, and dangerous.

Probably the most spectacular and objectively novel element of this production is the use of three female Mariachi artists throughout the play.  Yes, Mariachi, and it works.

You remember in English class that the teacher promised you that in Shakespeare’s day his plays were performed with musicians and artists wandering on stage and throughout the theater?  The performances were reportedly all-day parties. But, if you ever were exposed to music and Shakespeare in the same class, all you ever heard was safe, delicate, and desultory Olde Englishe recorder music.

Well!

Raush has created a Latin-flavored story with several very pretty Latino actors (of both genders), and the inclusion of vibrant, expressive Mariachi music is tone-perfect for this production. The original Spanish-language songs move the story along both book-wise and emotionally.  The musicians are mischievous, sexy, and fun!

The cast is truly composed of all stars.  Praising one or two isn’t fair.

Stephanie Beatriz (Isabela) plays her whole body while conveying ever so much with her eyes and face. She is strong and innocent simultaneously, the only way the character works.   Beyond flawless. 

Meanwhile Anthony Heald (Duke of Vienna) is completely right at every high, low, backtrack, and switch of the plot.  The script changes the motivation and level of sincerity for the Duke quickly, especially toward the end.  Heald hits each turn correctly, helping the audience track what’s real and what’s a put on meant to confuse other on-stage characters.  I suspect the Duke’s chatter is often Alzheimer-like ramblings or inexplicably random in many productions.  Heald both energizes the Duke and guides the story as if it really made sense.

Ramiz Monsef (Pompey) is a stand out as the amoral, loose-tongued bawd. Madame Mistress Overdone was, in fact, done to drag-queen perfection by actor Cristofer Jean. René Millán (Angelo) was tormented and sleazy in believable and scary ways. Tony DeBruno (Provost) and Kenajuan Bentley (Lucio) and Frankie Alvarez (Claudio) and… and.. and…  each amazing and wonderful.

Each production craft contributed to this great Measure. Everything meshed and complemented, and nothing jarred.  The set design by Clint Ramos deserves special note because it was so plain and yet versatile and fitting.  The stage starts off looking like the industrial cafeteria of ACT’s 2007 production of Blackbird, but it grew to so much more.  Sparse, changing, and flexible, especially with the action and video scenery visible through the center windows.

Raush raised the complicated story and complex play above the level of comedy or even comedy with problems.  Raush provides a clear vision for all aspects of the stories he directs, and Measure is no exception.  Given my weariness at sudden, out-of-the-blue happy endings, I especially appreciate how this production finishes.  After maintaining her virtue against the powerful Angelo’s entreaties for several acts, as the play closes the Duke proposes publicly to Isabela and offers her more worldly as his wife.  Raush has Isabela step up to a microphone to respond, mug world-class looks of conflict, face the mike, and … well, you’ll have to see yourself!

Ozdachs Rating:  

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
written by Tennessee Williams
Oregon Shakespeare Festival at its best strips Classic Plays of their Greatness, and allows the actors on stage to tell a simple story unburdened by the responsibility to live up to the Reputation of the Work of Art.  Their 2010 production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  — which closes too early on July 4 — is an example of OSF at the top of its craft.

Director Christopher Moore has blended the original 1955 script with some of the 1974 revisions penned by Tennessee Williams to give audiences a language-rich, clear, complicated, and very human account of the Politt clan in crisis.

Moore adeptly focuses on the different truths of the different characters, letting the audience explore “Whose truth is the truth?” The more explicit language and un-toned-down homosexual references in the theatrical versions (both 1955 and 1974) make the motivations of Brick (Danforth Comins), the central character, and his family deeper, more complicated, and more understandable than in the hushed-up Hays Code Taylor-Redford film.

The acting is tense in a low-key, realistic, and devastating way.  (more…)

Ruined
written by Lynn Nottage
This horror story opens with the audience being dropped into the middle of the ongoing uncivil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Mama Nadi (Kimberly Scott) is the wheeling, dealing savior madame and bar owner who, in the opening scene, is convinced by a trader to take on two new girls. 

There are 10 girls who work for Mama (only three appear as characters). All have been victims of political gang rape by soldiers who know that their physical victims will then be cast out of their families because of their forced degradation.  It’s true evil committed by young soldiers who are living in a land of war-induced cultural perversion.

The ugliness of humanity is fully, graphically, slowly, and rawly explored in the relentlessly uncomfortable script for which Nottage won last year’s Pulitzer Prize.  Child-like brutal rebel soldiers switch off with young, clear-headed brutal government soldiers as customers in Mama’s place.  Each man who wanders into the bar exposes his own profaneness, bravado-camouflaged damage, and desperation for a place to fit in.

Each character’s psychological vulnerability is uncovered, exploited, and left unattended. In turn, nearly every actor on stage is exposed, hurt, and made a victim of the war which has ended civilization.

(more…)

 Pride and Prejudice
written by Jane Austin
adapted by Joseph Hanreddy and J.R. Sullivan
I saw Pride and Prejudice at its opening several months ago, and I have been struggling to write about it ever since.

It’s not that the production was so good or so bad that words fail me, it’s that examining this sure-fire crowd pleaser is as pointless as the movie critics panning Sex in the City 2.  Basically, any review of either production isn’t going to matter to anyone.  Fans of the genre are going to go and applaud, regardless of the artistic merits of the show. 

Pride and Prejudice is Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2010 farce.  Wacky.  Truly good costumes for days.  Supposedly witty banter.  Happy ending.  If you love a pretty, mindless evening in the theater, you’re going to go and enjoy every minute.

My opinion:  it’s piffle. A waste of acting talent and theater space. A missed opportunity to educate and inform. The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, another recent example of the annual farce, pushed limits more and provided more than just laughs.  Noises Off offered more true wit and wisdom.  

Pride and Prejudice will satisfy only those who need a content-free farce in their theater schedule.

From the company’s perspective they have a mostly sold out soft-serve story that pleases crowds and will be remembered as a hit.

So, why bother carping?

Who cares if this adaptation of Austin’s manners comedy avoids any deeper social commentary by making fun of the victims of the financial inheritance rules of its time?  Does it matter that instead of mocking the fiscal mores of the culture, this Pride mocks the women trying to survive the unfair customs?  No, of course not. 

The set, the costumes, and the bright-face acting will carry the day, even if they are carrying the production around in merry-go-round circles that merely amuse without challenging, changing, or even commenting.

For me, a celebration of the financial enslavement of women is, at best, odd.  In my drive to find meaning in theater, I keep wondering why this play was chosen, why this adaption, why the direction that give us surface-level flirting instead of any deeper meaning.  Why?

The acting performances are excellent. The set is excellent.  The costumes are excellent plus. 

But, the play selection, adaptation, and pageant-but-not-pungent focus of the direction made me disappointed.  This is not art, it’s a live sit-com.

Ozdachs Rating:  

Well
written by Lisa Kron

It’s 105 minutes of “Did You Get It?”-sledgehammer-over-the-audience’s-head time as Well crawls its way to an unsatisfying conclusion.  

Stand-up comedian Lisa Kron wrote this sketch play that is repeatedly not about her relationship with her mother. Not about her mother who is lounging prominently on stage even as the audience takes its seats.  Not. Get it?

To be fair to Kron, I’ve talked to people who liked the play when it was at San Francisco’s ACT, it won Tony Award nominations for its lead characters when it was on Broadway, and the New York Times welcomed Well as a “sparkling autobiographical play” to rally “fans of that beleaguered literary form, the memoir”.

So, OSF gets credit for taking a risk with a modern, quirky piece.  But, director James Edmondson and crew didn’t connect with the work.  In this incarnation the play feels overreaching, shoddy, and incomplete.  Almost creepily amateurish. (more…)