Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Othello by William Shakespeare

Words, words, words!  Othello (Peter Macon, pictured left) and Iago (Dan Donohue, pictured right) made me feel like they each had too many of those damn multisyllabic chores to get through before they were allowed to go offstage and do something else.

There was one wordy speech after another.   You know the kind: they’re loaded with big rhyming Shakespeare words.  Good-for-you and opaque.

Othello starts off on full-tilt loud ranting pitch which Macon maintains for nearly every scene and utterance.  Donohue is quieter, more controlled, and clearer. But, he is also always talking through a mouth full of dusty Elizabethan words. Additionally, Donohue’s voice quavers annoyingly when he’s trying to communicate intensity.  Dan, retire the vibrato!

At two hours fifty minutes Othello was more of an endurance trial for both actors and audience.  They spoke, we listened and tried to give meaning to the syllables.  The powerful story of jealousy, betrayal, and tragic love appeared repeatedly, but only briefly. 
(more…)

Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

When you decide to present a well-known, quality chestnut, you’re declaring that you either have a fresh vision or else you’re going to new heights in production standards.  Hurtling above raised expectations is the stock in trade of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with its schedule of Shakespeare and other plays that everyone has seen from high school on.  OSF also shares new perspectives on tired war horses many times a season.

Unfortunately, this edition of Our Town is neither innovative nor Tony Award material.  It’s a technically competent production without gaffs. 

(more…)

Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner by Luis Alfaro

A discussion of this performance needs be brief.  The reviewer shouldn’t put more effort into the recap than the play writer did into his creation.

This wandering, pointless story is told with juvenile simplicity, no character development, and plenty of sophomoric words coming out of the mouths of inconsistent characters.  Worse, director Tracy Young apparently didn’t bother to read the play since her playbill synopsis referred to both themes and details which were not present in the offal delivered to the audience.  Her failure to latch on to any coherent narrative or personality is abject.

There is an attempt to explain the weak connectedness and inappropriate speeches as a result of Alfaro’s magical realism. No. Thanks for the artsy-sounding red herring, but that’s not it.  Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner is simply a horrid blob.  Maybe it was a great workshop, but it is not a play. Shame on Artistic Director Bill Rauch for selecting it.  Bill, sacrificing quality on the altar of novelty is a stupid strategy.

Two reasons not to walk out mid-act: 

1. G. Valmont Thomas found vignettes in the jumble of words given him to say.  His scenes were revelatory when either intentionally humorous or intentionally not.  Thomas’ insights were isolated and not given a chance by the script to move the story, but they were fun to watch.
2. The avenue stage set by Robert Brill was fanciful, bright, and effectively magical.

That’s it. We didn’t walk out, but I recommend exercising your membership benefits and turning in the tickets you hold for this inexcusable waste of time.

Ozdachs Rating:   

Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller

Most plays in theaters today are snappy, fast-faced reactions to the enveloping, careful productions of the mid-1900’s.  They’re not stodgy, not slow. We recognize what they are telling us through shared shortcut symbolism.  I appreciate their directness and focus on their themes.They reflect our times

But, seeing them had made me forget the rich language, dialog, characterization, and the details of everyday life in Arthur Miller at his best.  And, this production of A View from the Bridge is two and a half hours of classic slice-of-life mid-Century tragedy.  It’s a standout treat with story, meaning behind the story, and sympathetic flawed people behind the meaning of the story.  

Five minutes into the play I had the first “Oh, my!” moment as I listened to the chatter on stage.  It’d been a long while since I last heard the scene set so completely and yet naturally with words.  The “Oh, my!”s continued throughout the show, as characters talked and did what you knew that had to.  There were no surprises, yet no moments where the tension eased or my attention wandered.

Under the flawless direction of Libby Abbel, the actors provided the best work I’ve seen each of them in. 

Read the detailed review

Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler by Jeff Whitty

Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler ends with the title character shooting herself.  This play starts off with the last page of Ibsen’s dialog and cavorts forward from there. You don’t need to have seen or know the original Hedda, you’ll soon learn all you need to know about that classic.

Written by the 2004 Tony Award winner for Best Book of a Musical for Avenue Q, this Hedda fills the frothy farce slot in Oregon Shakespeare Festivals schedule.  You know: the accessible funny play that everyone likes and you take your grandmother and culture-hating red-neck cousin to.

So, as I watched, I worried.  It isn’t that TFAOHG isn’t funny.  It is. In fact it is hilarious and brilliant and quick.

But, it isn’t pointless and accessible and safe.  I expected tomatoes and rotten eggs and boos from the parts of the audience not ready for more than froth in their annual farce.

You see, after shooting herself in Ibsen’s story, our Hedda wakes up and tries to figure out what’s going on.  In quick succession she meets Mammy and Medea before Tosca drops in on the household. It turns out that Hedda lives on the cul de sac of tragic women. She lives out her suicide over and over and over.  She and her closest friends are the immortal successes with their tragedies, but the stage gets littered with characters who don’t last so long.

This time when Hedda wakes up, she decides she wants to change. She wants to be happy. And, our journey starts.

And, what a trip!  Hedda is played by Robin Goodrin Nordli, the same actress who had the title role in OSF’s 2003 production of Ibsen’s play. That casting reflects the in-the-know Easter eggs which are planted throughout the script. 

Hedda leaves home to talk her author into rewriting her as a happy person. Hedda’s husband Tesman (played by the always-jumping-on-a-sofa Chris DuVal) and Mammy (Kimberly Scott) follow.   Along the way, the followers encounter a slew of fictional characters, some transient and some immortal like Hedda.

Patrick (Anthony Heald) and Steven (Jonathan Haugen) from The Boys in the Band join in as traveling companions.  They bond quickly with Mammy because each of the three have been cast out by their own people.  They’re viewed as sell outs or self-loathing anachronisms by today’s audiences.

But, it’s all good farce, remember?  Certainly the quick bitch fights have happy zingers.  And, who cannot like a cocktail party in a row boat when Mammy, Patrick, and Steven commiserate about their fate?

My worries about flying tomatoes became a panic as the travelers meet one fictional character after another and then bump into Jesus Christ.  Actually 4 Jesuses:  Jesus the Carpenter’s Son, Mel Gibson Jesus on the Cross, Baby Jesus, and Godspell Jesus. Carpenter’s Son explains that Mel Gibson Jesus and Baby Jesus are the most popular models because people like to focus on the birth and death and no so much about what he said.  Or, something like that. It was all very quick, and it was hard to hear while I was under my seat, ducking to avoid what I was sure to be a very rotten tomato barrage.

Oddly, the audience kept laughing.  Howling sometimes.  Do all those older traditional grandmothers really understand the gay-infused allusions? Can they still like a play with those two explicatives bitch-screamed across the stage?  (The photograph, by the way, shows Patrick and Steven in an unhappy moment… like the unhappy moment that ended all their parties.)

The staging (Christopher Acebo), flawless costumes (designed by Shigeru Yaji), and direction (Bill Rauch) complemented the spot-on acting ensemble.  The many fictional characters were played by Kate Mulligan (Meda), Gregory Linington (Carpenter Jesus and others), and the other actors already complimented.  It was a great, fast-moving zoo of personalities and witticisms.

We left the theater a bit dismissive. We were grinning about seeing something witty and fun, but we thought it was just fluff.  But two days later I was still telling people about the play and how well the narrative exposed the importance of storytelling.  At breakfast we discussed how we would have to update the characters for the audiences in 2058.

Finally we had to admit, TFAOHG got us thinking in addition to laughing.

Ozdachs Rating: