Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Coriolanus by William Shakespeare

Coriolanus in 2008

It’s depressing.  This centuries’ old play about events a millennium earlier than that still speaks too accurately about the crowd/personality/political dynamics of the campaigns featured today on CNN and Fox.

There is no one-for-one tracking between Shakespeare’s characters and McCain, Romney, and the rest.  But, at times, when the self-righteousness or their temporizing morality is front and center, being refined for us future generations, I heard John and Mitt.

The self-centered, self-serving fickleness of public opinion is there, too.  Is there nothing new or nothing that we have learned?

It is the superb production that makes this dusty old story so powerful.

Danforth Comins as Caius Martius blazes with energy, anger, self-righteousness, and heroism.  Comins (pictured on the left on the balcony) has beefed up for this role, and he looks the physical hero.  Butch, brash, patriotic, and studly. His focused but uncontrollable rage owns the intimate stage.

And, the stage is set just so perfectly.  Housed in the small New Theater in a theater-in-the-round configuration, Coriolanus is quick, sharp, and dangerous.  Scenes change with appropriate war-like cracks and flashes.  Crash-bang. No waiting. It’s war. It’s busy times.

The sparseness, the placing of characters among the audience, the striped-down stylized fox holes, cellphones and PDAs, and modern drag are not conceits. They work.

Getting me to accept Shakespeare set in any period except the time of the story or the time of Shakespeare is a high hurdle which Coriolanus easily cleared. In fact, I am embarrassed to admit one of my favorite moments.  Amidst a lot of street hubbub about what is to happen next, one character fumbles and unobtrusively gazes into his cellphone. He looks up, and starts off, “The auguries say…”  The cellphone as a mystical source of information: wonderful!
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Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Wow!  This Midsummer isn’t so much a staging of a grandmother-approved Shakespeare classic as a performance of a barely Work Safe on-stage rave. The risque romp uses Shakespeare’s text and then sings, dances, and acts the story into a frenzy.

The best part of director Mark Rucker’s vision are the fairy servants of King Oberon and Queen Titania.  These fairies aren’t sweet Disney helpers with an impish sense of humor.  They’re glam-rock refugees from Rocky Horror on a berserker binge of havoc making.

Other productions have left me wondering why the cute fairies were tweaking the poor love-besotted humans.  They were always comforting — if oddly behaving — beings helping us to the happy ending of the play.

Well!  These danger boys barely held their darkest impulses in check.  Their entrances caused wide-spread shrieks of excitement from the many teenage and sub-teenage girls in the audience.  Puck (John Tufts) was sexually smoky. Titania’s courtiers were thieves, brazenly queer, and yet irresistible to all.

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Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
world premiere – opening performance, February 24, 2008

Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter by Julie Marie Myatt

I cannot image a more calculated tugging of the audience’s heart-strings.  Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter is  Love Story written to honor Iraq War veterans.  I feel manipulated, dirty.

“I noticed that you didn’t give the play a standing ovation, little boy.  Most everyone else did.  Don’t you honor our service men and women?”

All the playwright left out was little puppy dogs and cute bunnies.

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Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
opening performance, February 23, 2008

The Clay Cart by Sudraka (Translated by J.A.B. van Buitenen)

I’ve never seen a live-action Disney cartoon pageant before.  It was wonderful!

A rich, gorgeous stage filled with 40-some actors hosted this 2000-year-old play. The cast moved the story and the audience with their words, gestures, dance, and singing.  A funny, poignant, and biting social comedy, the evening was completely enjoyable and satisfying.  Its challenges, heroes,  problems, and villains were no lifeless abstract ancient stylizations — we still fight the same evil kings and their rapacious cronies.

It’s impossible to describe The Clay Cart without nodding to Shakespeare.  Sudraka may have lived 1500 years before and a continent away, but these two both knew how to comment on their times, give moral guidance, and make it a lot of fun.

The Clay Cart’s tells of the love between Charudatta (Christopher Jean, pictured at right) and Vasatasena (Miriam A. Laube, pictured at left).  He is an honorable, generous man who gave away so much that he’s now poor. She is a still-rich whore (called most often, delicately, a “courtesan”) with a heart of gold. She is aggressively pursued by the immoral Samsthanaka (Brent Hinkley), brother-in-law to the evil king.  Eventually the good boy gets the girl as his second wife… the first wife and son are on stage, too. All loose ends are tied up, and every good guy is rewarded and every bad guy is brought down.

Getting to the happy ending is just so entertaining!
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Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
opening performance, February 23, 2008

Fences by August Wilson

The opening of Fences revealed a shaky story shakily told.

I assume that it’s the script which has inconsistencies and false starts that Oregon Shakespeare merely brought forward.  Certainly this production didn’t weave together a clear or consistent or entertaining storyline from whatever August Wilson wrote.

To begin, various cast members stumbled over lines at least a half dozen times.  Blowing lines in an obvious way is my personal pet peeve;  it always jars me out of the moment. And, these Fences characters had tongue-tie-itis, especially the actors who appeared on stage early in the narrative.

It wasn’t just the lines that missed.  The direction, characters, sound, and lighting didn’t fit quite right. 

Director Leah Gardiner amped everyone’s energy up one or two notches above reasonable.  Words exploded at odd moments. 

In addition, Gardiner put me off with the playbill blurb:

“In 1957, when this play begins,  nine black students, protected by federal troops, desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Throughout the country, Black Americans, although aware that change was inevitable, continued to live segregated lives.”

What?  Inevitable?  Really, the country should have just sat back and waited then, eh? How young is this director? How clueless?
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