Tartuffe by Moliere, translated by Ranjit Bolt

Damn, it’s satisfying when a hoary piece of “accessible” culture is given genuine life on stage. 

When I last saw Tartuffe it was played for all of the pretentious fluff possible.  The play had no present meaning, unless you read the scholarly playbill notes.  It was a happy vacuous evening of Theatre. 

Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and the 2002 translation by Ranjit Bolt, have banished that cotton candy Tartuffe from my memory. They’ve created a production that’s equally good fun and sharp satire.

The book is still happily over-populated with couplets that have the audience anticipating and dreading the payoff rhyme. Yet, the dialog is wickedly focused on its target: religious hypocrisy.

The language sounds unforced and honors Moliere much more than a translation into archaic English.  Bolt’s words left a friend sure that Tartuffe (Anthony Heald) was channeling Jimmy Swaggart. This Tartuffe was written just last week after yet another mega-church preacher was caught in bed, using drugs, doing things he denounced from the pulpit on Sunday.

Ah, but this scandal is so much more fun than the ones that litter the media.  Tartuffe’s saga includes alert characters who say the bitchy lines you find yourself screaming at the TV when today’s phony men of the cloth take center stage.

Linda Alper as Dorine, the maid, steals the show with her verbal and physical antics, stirring the family up against the interloper Tartuffe.  She was given the lines by Moliere/Bolt, but her eyes and the rest of her body are fully her responsibility.  Thank you, Linda!

The costume designer and actor Eileen DeSandre share honors for starting the play off in the proper tone. As the grandmother under Tartuffe’s spell, DeSandre is comical but unfortunately believable.  The headpiece she wears while delivering the play-beginning speeches is a quintuple ruffled lacy black-and-white thing that looks like an upside down albino wattle. (more…)

Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson

The excellence of Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production serves to point out the flaws in this first episode of August Wilson’s 10-play series on the Afro-American experience in America in the 20th Century.  The evening oozes importance and great meaning.  The cast rises to the challenge.  Unfortunately, this penultimately written saga tries to do too much and fails to do much.  The play confuses instead of illuminates. 

Set in  Pittsburgh in1904, the story deals with the ambiguity of the new de jure freedom for black people which runs up against the de facto economic and physical control of their lives. The central character is a magical 285-year-old “spiritual advisor” (Greta Oglesby as Aunt Ester). In her house we meet the woman she hopes to entrust her secrets and magic to (Shona Tucker as Black Mary), Aunt Ester’s close friend and ex-slave (G. Valmont Thomas as Solly Two Kings), Aunt Ester’s gatekeeper (Josiah Phillips as Eli), a newly arrived African-American refugee from Alabama (Kevin Kennerly as Citizen Barlow), Shona’s brother who has been co-opted by the white mayor to enforce tough justice in the black community (Derrick Lee Weeden as Caesar), and the white housewares peddler (Bill Geisslinger as Rutherford Selig).

The production does an excellent job with each character, and OSF handles the magical dream-like scenes clearly and well. 

The actors have strong voices, and the moments of spirituals sung by the characters are mood-creating and haunting.  The simple staging focuses the audience on the movement and the words.  The performance is steady, straight forward, and powerful.  One magic moment involves a boat ride which could easily be hokey in less professional hands, but at OSF you felt the tossing of waves during the narrated storm.

Each performer deserves his or her own moment of praise.

Oglesby balanced the physical and spiritual sides of her character without a jar.  Her voice raised in occasional song is worth the price of admission itself! 

Thomas is so big and so perfect in his movement that his equally on-target speaking is deceptively skilled and almost under appreciated.  By turns he is gentle and subtle and then angry and dangerous. But, he’s always underplaying and drawing the audience to him. 

Weeden owns his thin, mean, conflicted character who is no Caesar and all Cassius. Tucker radiates youth and growth in her apprentice role.  And, Bill Gesslinger plays a character and not himself. (Okay, it sounds like faint praise but after seeing him do the same character in many different plays, I was relieved to see something else in Gem.)

But, even with top-quality in cast, direction, and staging, the result remains a production tour de force in service of an uneven piece of theater.  Plot lines were introduced, tended, and left unresolved. New complications arose in late scenes which were neither needed nor handled.  The play ended at least three times, but even when the lights went up, there are many “yes, buts” to be answered. 

Instead of powerful theater, we were exposed to overpowering ideas.  These were exquisitely important ideas about American and its people. But, bringing them forward and leaving them on stage is not enough.

The artists who gave us the evening deserved the standing energetic ovation they received. But, the overall Gem experience is only

On the Razzle by Tom Stoppard

Either your the type of person who laughs non-stop at silly sit-coms or you’re not.  If you’re not, then there’s no use in someone talking to you about the quality of the script, the acting, the physical humor, or any of the other skills employed in the show. 

I am not a sit-com aficionado.  So don’t waste your time explaining how right and funny a plot line you saw was.

And, that’s my feeling about On the Razzle, Oregon Shakespeare’s obligatory farce for the season. 

It just isn’t my type of play. I can agree that the word play is witty, well-written, and engaging.  The story is Hello Dolly mixed slightly with one of Shakespeare’s cross-dressing suitor comedies. It’s cute, quick, smart, and lively.  This production’s staging is innovative and catchy.  The costumes are appropriately gaudy.  The night is a visual bouquet created by trained  and determined florists.

The actors are downright flawless.  Fun, in-character, happily over-the-top, yet comfortable.  They mix perfect line delivery with spot-on physical movements.  Tony DeBruno (Zangler, the merchant) maneuvers through his malaprop-laden speeches expertly, and the timing of his farcical collaborators is impeccable. Director Laird Williamson deserves my personal thanks for not casting the perpetually bouncy, scenery chewer Chris DuVall in this play.

“I hated it!” started off one of our group as the entire house left the theater with wide smiles on our faces.  You couldn’t not be smiling because you’d just spent two hours in a clean, welcoming up-beat madhouse. So, she admitted with a little prodding, she hadn’t hated the production.  But, rather, she thought it was just was a waste of time.

That’s my judgment, too.  Seeing On the Razzle spent time and money that could have been used to see a real play.

February 25, 2007 – Opening Performance
Ashland, OR
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire

I pushed my way out of the theater at intermission because after only an hour or so, I needed daylight.  I was hoping for bright sunshine, but the obscured sky and the accompanying driving rain actually was probably better. The gloom was less jarring after what we’d been through.

The official Oregon Shakespeare Festival synopsis of the play is mechanical and sparse compared to the actual production. It talks about death and colliding grief.  Director Jim Edmonson did a summary that says it better but remains unsatisfying:
“Rabbit Hole seems to me a fugue for five characters:  a study in loss and guilt and courage and very complicated love.”

I won’t try to best Edmonson, because the truth is this play is good enough that no smart paragraph or two is going be adequate.  You have to see the play and let any overview remind you of what you saw.

The story of a family eight months into dealing with the death of a child is difficult to keep in the drama range: it could easily slip into mawkish melodrama. Lindsay-Abaire keeps that from happening by delivering true-to-my-life dialog and OSF keeps it from happening by delivering a company equal to the play. 

The parents have serious discussions — truly angry arguments even — that are salted with humorous one-liners.  It’s just like the domestic ahh…. discussions…. I have at home.  The language is real, understandable, and painful. 

Except, and of course, it’s not always painful.  The play opens with a seemingly shallow Tyler Layton (Izzy, aunt to the dead child) telling the story of how she got into a barroom fight with another woman.  It’s an outrageous story, setting a humorous mood, yet not a fluffy word of it is wasted when it comes to our main story. Layton is amazing as the airhead who isn’t so fluffy herself at the end of two hours and 30-some minutes. She, like her fellow cast members, is close to perfection in her language and physical moves.  Damn it, she’s good!

The characters change during the two months of the play.  It’s believable growth that doesn’t resolve into a happy ending.  Yet trying to fix any of the characters by describing their personality doesn’t work unless the characterization is limited by time. 

For example, when the play opens Robin Goodrin Nordli (Becca, the mother) is as beautiful as the TV desperate housewife with whom she shares an obsession with numbing details.  She’s not ready to make nice with life, or anyone in it. She’s still beautiful at the end of the production, still not happy, but she has grown less brittle and it shows brilliantly in her speech and in her body.

Dee Maaske (Nat) finally escapes variations on her role as ditsy Dorothy in Noises Off.  Sure, as the grandmother she can deliver some ditsy lines.  But, she has her own emotions that are completely grounded and rational.  It was nice to see her out of frumpy clothes, too.  She’s not at all bad looking as a brassy blonde!

Even the non-equity Jeris Schaefer as the high-school driver of the car that struck and killed the son does a superb job with the excellent material.  He is right on down to his finger motions and the wiping off of food from his hands by a quick brush off onto his pants. Amazingly good work!

Finally, Bill Geisslinger as the father is fine.  I personally find his Bill Clinton-like incomplete voice disconcerting. He’s too underplayed and difficult to understand for me, but I think it’s just me. 

Not since Wit did a play make me feel such a need to see daylight to decompress. Unlike Wit, by the end of this play, we’d changed enough so I could live indoors again.  Not happily indoors, but still inside and in the company of other people.

February 24, 2007 – Opening Performance
Ashland, OR
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The Cherry Orchid by Anton Chekhov

Symbolism alert! Or, as redozdachs said as I prepared to come up for opening weekend, “This is your first chance to say ‘good-bye’ to Libby Appel for the last time.”

Yes, Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Artistic Director Libby Appel is retiring this season. Her very talented but very self-satisfied, self-congratulating Presence will soon no longer permeate through all sectors of the Ashland stage. She choose to direct this Chekhov classic about change, loss, and growth as a parting gift. What a schmaltzy, in-your-face symbolic choice. As much as it pains me to say it, “Thank you, Libby.”

There is cigarette matchbook cover showing a cartoon dinosaur ambling across some prehistoric landscape with the inscription “Adapt or Die!”  The obvious target of the message is the avid nicotine addict who is about to deliberately pick up speed down his own road to extinction.  The Cherry Orchid, pitched to us upper-middle class culturaholics, has an analogous, if not exactly similar, feel. Just who is sitting in the seats, watching the throes of the old comfortable aristocracy not dealing with inevitable change?

No matter. Enough irony.
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