February 23, 2007 – Opening Night
Ashland, OR
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

One of the best aspects of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is its de-monumentizing of Shakespeare.  His plays are put on stage without the pomposity that lets the audience know that they are seeing high culture which is good for them.  The normal OSF attitude is “Shakespeare today, August Wilson tonight, you decide what you like.”

Well, OSF didn’t follow that rule this time.  Not with this As You Like It, and as a result, I liked it very little.

The production is leaden and long.  The first half is filled with speechifying.  Characters bluster to the front of the stage and deliver their lines. A mosaic of problems is dropped in front of the audience without connection or cohesion. 

“Here, take this. It’s Shakespeare!” we seem to be told.  “And this!  And this!”

The disjointedness is amplified by the senseless staging and costuming.  Supposedly set in the 1930’s depression, the stage is initially sparse and industrial and more like a silent movie depicting a Industrial Revolution factory.  The Arden forest is equally sparse and stylized, and equally unsatisfying in its own, off-the-mark way.  The supposedly complementary costumes are the real puzzles.  They wander from pseudo-1930’s business, to gangster, to 1800’s English countryside, to simply too busy, incomprehensible, and wrong. And, then there’s the featureless music which is delivered inappropriately by this player or that.

The wrestling scene which featured a shirtless, clean-cut, 20/30-something Danforth Comins (Orlando), typified the off-putting feeling of the evening.  Instead of the match showcasing a tantalizing bit of male flesh (normally a very good thing), the participants in the wrestling here were made unattractive and, well, odd-looking.  I am pretty sure that Comins is good looking, but not on this set, in this light, with this direction.

There are fun performances to watch, but all of the actors are clearly doing a bidding of a director, J.R. Sullivan, whose psychotropic meds were having an off week.  There’s no overall functioning together of the parts of the play.

Rather than cutting and focusing or amplifying and spotlighting, this production gives the audience a vision-less regurgitation of Shakespeare’s comedy chestnut.  As a result, the evening was heavy and long.   

Positive nods to Miriam Laube (Rosalind) for sparkling eyes and fun moments. Sarah Rutan (Phebe), Robert Sicular (Jaques), David Kelley (Touchstone) had great moments, too.  And, Juan Rivera LeBron was pretty, sincere, and spot-on in his scenes as always (although, he is getting a bit old to be the starry-eyed kid much longer).

But, the performances needed better direction for the evening to be entertainment.

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August, 2006
Ashland, OR
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (translated and adapted by Anthony Burgess) is a perfect play for my tragedy-loving and comedy-disliking personality.  The story is a tear-jerker, full of honor, unrequited love, bravery, more honor, more love, and ultimately death. The title character, played by Marco Barricelli, is so honorable and acts with so much integrity, that even disaster lovers like me squirm in our seats hoping for a last-minute rewrite that delivers the girl and a long life to the hero. (more…)

August, 2006
Ashland, OR
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare

If you’re going to produce an over-the-top romp 400 years after it was written, you should do it with the energy, skill, and good fun that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival gives to Merry Wives. Will’s16th Century sit-coms generally do as little for me as the 21st Century ones that I delete unwatched from TiVo.  Yet, OSF makes the scheming and put-ons of MW a simple good, fun night in the outdoor theater. (more…)

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

The farce at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this season relies on word play instead of physical humor and timing. Still, the company manages to over-act and put on stuffy English accents to keep alive their tradition of doing
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comedy.

There’s not much to say about this good production of a clever but well worn play.  It was good to see Kevin Kennerly as Algernon in a break from his murderous roles of past years (Booth in Topdog/Underdog and Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom).  Costumes are pretty. The acting competent, if unsubtle and mostly uninteresting. The set is lush, the lighting fine, …. yawn.

You’re going to see this play at sometime in your play-going career. If you haven’t seen it yet, OSF’s production is a fine opportunity to punch your Wilde card.

Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage

I got teary-eyed watching Esther Mills and Mr. Marks appreciate the swath of fine fabric, Yes, their unrolling of a piece of cloth was that emotional, complex, and full.

I didn’t feel manipulated.  There were no “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” sniffling heart-string tugs.  It was just that what wasn’t being said on stage — what couldn’t be said on stage — was just that potent.

Intimate Apparel’s surface story is easy to tell. The play is about a mid-30’s single Negro seamstress of women’s undergarments in the early 1900’s. People talk to her intimately because of the nature of her work.  At the beginning of the play Esther has never had a love relationship.  During the play we follow her as she falls in love and gets married.  It’s a simple story.

Ah,… but the story is so well done. Author Lynn Nottage gives us good glimpses into the lives touched by our heroine, Esther (played spectacularly by Gwendolyn Mulamba).  Her clients are stereotypes of diversity — an uptown socialite and a chorus girl prostitute — but there is no cardboard cutout in their portrayal.  Esther’s yearnings that lead her to falling in love with a man she knows only from his letters are somehow realistic: both her idealism and practicality ring true.  (more…)