Seagull
Written by Anton Chekhov
Adapted and Directed by Libby Appel

A three-word summary review of Seagull:  unfortunate play selection.

Everything about this production was well done.  The actors hit the right note in everything they did.  Chris Acebo’s set took inventive advantage of the New Theater’s intimacy.  Deb Dryden’s clothes were rich and a nice counterpart to the early sparseness of the stage.  Libby Apple directed a consistent, restrained, and intelligent vision of this Chekhov classic.  Even with all the top-notch craft work, the scenes dragged and nothing interesting was revealed.

I liked the production of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchid a few years ago, so I didn’t walk into the building wondering why I was there.  But, this play was too predictable and unrelievedly negative.  The characters don’t develop in any significant way, bad things happen, and time moves slowly. 

The cast navigated the turgid script admirably.  I enjoyed seeing Tasso Feldman (Kostya) in a dramatic, not-just-a-cute-kid role.  Armando Duran (Dr. Dorn) still has the looks to come off as a handsome, world weary rake.  I was interested in seeing the skills of Ashland newcomer Kathryn Meisle (Irina). Michael Hume (Pyotr) did a fine job deteriorating into an old man of 60-something.  And so on and so on.

These thoughts tracking the actors’ careers were going through my head during the performance.  I was desperate to keep my mind going and to keep focus.  The narrative was not doing it.

There were minor parts of the production I would change:

• The shiny deep blue of the stage didn’t work for me;  if it was supposed to help us think we were outdoors, wouldn’t earth brown be better?
• This new adaptation could have helped itself by making Michael Hume older than 62.  When the doctor told Hume that his physical condition would just go downhill because he was past 60, the mostly white-haired audience snickered.  I don’t think it was supposed to be a laugh line.
• The blocking had the actors marching too close to my row A seat, and I thought I was going to be accidentally hit on the back swing of Hume’s cane at one point.
• The dead seagull prop looked positively fuzzy and cuddly.

But, let’s not spend any more time craping about details.  It was a fine production of a story that didn’t reach me.

Ozdachs Rating:   

The White Snake
Written and Directed by Mary Zimmerman

Playwright Mary Zimmerman has distilled an ancient, often modified, Chinese legend of The White Snake into a coherent, relevant, engrossing, artistic, and accessible 138-minute story. The text is stylized and full of Eastern cultural references, but Zimmerman’s lively, humorous, and rich approach somehow [“somehow” as in “the magic happens here”] honors the fable’s roots while letting it transcend its place and time of origin. 

The White Snake avoids being artsy fartsy as Zimmerman’s works have been in the past (I’m thinking specifically of Berkeley Rep’s Metamorphoses which I disliked, its later Broadway Tony notwithstanding), and instead rises to a mesmerizing blend of straight-forward narrative, stylized symbolism, humor, gorgeous visuals, and conflicting morality. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s own January-deadline publications warned that the script had not yet been written, yet at its opening the play was polished, professional, and ready for prime time. (more…)

Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare

In Director Laird Williamson vision, Romeo and Juliet is a farcical melodramatic moral play filled with bawdy clowns.  It’s a slapstick tragedy, a category  underrepresented on modern stage.  The script’s only fault is the pesky obvious rhymes and flowery language that can be best gotten through in a quick pace at high volume. 

Williamson has ordered up so many pelvic thrusts for the hormonal young men that the show is unsuitable for school tours.  What in other productions comes off as witty sexual innuendo, Williamson unmasks as full-on, lowest-common-denominator sleazy talk. He gets the audience giggling at the sex, tittering at the over-wrought emotions, and focused on the comic characters of nurse, friar, and apothecary. (more…)

The African Company Presents Richard III
by Carlyle Brown

The African Company Presents Richard III is a very satisfying vehicle to exhibit extraordinary acting in service of a a not terrible, not overwrought script. 

The play-within-a-play scenes give us some riveting moments as the actors play their characters and then their characters slip into their roles in Shakespeare’s Richard III for a few stanzas. 

Kevin Kenerly (as James Hewlett) is excellent and the dominating presence on stage throughout the evening.  He’s sweet, stupid, overly focused, driven, and practical as Hewlett, and then instantly differently mesmerizing as he goes into actor mode and creates a scene of Shakespeare. Read More about the Performance

Ghost Light
conceived and developed by Jonathan Moscone and Tony Taccone
written by Tony Taccone
directed by Jonathan Moscone

When Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced it was commissioning a play on the shooting of Harvey Milk and George Moscone I was half pleased that gay civil rights would be a topic mentioned in the festival’s 37-play United States History Cycle and half apprehensive about seeing another cover of the Milk assassination already spotlighted very well in Execution of Justice and in the movies The Times of Harvey Milk and Milk.

My assumptions about the play topic set me up perfectly for Ghost Light.  Read more about the Prodcution