August: Osage County
by Tracy Letts

We saw the evening performance of August: Osage County the same day as the matinée of Ghost Light.  With apologizes to the Pulitzer jury and to our many friends who felt that August had the best of all possible characterizations and story, in my opinion August is just too contrived and suffers in comparison to the realness of Ghost Light.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival August production is excellent, and none of my reservations come from the Ashland concepts, designs, or acting.  Director Christopher Liam Moore worked a quality, cohesive structure where the crafts and on-stage talent give us a perfectly blended, unified vision. 

The big, sprawling-but-detailed set moves the open plains into the Bowmer Theater.  Neil Patel’s design is a great hodgepodge of vignette holding spaces, mixed up like the family we’re watching.  

Costume designer Alex Jaeger gives just the right clothing to each person.  There is (mostly) subtle differences in what’s being worn, and the choices reflect the wearer’s personality without drawing unreasonable attention to the clothes.

The acting is a magnificent tour de force of depth and strength. All of the actors have the same understanding of the family and of the play. They work together to expose each character to the audience.

 Judith Marie Bergan (Violet) is spectacularly selfish, hurt, sick, harsh, and funny.  In most venues she would have walked away with the show and you wouldn’t remember who else was on stage with her.  She was natural in her twisted addictions, sometimes even humorous but never too slapstick-y. 

Richard Elmore (Beverly) sets the high standard for the acting with his prologue.  I love his low-key delivery  that lets him slip off the stage without you fully comprehending how he’s set up the rest of the play.

Terri McMahon (Ivy Weston) and Kate Mulligan (Karen Weston) are terrific as sisters, and Catherine E. Coulson (Mattie Fay Allen) puts power into a relatively ditz-prone woman of a certain age.  I have only applause for the other actors, too.

What I cannot applaud is the contrived storyline that sounds like an outline for the most convoluted soap opera ever.  Don’t believe me?  Check out the plot in Wikipedia.

This play is beyond conscientious in making sure that it handles every family complication possible (although they only make a lesbian accusation and don’t really have a sexual minority to prey on).  The plot serves a ratatouille of domestic misfortune and intrigue. I think it’s so uncomfortably over-spiced that it tastes phony.   The narrative isn’t in the tradition of great theater tragedies, it’s from the reject pile for Desperate Housewives.

The author’s attempt at manipulation as he stuffs suicide, drug addition, sibling discord, infidelity, failing health, failing marriages, etc. ad nauseum into one steaming lump of drama leaves me emotionally untouched. He’s written a serviceable vehicle for brilliant acting vignettes, but a Pulitzer? 

There are meaty monolog-ish scenes which will serve generations of aspiring actors as audition material.  Ashland’s talented team avoids crewing scenery, histrionics, and anything vaguely cringe-inducing.  The audience can see themselves or someone in their family here and there.  But, really.  Enough. As a whole, the plot is impossible to accept and distanced me from the performances.

In addition, there were holes in my understanding of the story.  There’s a pouch around the neck that one character talks about early on, but nothing comes of it that I could tell.  And, the Importance (capital I) of that character mystifies me still.  Other friends noted other loose ends, and overall I felt the play still needs editing.

But, we’re still watching Our Town with its simplified corny charm, and the nasty mess of August could become the classic reference of a family in the 2010’s.  Who knows?  For me, though, all the stars are for the actors and crafts that presented August in Ashland. 

Ozdachs Rating:   

The Pirates of Penzance
by Gilbert and Sullivan

What a silly, talented romp!  I cannot imagine a better production of this classic piece of fluff.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival delivers 200% of the music and action of the show. The production is physically dazzling, inventive, and big.  The voices, especially those of Eddie Lopez (Frederic), Michael Elich (the Pirate King), David Kelly (Major-General Stanley), Robin Goodrin Nordli (Ruth), Robert Vincent Frank (Samuel), and Khori Dastoor (Mable) are socks-knocking-off powerful, expressive, and entertaining.  And, yeah, I said “especially” and then named more than a handful of actors… and I feel bad about not singling out more. More about the Performance

Willful

Two days later Willful is still coming up in meal conversations and rides in the car. We’re still sharing insights of what we experienced and delighting over twists and conceits that worked for us.  Or, maybe that one didn’t even exist except in our own mind. More about the Performance

Henry IV, Part II
by William Shakespeare

The consistently inept directing of Shakespeare at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is inexcusable.  Artistic Director Bill Rauch is brilliant in his own handling of Shakespeare and is visionary about many, many aspects of the festival.  But, his chronic hiring of weak, inexperienced directors for Shakespeare is pissing me off.

The outdoor theater looked less than half full when we saw Henry.  Get a clue, Bill.  This mishmash lump of time-consuming theater is not worthy of OSF, most colleges, and many high schools.  The acting company was very good to excellent, but all of the thematic decisions and technical crafts were artless.  People don’t want to pay in money or time to see substandard, poorly executed theater.

Director Lisa Peterson completely failed in creating a space and time where a story could be told.

We listened to the director talk about the production in a podcast as we drove to Ashland.  At one point Peterson half coyly tells us that she really didn’t have a concept for the production.

What an understatement.  No concept and no skill made the evening not so much fun.

The true felonious horror of the night was the thrift-store collage of crap costumes credited to designer David Woolard.  They were beyond hideous. You got tired of laughing at the bad choices as each new scene brought more mismatched, pointless weirdness on stage.  It wasn’t as if good guys (the loyalists?) more modern dress while bad guys (the rebels) wore Shakespearean garb.  No.  It was a complete hot mess where tie-dye t-shirts, 16th Century robes, modern military uniforms, and western-movie gun holsters were randomly distributed throughout the cast in the same scene.  The disorder was pointless and truly distracting as the attention-getting clothes seem to be trying to communicating SOMETHING.  But their groans were inarticulate autistic noise that communicated nothing.

Rumor (Rodney Gardiner*) leads off the evening’s disorder by appearing in modern jeans and a Rolling Stones tongue t-shirt.  He spoke in a kind of Southern jive and gave us lots of tongue action. Fine, except the next characters we see use different dress and different accents, even among themselves.

None of the characters seemed to have met each other before they appear on stage.  Their accents were Southern, British, and/or American English without rhyme or reason. 

The set was extravagantly wrapped in construction steel by designer Rachel Hauck.  But, all the money used to create a framework around the stage and a large center stairway was spent without reason.  The steelworks did nothing artistically, and the stairway was used ineffectively except for one brief scene. 

There were some good moments of acting and one good artistic note. 

Unfortunately, the best moment of the play comes before it opens.  As the lights come up, the cast does a 60-second recap of Henry IV, Part I to catch the audience up on what happened in the last episode.  That was a cute device that brought us into the evening.  Also unfortunately, after the Shakespeare ended, the cast came back on stage and gave us a 60-second discordant, mood-destroying trailer for the next play in the history series, Henry V, which will be performed next year.  This epilogue was jarring, inappropriate, unneeded, and wrecked whatever dramatic climax the play had offered.  Lame.

The actors were ill served by Peterson’s direction.  The best among them could manage a captivating scene or two, but there was no flow and no chance for character development. The deathbed scene with Price Hal (Jonathan Tufts) and old Henry IV (Richard Howard) had depth.  The dottering old connivers Justice Shallow (James Edmondson) and Silence (Michael J. Hume) gave good comic relief.  Doll Tearsheet’s (Nell Geisslinger*’s) breasts that threatened to malfunction the wardrobe were watchable. 

Falstaff (Michael Winters*) was competent enough so that this was clearly his play, much in the same way that last year’s Part I belonged to Hotspur.  I enjoyed musing over this traditional focus for Parts I & II, and remembering how in the last OSF run of the three-play series Dan Donohue owned each of the plays as Prince Hal/Henry V. 

Other lords and bawds were good and talented, too.

But, in this Part II the actors didn’t have a chance to create a special identity.  Shakespeare’s story didn’t have a chance.  The choice of directors lost this battle before anyone with talent had a chance at creating art.

Ozdachs Rating: