Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
written by Tennessee Williams
Oregon Shakespeare Festival at its best strips Classic Plays of their Greatness, and allows the actors on stage to tell a simple story unburdened by the responsibility to live up to the Reputation of the Work of Art.  Their 2010 production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  — which closes too early on July 4 — is an example of OSF at the top of its craft.

Director Christopher Moore has blended the original 1955 script with some of the 1974 revisions penned by Tennessee Williams to give audiences a language-rich, clear, complicated, and very human account of the Politt clan in crisis.

Moore adeptly focuses on the different truths of the different characters, letting the audience explore “Whose truth is the truth?” The more explicit language and un-toned-down homosexual references in the theatrical versions (both 1955 and 1974) make the motivations of Brick (Danforth Comins), the central character, and his family deeper, more complicated, and more understandable than in the hushed-up Hays Code Taylor-Redford film.

The acting is tense in a low-key, realistic, and devastating way.  (more…)

Ruined
written by Lynn Nottage
This horror story opens with the audience being dropped into the middle of the ongoing uncivil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Mama Nadi (Kimberly Scott) is the wheeling, dealing savior madame and bar owner who, in the opening scene, is convinced by a trader to take on two new girls. 

There are 10 girls who work for Mama (only three appear as characters). All have been victims of political gang rape by soldiers who know that their physical victims will then be cast out of their families because of their forced degradation.  It’s true evil committed by young soldiers who are living in a land of war-induced cultural perversion.

The ugliness of humanity is fully, graphically, slowly, and rawly explored in the relentlessly uncomfortable script for which Nottage won last year’s Pulitzer Prize.  Child-like brutal rebel soldiers switch off with young, clear-headed brutal government soldiers as customers in Mama’s place.  Each man who wanders into the bar exposes his own profaneness, bravado-camouflaged damage, and desperation for a place to fit in.

Each character’s psychological vulnerability is uncovered, exploited, and left unattended. In turn, nearly every actor on stage is exposed, hurt, and made a victim of the war which has ended civilization.

(more…)

 Pride and Prejudice
written by Jane Austin
adapted by Joseph Hanreddy and J.R. Sullivan
I saw Pride and Prejudice at its opening several months ago, and I have been struggling to write about it ever since.

It’s not that the production was so good or so bad that words fail me, it’s that examining this sure-fire crowd pleaser is as pointless as the movie critics panning Sex in the City 2.  Basically, any review of either production isn’t going to matter to anyone.  Fans of the genre are going to go and applaud, regardless of the artistic merits of the show. 

Pride and Prejudice is Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2010 farce.  Wacky.  Truly good costumes for days.  Supposedly witty banter.  Happy ending.  If you love a pretty, mindless evening in the theater, you’re going to go and enjoy every minute.

My opinion:  it’s piffle. A waste of acting talent and theater space. A missed opportunity to educate and inform. The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, another recent example of the annual farce, pushed limits more and provided more than just laughs.  Noises Off offered more true wit and wisdom.  

Pride and Prejudice will satisfy only those who need a content-free farce in their theater schedule.

From the company’s perspective they have a mostly sold out soft-serve story that pleases crowds and will be remembered as a hit.

So, why bother carping?

Who cares if this adaptation of Austin’s manners comedy avoids any deeper social commentary by making fun of the victims of the financial inheritance rules of its time?  Does it matter that instead of mocking the fiscal mores of the culture, this Pride mocks the women trying to survive the unfair customs?  No, of course not. 

The set, the costumes, and the bright-face acting will carry the day, even if they are carrying the production around in merry-go-round circles that merely amuse without challenging, changing, or even commenting.

For me, a celebration of the financial enslavement of women is, at best, odd.  In my drive to find meaning in theater, I keep wondering why this play was chosen, why this adaption, why the direction that give us surface-level flirting instead of any deeper meaning.  Why?

The acting performances are excellent. The set is excellent.  The costumes are excellent plus. 

But, the play selection, adaptation, and pageant-but-not-pungent focus of the direction made me disappointed.  This is not art, it’s a live sit-com.

Ozdachs Rating:  

Well
written by Lisa Kron

It’s 105 minutes of “Did You Get It?”-sledgehammer-over-the-audience’s-head time as Well crawls its way to an unsatisfying conclusion.  

Stand-up comedian Lisa Kron wrote this sketch play that is repeatedly not about her relationship with her mother. Not about her mother who is lounging prominently on stage even as the audience takes its seats.  Not. Get it?

To be fair to Kron, I’ve talked to people who liked the play when it was at San Francisco’s ACT, it won Tony Award nominations for its lead characters when it was on Broadway, and the New York Times welcomed Well as a “sparkling autobiographical play” to rally “fans of that beleaguered literary form, the memoir”.

So, OSF gets credit for taking a risk with a modern, quirky piece.  But, director James Edmondson and crew didn’t connect with the work.  In this incarnation the play feels overreaching, shoddy, and incomplete.  Almost creepily amateurish. (more…)

Hamlet
written by William Shakespeare
directed by Bill Rauch

Dan Donohue’s Hamlet is so strong, so conversational, so underplayed, so accessible that every moment of the play belongs to him.  In some productions, Hamlet shows up on stage as a wandering soul with a mouth full of pretty words.  Not here.  This Hamlet is at the knowing center of all action and activity.  The plot, the motives, the night, the story, the tragedy are all clear and all his.

This Hamlet is not a callow 20-something who wound up at school, but a deferred student with some life behind him.  More of a reflective man than an icon of dithering youth.

At the conclusion of the short-feeling 3 1/4-hour play, when Hamlet resurrects himself for the deservedly wild standing ovation, you almost feel sorry for the other cast members who were bit players on the fringe of Donohue’s spotlight.

And then, the amazement sets in. (more…)