Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler by Jeff Whitty

Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler ends with the title character shooting herself.  This play starts off with the last page of Ibsen’s dialog and cavorts forward from there. You don’t need to have seen or know the original Hedda, you’ll soon learn all you need to know about that classic.

Written by the 2004 Tony Award winner for Best Book of a Musical for Avenue Q, this Hedda fills the frothy farce slot in Oregon Shakespeare Festivals schedule.  You know: the accessible funny play that everyone likes and you take your grandmother and culture-hating red-neck cousin to.

So, as I watched, I worried.  It isn’t that TFAOHG isn’t funny.  It is. In fact it is hilarious and brilliant and quick.

But, it isn’t pointless and accessible and safe.  I expected tomatoes and rotten eggs and boos from the parts of the audience not ready for more than froth in their annual farce.

You see, after shooting herself in Ibsen’s story, our Hedda wakes up and tries to figure out what’s going on.  In quick succession she meets Mammy and Medea before Tosca drops in on the household. It turns out that Hedda lives on the cul de sac of tragic women. She lives out her suicide over and over and over.  She and her closest friends are the immortal successes with their tragedies, but the stage gets littered with characters who don’t last so long.

This time when Hedda wakes up, she decides she wants to change. She wants to be happy. And, our journey starts.

And, what a trip!  Hedda is played by Robin Goodrin Nordli, the same actress who had the title role in OSF’s 2003 production of Ibsen’s play. That casting reflects the in-the-know Easter eggs which are planted throughout the script. 

Hedda leaves home to talk her author into rewriting her as a happy person. Hedda’s husband Tesman (played by the always-jumping-on-a-sofa Chris DuVal) and Mammy (Kimberly Scott) follow.   Along the way, the followers encounter a slew of fictional characters, some transient and some immortal like Hedda.

Patrick (Anthony Heald) and Steven (Jonathan Haugen) from The Boys in the Band join in as traveling companions.  They bond quickly with Mammy because each of the three have been cast out by their own people.  They’re viewed as sell outs or self-loathing anachronisms by today’s audiences.

But, it’s all good farce, remember?  Certainly the quick bitch fights have happy zingers.  And, who cannot like a cocktail party in a row boat when Mammy, Patrick, and Steven commiserate about their fate?

My worries about flying tomatoes became a panic as the travelers meet one fictional character after another and then bump into Jesus Christ.  Actually 4 Jesuses:  Jesus the Carpenter’s Son, Mel Gibson Jesus on the Cross, Baby Jesus, and Godspell Jesus. Carpenter’s Son explains that Mel Gibson Jesus and Baby Jesus are the most popular models because people like to focus on the birth and death and no so much about what he said.  Or, something like that. It was all very quick, and it was hard to hear while I was under my seat, ducking to avoid what I was sure to be a very rotten tomato barrage.

Oddly, the audience kept laughing.  Howling sometimes.  Do all those older traditional grandmothers really understand the gay-infused allusions? Can they still like a play with those two explicatives bitch-screamed across the stage?  (The photograph, by the way, shows Patrick and Steven in an unhappy moment… like the unhappy moment that ended all their parties.)

The staging (Christopher Acebo), flawless costumes (designed by Shigeru Yaji), and direction (Bill Rauch) complemented the spot-on acting ensemble.  The many fictional characters were played by Kate Mulligan (Meda), Gregory Linington (Carpenter Jesus and others), and the other actors already complimented.  It was a great, fast-moving zoo of personalities and witticisms.

We left the theater a bit dismissive. We were grinning about seeing something witty and fun, but we thought it was just fluff.  But two days later I was still telling people about the play and how well the narrative exposed the importance of storytelling.  At breakfast we discussed how we would have to update the characters for the audiences in 2058.

Finally we had to admit, TFAOHG got us thinking in addition to laughing.

Ozdachs Rating:  

Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Coriolanus by William Shakespeare

Coriolanus in 2008

It’s depressing.  This centuries’ old play about events a millennium earlier than that still speaks too accurately about the crowd/personality/political dynamics of the campaigns featured today on CNN and Fox.

There is no one-for-one tracking between Shakespeare’s characters and McCain, Romney, and the rest.  But, at times, when the self-righteousness or their temporizing morality is front and center, being refined for us future generations, I heard John and Mitt.

The self-centered, self-serving fickleness of public opinion is there, too.  Is there nothing new or nothing that we have learned?

It is the superb production that makes this dusty old story so powerful.

Danforth Comins as Caius Martius blazes with energy, anger, self-righteousness, and heroism.  Comins (pictured on the left on the balcony) has beefed up for this role, and he looks the physical hero.  Butch, brash, patriotic, and studly. His focused but uncontrollable rage owns the intimate stage.

And, the stage is set just so perfectly.  Housed in the small New Theater in a theater-in-the-round configuration, Coriolanus is quick, sharp, and dangerous.  Scenes change with appropriate war-like cracks and flashes.  Crash-bang. No waiting. It’s war. It’s busy times.

The sparseness, the placing of characters among the audience, the striped-down stylized fox holes, cellphones and PDAs, and modern drag are not conceits. They work.

Getting me to accept Shakespeare set in any period except the time of the story or the time of Shakespeare is a high hurdle which Coriolanus easily cleared. In fact, I am embarrassed to admit one of my favorite moments.  Amidst a lot of street hubbub about what is to happen next, one character fumbles and unobtrusively gazes into his cellphone. He looks up, and starts off, “The auguries say…”  The cellphone as a mystical source of information: wonderful!
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Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Wow!  This Midsummer isn’t so much a staging of a grandmother-approved Shakespeare classic as a performance of a barely Work Safe on-stage rave. The risque romp uses Shakespeare’s text and then sings, dances, and acts the story into a frenzy.

The best part of director Mark Rucker’s vision are the fairy servants of King Oberon and Queen Titania.  These fairies aren’t sweet Disney helpers with an impish sense of humor.  They’re glam-rock refugees from Rocky Horror on a berserker binge of havoc making.

Other productions have left me wondering why the cute fairies were tweaking the poor love-besotted humans.  They were always comforting — if oddly behaving — beings helping us to the happy ending of the play.

Well!  These danger boys barely held their darkest impulses in check.  Their entrances caused wide-spread shrieks of excitement from the many teenage and sub-teenage girls in the audience.  Puck (John Tufts) was sexually smoky. Titania’s courtiers were thieves, brazenly queer, and yet irresistible to all.

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Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
world premiere – opening performance, February 24, 2008

Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter by Julie Marie Myatt

I cannot image a more calculated tugging of the audience’s heart-strings.  Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter is  Love Story written to honor Iraq War veterans.  I feel manipulated, dirty.

“I noticed that you didn’t give the play a standing ovation, little boy.  Most everyone else did.  Don’t you honor our service men and women?”

All the playwright left out was little puppy dogs and cute bunnies.

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Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
opening performance, February 23, 2008

The Clay Cart by Sudraka (Translated by J.A.B. van Buitenen)

I’ve never seen a live-action Disney cartoon pageant before.  It was wonderful!

A rich, gorgeous stage filled with 40-some actors hosted this 2000-year-old play. The cast moved the story and the audience with their words, gestures, dance, and singing.  A funny, poignant, and biting social comedy, the evening was completely enjoyable and satisfying.  Its challenges, heroes,  problems, and villains were no lifeless abstract ancient stylizations — we still fight the same evil kings and their rapacious cronies.

It’s impossible to describe The Clay Cart without nodding to Shakespeare.  Sudraka may have lived 1500 years before and a continent away, but these two both knew how to comment on their times, give moral guidance, and make it a lot of fun.

The Clay Cart’s tells of the love between Charudatta (Christopher Jean, pictured at right) and Vasatasena (Miriam A. Laube, pictured at left).  He is an honorable, generous man who gave away so much that he’s now poor. She is a still-rich whore (called most often, delicately, a “courtesan”) with a heart of gold. She is aggressively pursued by the immoral Samsthanaka (Brent Hinkley), brother-in-law to the evil king.  Eventually the good boy gets the girl as his second wife… the first wife and son are on stage, too. All loose ends are tied up, and every good guy is rewarded and every bad guy is brought down.

Getting to the happy ending is just so entertaining!
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