February 25, 2007 – Opening Performance
Ashland, OR
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire

I pushed my way out of the theater at intermission because after only an hour or so, I needed daylight.  I was hoping for bright sunshine, but the obscured sky and the accompanying driving rain actually was probably better. The gloom was less jarring after what we’d been through.

The official Oregon Shakespeare Festival synopsis of the play is mechanical and sparse compared to the actual production. It talks about death and colliding grief.  Director Jim Edmonson did a summary that says it better but remains unsatisfying:
“Rabbit Hole seems to me a fugue for five characters:  a study in loss and guilt and courage and very complicated love.”

I won’t try to best Edmonson, because the truth is this play is good enough that no smart paragraph or two is going be adequate.  You have to see the play and let any overview remind you of what you saw.

The story of a family eight months into dealing with the death of a child is difficult to keep in the drama range: it could easily slip into mawkish melodrama. Lindsay-Abaire keeps that from happening by delivering true-to-my-life dialog and OSF keeps it from happening by delivering a company equal to the play. 

The parents have serious discussions — truly angry arguments even — that are salted with humorous one-liners.  It’s just like the domestic ahh…. discussions…. I have at home.  The language is real, understandable, and painful. 

Except, and of course, it’s not always painful.  The play opens with a seemingly shallow Tyler Layton (Izzy, aunt to the dead child) telling the story of how she got into a barroom fight with another woman.  It’s an outrageous story, setting a humorous mood, yet not a fluffy word of it is wasted when it comes to our main story. Layton is amazing as the airhead who isn’t so fluffy herself at the end of two hours and 30-some minutes. She, like her fellow cast members, is close to perfection in her language and physical moves.  Damn it, she’s good!

The characters change during the two months of the play.  It’s believable growth that doesn’t resolve into a happy ending.  Yet trying to fix any of the characters by describing their personality doesn’t work unless the characterization is limited by time. 

For example, when the play opens Robin Goodrin Nordli (Becca, the mother) is as beautiful as the TV desperate housewife with whom she shares an obsession with numbing details.  She’s not ready to make nice with life, or anyone in it. She’s still beautiful at the end of the production, still not happy, but she has grown less brittle and it shows brilliantly in her speech and in her body.

Dee Maaske (Nat) finally escapes variations on her role as ditsy Dorothy in Noises Off.  Sure, as the grandmother she can deliver some ditsy lines.  But, she has her own emotions that are completely grounded and rational.  It was nice to see her out of frumpy clothes, too.  She’s not at all bad looking as a brassy blonde!

Even the non-equity Jeris Schaefer as the high-school driver of the car that struck and killed the son does a superb job with the excellent material.  He is right on down to his finger motions and the wiping off of food from his hands by a quick brush off onto his pants. Amazingly good work!

Finally, Bill Geisslinger as the father is fine.  I personally find his Bill Clinton-like incomplete voice disconcerting. He’s too underplayed and difficult to understand for me, but I think it’s just me. 

Not since Wit did a play make me feel such a need to see daylight to decompress. Unlike Wit, by the end of this play, we’d changed enough so I could live indoors again.  Not happily indoors, but still inside and in the company of other people.

February 24, 2007 – Opening Performance
Ashland, OR
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The Cherry Orchid by Anton Chekhov

Symbolism alert! Or, as redozdachs said as I prepared to come up for opening weekend, “This is your first chance to say ‘good-bye’ to Libby Appel for the last time.”

Yes, Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Artistic Director Libby Appel is retiring this season. Her very talented but very self-satisfied, self-congratulating Presence will soon no longer permeate through all sectors of the Ashland stage. She choose to direct this Chekhov classic about change, loss, and growth as a parting gift. What a schmaltzy, in-your-face symbolic choice. As much as it pains me to say it, “Thank you, Libby.”

There is cigarette matchbook cover showing a cartoon dinosaur ambling across some prehistoric landscape with the inscription “Adapt or Die!”  The obvious target of the message is the avid nicotine addict who is about to deliberately pick up speed down his own road to extinction.  The Cherry Orchid, pitched to us upper-middle class culturaholics, has an analogous, if not exactly similar, feel. Just who is sitting in the seats, watching the throes of the old comfortable aristocracy not dealing with inevitable change?

No matter. Enough irony.
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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.

 .

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…)