theater | Dangerous Common Sense

“unseen” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

unseen

written by Mona Mansour
directed by Evren Odcikin

Ashland, OR
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

unseen has given us hours of discussion on how we could fix it to make it a good play. We try so hard because the storyline resonates so loudly in our times of war, horror, loss, and helplessness. And we can spend hours on fixes because there are so many issues.

The title unseen itself illustrates one of the play’s problems. The e. e. cummings capitalization style is obviously supposed to mean something. So much of unseen is supposed to mean something that I didn’t quite grasp. From the title capitalization to parts of the set to passages of dialog to almost everything presented to the audience, the show is endlessly metaphorically symbolic and reminiscent of… things I should understand.

But, there’s too much I don’t understand without taking the PhD class in symbolism.

Perhaps I would spend more time trying to grok the finer points presented to us, except that the main character, Mia (played by Helen Sadler), is unlikable. Her coldness is another point of endless debate — is the character written poorly or is the problem with the actor and director in this production. Whatever the reason, we don’t wind up caring about what has happened or is happening to her.

Because we don’t bond with Mia, the string of events in her life feel random. I know what she’s lived through is PTSD provoking. But, she wasn’t warm and friendly in the earlier, pre-passing-out stressed flashback moment. So did we miss some earlier damaging scene? And, speaking of time disorientation, scenes usually started out with their time being displayed in lights on a beam on the stage, e..g, “3 months ago”. But, I think that the scenes were shown in chronological order. Weren’t they? So why display the dates?

unseen (2022): Helen Sadler and Nora el Samahy. Photo by Jenny Graham.

Helen Sadler and Nora el Samahy. Photo by Jenny Graham, OSF

I am fan of the rule that if you show me a gun in Act I you need to shoot it before the play is over. In unseen I never understood why Mia is a lesbian. Was it because her ex girlfriend (Derya, played by Nora el Samahy) was not out and therefore was “unseen” by much of Derya’s birth family? I don’t know. And, there were just too many loose ends for me to care about any of them.

The highlights of the short 100-minute-ish performance was the acting by el Samahy and Carolyn Shaffer who played Jane, Marian, and Nancy. These two women gave nuanced, emotional, and approachable performances. They quality of their acting was one of the reasons there was so much discussion on fixing the play… we wanted it to be worthy of their skill.

However, there’s even more to fix.

The stage design was weird with 1/3 seemingly reserved for a tree branch. There was too much movement from one side to the other making people feel like there were watching a tennis match in the aisle configuration.

Then there were the words flashed on the set telling us the time period of some of the scenes. That was okay because if you missed the date in its out-of-the-way location you generally got was going on by context. However, at the end of the play there is a prayer/song/something sung in Turkish (Arabic?) and the English translation was apparently splashed on a wall. About one in six people I talked to saw the translation, the rest of us missed the meaning of the closing words. That was a loss.

unseen has too many themes, too many possibilities, and too many symbols to be either fun or worthwhile. It’s a well-meaning piece with two fine actors, and you will discuss your ideas about how to improve it. But, overall, it’s only:

Ozdachs Rating:

Othello

Ashland, Oregon
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Othello

by William Shakespeare
directed by Bill Rauch

I know I have seen Othello before, at least a couple of times. But, I never experienced this deliberate, painful story with believable Evil, blinded goodness, and flawed purity. Other Othellos were classic SHAKESPEARE. This was 2018 artistry. I left the theater wondering if Othello‘s tragedy is personal or is the real sadness that racism, dislike of foreigners, faux-Christian superiority and male dominance has changed so little in 400+ years?

Othello (Chris Butler) is certainly flawed and succumbs too completely to Iago’s (Danforth Comins) suggestions of marital infidelity. But, Butler’s Othello is not the bombastic, purely self-important character I’ve been presented with before. He’s trusting, reflective. There are pages of dialog from him and about him I swear were written for this performance. Yes, he makes terrible decisions, but they are recognizable human decisions.

I suspect the nasty racial slurs and the dwelling on Othello’s nationality have been swallowed in other productions to make the play more a great piece of literature focusing on irrational jealousy, suitable for educated audiences. Othello is about misplaced jealously, after all.

But, in Director Rauch’s Othello, the prejudiced-based plotting against the Other, exemplified by, but not solely practiced by, Iago deepens the significance of the production. This show is not the easy moral lesson about avoiding gossip and trusting your wife that other Othellos have been.

Chris Butler, Alejandra Escalante. Photo by Jenny Graham.

There are so many comments about race and nationality. How could I have missed their importance before? I mean, they were there, but it was all about misplaced jealously, wasn’t it?

Furthermore, Rauch and his cast have discovered that none of the characters are true stereotypes of good, mindless evil, and blind protectiveness. I don’t remember hearing the subtitles of personality in other productions, but Rauch’s actors emphasize nuance over comfortable classifications.

Iago shares his cunning schemes not as an irrational one-dimensional crazy person, but as a hurt, vindictive, effective narrow human. Comins gives us a man, not just an archetype, to despise.

Amy Kim Waschke (Emilia) Danforth Comins (Iago). Photo by Jenny Graham.

Audiences for all Othellos must lament Desdemona’s panicked concealment of the symbolic handkerchief’s innocent loss. Yet, I’ve never felt before how reasonable Othello was in his doubts about Desdemona’s purity as I did watching OSF’s scene of repeated questions and dissembling. My God! Othello was not the insanely jealous icon of self-delusion and self-righteousness who I remember.

I’m sure the dismissive xenophobia of the local population, especially the Muslims, has been there before. But, I just haven’t seen it. At least not in a way that made it part of the central weaving of prejudice and unfairness that poisoned Othello’s mission, marriage, and mind.

I especially appreciated a small silent scene, possibly added by Rauch, where the local Muslim official (Barzin Akhavan) unrolls a prayer mat downstage and bows his religious obligations. The dialogue and force of action is about preparation for a public dinner by our Christian characters, but we get to see this quiet act of differentness. Brilliant.

This is no pageant grandly presented in the Elizabethan theater. The simple, but exquisite, set by Christopher Acebo allows Iago to come out and literally touch audience members, to draw us in to his need for to recover from the ego injury of having been passed over for promotion by the dark-skinned Othello. I felt his need to bring down the foreigner and to make Venice great again.

Othello is placed in modern times, almost flawlessly. The location unleashes Acebo. His clean stages always allow the audience to see the action on stage better, and in Othello he has devised ways to make us feel very comfortable and included in the story.

My favorite setting was that of the work-out gym that is used for the serial plotting of the women and the men. You know those series of conversations where people keep meeting each other on the street, saying their lines that move the story, and then disappearing in a rapid succession of “Adieus”? To avoid the street mish-marsh, Acebo created a gym, complete with a wall of big-screen TV’s, where Othello et al naturally came in, worked out, talked, and then moved on to the showers. That’s how people would meet and gossip in 2018!

Chris Butler, Derek Garza, James Ryen, Barzin Akhavan. Photo by Jenny Graham.

The entire cast was excellent. I am particularly fond of people who make small roles memorable without drawing too much attention to their minor part, and so kudos to Richard Elmore for his whistling handyman. (He’s the Duke, too, but much more fun with his box of tools.) I feel the need to applaud Desdemona (Alejandra Escalante), Cassio (Derek Garza), Roderigo (Stephen Michael Spencer), Emilia (Amy Kim Waschke). and Lodovico (James Ryen) — great jobs!

There are two areas which left me flat. First, Othello has an accent that is difficult to understand. Butler delivers it consistently, and I get that it makes him more foreign. But, the accent sounds more like central or south African to me, although I am no expert. In any event, even if it is genuine Moroccan, its distracting. A minor nit.

The other nit is some of the costume designs by Dede M. Ayite. For an elegant dinner Desdemona’s dress is a green thing that looked like it came from someone going to my high school prom in 1967. My theater date complained about Desdemona’s orange pants in another scene. Meanwhile Roderigo is given prominent bulging, pointed crotches for no apparent reason. Maybe he has a problem fitting into the wardrobe, but whatever the cause, the effect is distracting. Nothing is ever made of his endowment so I felt like they showed us a gun in Act I but never fired it. Either the costumes — or Roderigo — need some surgery.

Nits aside, Bill Rauch’s Othello is a masterful performance that exemplifies the uniqueness of the talent and vision of the artists at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He and his team avoid the simple, single-themed popular approach to Shakespeare’s story. They restore the many detailed narratives and human depths so that Othello is a modern horror.

Play rating: