upcoming ... oh, just random stuff

1.  Bobo intends to review Doubt at Interplayers just as soon as he gets back and sees it — at the Wednesday, Oct. 28, performance, which will be followed (as will the Nov. 4 performance) with Catholic priests (and, presumably, interested hangers-on from the audience).

2.  Beautiful fall weather in Ashland, not that you asked. A bit more blustery and cloudy today. But not complaining: Yesterday between shows, went on one of my favorite runs, leaf-strewn/babbling brook Lithia Park in Ashland -- all uphill on the way out, but you can bomb the downhill on the way back. Not a trace of tremor cordis.

3.  For space and personnel reasons, we had to hold the preview of String of Pearls at the Civic until the Oct. 29 issue. (Guess I'd better write it.) Will see and blog-review the show this weekend.

4.  Another "20 Questions ..." with a local actor is in the works. (Hey, I do this in my spare time, folks.)

5.  At Powell's Bookstore in Portland, the men's room has a condom machine. Just in case the redhead in the art history section decides that she wants to browse more than just books. A funny location for a condom dispenser, no? Are book readers so scarce that they've become kind of sexy? (Long ago, this was my Revenge of the Nerds fantasy. Didn't quite work out for me that way -- though Dannie, Long-Suffering Wife of Bobo, went on her second-ever date with her future spousal unit [that would be me, Bobo -- back in 1986] to see Ron Leibman and Jessica Walter in Tartuffe at the old L.A. Theater Center in the Garment District.)

6.  Special-ordered and read Lynn Nottage's Ruined, then remembered that OSF is doing it next year. It's Mother Courage in the Congo. Cast of 11, plus extras; all African, one Lebanese. Three songs, with lyrics by Nottage; special effects include parrot calls at pivotal moments that, I would imagine, will be challenging for sound mixers.

In the middle of a brutal civil war, Mama Nadi runs a bar/brothel. She's indifferent to the girls who are coerced into whoring (Nottage and Kate Whoriskey interviewed rape victims in the Congo), but of course sees the light, has a heart, forges a new future in the end.

I don't want to be cynical. Ruined brings to light the abuses and degradation of life in a land far from our own. Days after reading it, however, it feels too rounded off, too rotely optimistic at the end, with a couple of the relationships resolved, and (at least on the page) not that much hint in the finale that a brutal war is still raging. (As with The Illusion, however, I'm always willing to get behind a script that plays better than it reads.)

7.  I forgot to mention the call-to-action in Equivocation (and how it reflects on Ruined): At one point, Cecil makes Shag face his audience, belittling theater by saying that plays simply entertain people without moving them to actually do anything. And Bill Rauch raised the house lights just a tad, just enough to let us know that, at that moment, we were the ones being looked at under the microscope.

I'd felt a similar twinge days before in reading Ruined: genocidal wars, horrific poverty, the nightmare of rape being used as an instrument of war ... and what exactly have I done, personally, to alleviate those horrors? Exactly nothing.

Theater changes people's lives only in those rare cases when the theatergoers choose to take action.

Equivocation does the same in making its parallels between the torture at the Tower of London and the torture at Abu Ghraib: You can't really blame Dickhead Cheney and Stunted Bush unless you yourself spoke out.

Convicted.

8.  The lead art for OSF's 2010 season? "What a piece of work is man" -- with a photo of Spokane's own Dan Donohue, who's going to play guess which Danish prince next year. (Jude Law, stay on the East Coast.) 

"Our Town" in the rain

Productions of Thornton Wilder's bare-stage/universalizing classic all look pretty much the same. The three-story facade of the Elizabethan Theater worked against the bare-planks setting.
Bobo had planned well by ordering a ticket under the overhang, in case of rain. It rained, lightly, through most of Acts 1 and 2; but it stopped when it would have worked best, for the the Act 3 graveyard scene. (Photo is of the gray-clad dead in their graves, with Anthony Heald [the vice-principal in *Boston Public,* and much, much else] in the background; Heald was the best Iago I've ever seen onstage a few years ago in the Bowmer; now sharing the stage with this year's Iago, Dan Donohue, who played the drunken/suicidal church-choir director, Simon Stimson [and who, of course, attended LCHS and Whitman]; Bobo forgot to mention the U of Idaho connections of this year's Desdemona, Sarah Rutan, who played many roles at Idaho Rep before coming here and also doing an effective, femme fatale '30s take on Valeria, the 3rd woman in *Coriolanus.*)
So it comes down to the acting. *Our Town* under the stars, except you couldn't see the stars. Can't beat the play for arousing emotions of live-your-life-now-and-live-it-intensely. But the crucial role of Emily Gibbs was poorly played.
Heald, as the Stage Manager, was folksy and got laughs. A nice experiment to do it outdoors, but not particularly impressive.
Color-blind casting: New Hampshire in 1903-11 with black folks who have a white son and an interracial marriage that produces a daughter (Mahira Kakkar as Emily Gibbs) who's East Indian (or perhaps Pakistani, judging from her accent)? The mind rebels, dwells -- but then of course the point (better suited to Wilder's expansive vision that to, say, one of Shakespeare's history plays, which is rooted quite firmly in, say, the battle of Agincourt in 1415 or whatever) is that, as the Stage Manager is always reminding us, we live in the context of the infinite. All the people who ever were (in whatever century, on whatever continent) have had/will have the same hopes and dreams, the same worries and fears for their children. It's a classic for a reason, man: Wilder gets us out of the humdrum and into what matters about our lives. My point being: color-blind casting works here precisely because it gets us thinking about the gap between what's normal/usual/historical and what can be/should be: Seeing that Asian woman over there, not as primarily Asian or even primarily a woman, but as a fallible, variegated, multi-talented, self-defeating, wondrous creature.
Just like the rest of us, just like that janitor over there.
She IS Asian and female, sure, that's part of her makeup. But only parts, substantial parts, of her story.
All the dead were dressed in gray. They knew, better than those us who are alive, that most living people are blind to the little miracles that are all around us.
Yew illustrated some lines (we saw the Polish mother with her twins -- though, oddly, up in one of those Elizabethan casement windows) and we saw the paper boy, grown into a doughboy, charging into a World War I foxhole and into his death. But it's a plain, folksy play, and if not a complete success here, still worth doing and attending to.