review of *The Servant of Two Masters*

Oct. 24 at OSF in Ashland

The improv bits, which were brilliant and amazing, extended the normal run time of the 18th-century Goldoni farce (adapted here by director Tracy Young) by 45 minutes on Saturday night.
Which was both a delight and disadvantage.
We opened with a commedia troupe in mid-rehearsal, bickering over budget cuts and the sad state of our economy. The power kept cutting out (especially during juggling acts and swordfights that would have been just amazing, if only we could have seen them). Costumes still had tags on them; props had to be pulled out of trunks from some other play. Allusions to all the other OSF plays and current political figures ensued. So far, just fine, but not anything you couldn’t have seen done with equal gusto at your local theater.
But a commedia romp like Goldoni’s — with its prefabricated bits of shtick and its impossibly convoluted plot (with a woman disguised as her brother, to get the dowry due him before his supposed murder, and romance popping up among both masters and servants, and poor Harlequin/Truffaldino, the title character, stuck with dual loyalties and an always-hungry stomach) — holds the promise of unexpected comic gems.
The first bit had Truffaldino (Mark Bedard) lamenting how hungry he was and begging the audience for a sandwich -- never expecting that anyone would actually have one. (It was peanut butter and jelly. They ended up eating half of it and then stomping on it. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t scripted.) There was a teacher, looked like Dr. Andrew Weil, in the front row, who turned out to be more of a card than the professional clown. When the chief jokester took up a collection at intermission, hoping for lots of candy, the crowd really responded. The comic stereotypes were lots of fun: A pink-haired, air-headed ballerina (that afternoon’s Helena in All’s Well). The effeminate young lover, more interested in his own Three Musketeers lace than he is in his girl. Pantalone and Il Dottore. A Mandy-Patinkin-in-Princess Bride type.
The pace was hyper-energetic, even breath-taking, with Truffaldino making diving catches of food heaved at him from the upper playing levels. (This show was in the round at the New Theater; All’s Well had been in the thrust; the other three I saw here were at the 600-seat Bowmer.)
I wasn’t particularly in the mood for silliness (though I thought I was, it being Saturday night and all) — maybe because this was, counting two plays I’d seen in Spokane before leaving, my ninth play in 11 days.
It’s difficult to be consistently funny for more than three hours. And Truffaldino was spoofing so much with audience members that it extended all the fun, though almost unnoticeably.
The running joke was that everyone was deathly afraid of the tiny woman playing the cook —with a giant setup like that, there had to be a payoff, and it was both hilarious and gory.
A lot of inspired comedic moments flew past so quickly that you could barely register them.

[photo: from Oregon Shakespeare Festival -- Elijah Alexander as Florindo and Mark Bedard in the title role in The Servant of Two Masters, directed by Tracy Young, March-Nov. 2009]

review of *All’s Well That Ends Well*

directed by Amanda Dehnert
Oct. 24, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

A bare, autumnal tree -- the focus of Christopher Acebo’s set for All’s Well -- conveys the play’s mixed mood: a place of decline, a place to play. (There’s a tree swing for cavorting and meditation, and director Amanda Dehnert has strung a sheet nearby for showing outdoor nickelodeon films (for the scene transitions, like old-timey silent-film title cards, with the voice-overs themselves becoming part of the fun and joking).
Kjerstine Rose Anderson plays Helena with the spunky-gangly-adorable mannerisms of Anne Hathaway in the Princess Diaries movies: the self-doubting Ugly Duckling morphs into the self-assured princess who’s worth more than the prince she’s chasing.
(Bobo has a vexed, puppy-dog relationship with All’s Well: He first heard it on an LP record in the ‘70s, and the sound of Vanessa Redgrave’s voice pleading for Bertram to return her love made my teenage self wonder if there was any girl out there who would ever, ever feel that way about me. I would imagine every line and trick of her favor. But I have grown old, and Vanessa even older. The imaginary love-relationship we had is gone, and I must sanctify her relics.
My point being: I have a reverential view of Helena, the self-negating, determined, selfless, loving young woman who really ought to step out of the pages of my collected Shakespeare, dump Bert and kiss me.)
But Dehnert’s production showed me something new about a play that’s close to my heart (cold, remote Ian Charleson in the BBC TV version; Laird Williamson’s Raphaelite production for PCPA in Santa Maria in ‘82, with the young lovers shadowed by angels wherever they went, and a tawny autumnal beauty for the Italian scenes; the World War I setting of the ‘92 production here in Ashland, with Luck Hari as Helena, separated from Bertram by class and race).
Dehnert goes with just nine actors, with Armando Duran (Eddie Carbone last year, this year’s Don Quixote) as Lavache/Clown/presenter and multiple roles, cueing the voiceover films, shambling about like a Chaplin clown, switching among roles and playing the Interpreter who taunts poor humiliated, treacherous Parolles (John Tufts, who was Puck here last year, and the angry young actor Sharpe in the Equivocation crew -- Tufts ranged from effete prissiness when the braggart soldier was in the ascendant to a look of such utter humiliation, when he was shamed into his nadir, that it evoked pity just to look at him).
The shorthandedness (of only having nine in the cast) only showed when the Clown had to play all the suitors whom Helena rejects at court before making Bertram her choice of husband; and when Lafew rather inexplicably shows up as a member of Bertram’s troop, so that there’d be someone else up there taunting Parolles and listening to his shameful, cowardly confession.
But Dehnert was brilliant in several spots, and this was the best-directed show I’ve seen on this trip (or in a long time): Helena showing her tomboy side by delivering the I-adore-Bertram speech early on while climbing the tree and then hanging upside-down from it. Just before intermission, Dehnert brilliantly intercut two separate speeches of Helena (worried that she has exposed Bertram to war) and of Bertram (worried that he has chosen the wrong life for himself -- in the realms of love and war, respectively, they each face even bigger hurdles than they had anticipated.
A real strength: how the humiliation of Parolles anticipates the humiliation of Bertram in the final scene - and how, conversely, Helena had been humiliated much earlier, when Bertram publicly rejects her hand in marriage.
Dee Maaske and James Edmondson as the Countess and King of France, both elderly now but still powerful. Sadness in their faces, authority in their voices. (The curing of the king done ritualistically, with Helena laying out all her father’s magical potions, but not until after she had wandered into the throne room in Harry Potter robes, fallen flat on her face in abject awe, but soon after faced up to the old codger king and challenged him: my life upon my dad’s abilities -- and promise me a husband while you’re at it, Mr. King.)
Diana and her mother costumed as in some Italian Riviera movie of the ‘50s.
But most important of all:
Dehnert has coached Danforth Comins into being the most likable Bertram I’ve ever seen. Still a schmuck, still full of himself and needing to grow, but basically good, blinded by the class system, appreciative of Helena and now awed into what she has done to pursue him and brought to tears, brought low, brought to the level he needs to be at to give himself over, truly, to another human being who loves him in return.
Finally, Dehnert wisely rejects the King of France’s lame Epilogue, replacing it instead with the newlyweds on a picnic blanket, gazing at home movies, watching their son grow (Helena’s visibly pregnant for the last couple of scenes), with the Clown, under that autumnal tree, reciting one of the procreation sonnets (No. 17, a young woman felt sure after) about the beauty of living on and having our children live after us. ("the beauty of your eyes" "were some child of yours alive that time ..." especially appropriate, with their son cavorting in the home movie)

From Dehnert’s wise program note:
“All’s Well That Ends Well. Does It mean Everything That Happens Is All Right as Long as It Comes Out All Right in the End? I would rather this: All Sorts of Things Will Happen, but They’re All Part of How We Make Our Ending.”

Things don’t happen to us; we choose our own plots. Helena works hard at hers, and we should do the same. Tales of young love have lessons even for those whose love is old and autumnal.
[written less than an hour after the show. I really need not to go to these things alone]

review of *Macbeth*

[photo: Who needs the damn spot to get washed out now? 

sfgate.com: Peter Macon and Robin Goodrin Nordli will be your hosts tonight -- and they always have such charming dinner parties at the Macbeths']

review of Macbeth
Oct. 23, at OSF

In a production, better than most, of a notoriously difficult-to-stage tragedy, director Gale Edwards has underscored the play’s obsession with doubleness and equivocation and has scoured the text in order to make inventive changes.
The three witches — looking rather silly in white fright wigs — have their opening incantation intercut with bustling swordplay battles. Macduff subs in for the Bloody Sergeant who reports Macbeth’s first victory, giving the Thane of Glamis’s biggest rival a more prominent part early on. Fleance is characterized at first as a mama’s boy, unwilling even so much as to touch his daddy’s (Banquo’s) sword; later on, he escapes a murder attempt, of course, grows a pair and joins in the gathering of jackbooted, quasi-Nazi military types who crowd the final scene — just in time for the three witches, in Edwards’ final image, to extend their arms right at him. (At least I think it was him; if not, it was Donalbain, Malcolm’s brother, with Edwards echoing the ending of Roman Polanski’s 1971 “Playboy” film — either way, the point is that the cycle of vengeance and ambition’s murders will go on, just as we’re told they have in the opening, with all the business about the Thane of Cawdor’s treachery and Macbeth’s sudden ascent).
Lady Macduff joins her husband in the knocking-after-the-murder scene, likewise giving her some earlier stage time before she gets killed off by Macbeth’s henchmen (here, by being forced to swallow gasoline).
There were also three junior witches (unexplained, really, unless they are the future generation of witchcraft) and some cool effects with pulling the specters of children and crowned kings out of the central cauldron.

[photo: from oregonlive.com; one of the little-girl junior witches dangles a dagger before the eyes of Peter Macon as Macbeth]

Another definite highlight was Scott Bradley’s set, with lava rock rimming the stage’s front (but with skeletal bones sticking out here and there), then an inlaid marble charm circle, black and starred, in which both the Weyward Women and their human avatars, Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth, can conjure evil and perform their spells; and finally, a grand curving staircase, deformed and finally giving out, its railings crazily jutting out like twisted railroad ties, leading up to a bumpy, out-of-kilter ramp, supported only by angular, skimpy bars and boulders, leading up to the room where Duncan’s throat is slit.
Bobo didn’t see Peter Macon’s Othello here last summer, but his Macbeth gave the general impression: stalwart and stocky, bass-voiced, rolling eyes for sarcasm and for disbelief, an almost hair-trigger athleticism, high-pitched vocal tricks to add comedic daubs here and there. As with the rest of the show, Macon’s performance displays much to admire and some to dislike.
Macon commands attention and has an amazing vocal instrument. After the Act Four meetup with the witches and the parade of freaky children with hydrocephalous, oversized heads, he runs around with the witches’ painted hand-imprints on him, some weird necklace jangling around his neck: a man possessed.
The final sword battle with Macduff has Macon walking off, swordless, nihilistic -- until Macduff uses the same taunt (you’re such a scaredy-cat) that Lady M. had used earlier to goad her husband on. It was more of a death-wish final battle than I’d seen before, with Macbeth, defiant to the last, spitting at his tormentors before they surrounded him and -- in about as realistic a manner as I’ve ever seen onstage -- beheaded him and lofted his “head” above on swordpoint.
But Macon overdoes the athleticism. This is a Macbeth who can’t swagger offstage or pace determinedly -- he’s always running, even near the depressed end, at one point, in an affected way, kicking his lead foot out in front, parallel to the ground, preparing for an exit with a stylized goose-step.
Robin Goodrin Nordli (the best Viola I’ve ever seen, anywhere, and brilliantly hilarious last summer here in the title role of The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler; not to mention I’ve long had a crush on her, though she’s married to Michael Elich, who’s playing Harold Hill in The Music Man here this season, and who I saw walking through the lobby, unnoticed, even as his face was on large video screens touting this year’s shows) ... Nordli may have relied on comic mannerisms too much too early. She’s a beautiful blonde who looks great in formal gowns, even if Murell Horton’s design for the banquet scene made Mrs. Macbeth resemble, a bit too much, the evil stepmother in Sleeping Beauty.
I would have preferred more icy control in the early persuasion scenes -- right after warning her husband not to betray their intentions with his behavior (“To alter favor ever is to fear”), Nordli stage-grimaces at the first hint of Duncan’s credulously relying on the Macbeths’ hospitality. They got the passion right (making out, sprawling on the staircase upon his first returning home).
The sleepwalking scene, however, was highly effective: torn white baggy sleeping gown, hair down, face smeared, freaky eyes, not overdone.
But Macbeth may just be an impossible play to get entirely right: the familiar lines, the Grand Guignol, the occasional attempts at humor seeming self-conscious, the one deliberate attempt at humor (the Porter) relying on contemporary allusions that you’d have to look up in footnotes unless you had seen Equivocation just that afternoon.

review of *Paradise Lost*

PARADISE LOST
by Clifford Odets, premiered in 1935
Oct. 22 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland

Seventy-seven years after the action in Clifford Odets' play opens, and America's in the same pickle: Great Depression then, Great Recession now. Foreclosures and job loss, homelessness, anger at the System, political radicalism, self-blame, money worries, feuding business partners -- a lot of Odets' material resonates right now in ways that it wouldn't have even just two years ago.
So it's a privilege to witness this play at this juncture of our history.
Odets traces the decline of a middle-class Brooklyn family in the middle of the Depression, from flush times to being evicted. Among his plays, it was his favorite -- though even he admitted it was too crowded with characters, too episodic.

[photo: Clifford Odets, from www.jewish-theatre.com]

Director Libby Appel's production pays tribute to its Group Theater origins by studding the 22 roles with plenty of OSF veterans, even in the small parts. No star turns here. (Then again, you won't often see a play this old and large done by professional theaters very often.)
The family loses its home; each of the three adult children has his or her dreams shattered (or worse); the optimistic best friend has a daughter who marries the favorite son, only to turn out self-centered and resentful; the business partner is an angry, corrupt old toad. Six years after the Crash, it all comes crashing down. So Paradise is indeed Lost, along with the American Dream.
The odd thing was that, as Mr. Pike the pessimist and Leo Gordon the optimist spouted their scenarios of gloom and hope, you didn't get the sense of prophesies fulfilled so much as the cyclical nature of history. (Maybe Hegel, or the pendulum theory of history, is vindicated most here.)
Michael J. Hume (Mr. Antrobus, Stephano, and Macbeth in 18 years here, among many other roles) doesn't quite earn the heart-ringing optimism of his big final speech** -- and the final scene, with its echoes of the end of The Cherry Orchard, wasn't quite as moving as it hoped to be. (But then Truth is hard to face: After a couple of hits with Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!, Odets didn't hit it over the fences with this one; critics worked hard to dissociate this particular middle-class family from what was happened to so many others in the late '30s.)
That's partly because the script is so scattered (seemingly dozens of people trooping in and out of this brownstone residence, barely knocking at the front door as they scurried in to tell their tales).
But it also contains cumulative surprises: A lot is happening, a sense of lives glimpsed in snippets, plenty of activity and not just people lying around bemoaning their fate. Paradise Lost is still in my head the morning after, and while I haven't liked some of Libby Appel's choices (King Lear, The Cherry Orchard), I thought this was the best-directed of her efforts that I have seen.
David DeSantos as Ben: took risks with over-the-top zoot-suit effusiveness in the first act, but turned those same mannerisms into cynical self-loathing by the second act. (A three-hour play with two intermissons and a huge cast -- just like in the old days!) DeSantos was almost acting in his own play, in a style unlike anybody else onstage (and, let's face it, this has something to do with OSF's emphasis on colorblind casting: the Hispanic Jewish kid who speaks in Brooklynese) -- BUT, DeSantos, like Marilyn Stacey (who I saw the night before in Becky's New Car at Artists Rep) commands attention, has magnetism. You start daydreaming: what else I'd like to see these actors in.
Mr. Pike grumbles about his two sons, both killed in the Great War, and then about how capitalism breeds wars -- and you're struck by how Odets and his actors could only see WW2 coming, and didn't know about Korea, Vietnam, two Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, and all the rest. And now we're back in an economic pit, clawing to get out.
Hume's character, Leo Gordon, has such compassion: Does it translate into my actual life, with me sitting in my expensive theater seat, while others are losing their jobs? Resolved: to do more to help the poor, even as I continue to experience the kind of art that makes me want to live a better life. Charity and art, both pretty basic; don't neglect either, don't feel guilt, just try to do better in both arenas.
Paradise Lost doesn't foretell the end of capitalism any more than today's troubles mean we're all going to die next Tuesday. With hindsight, both extremes of outlook seem exaggerated: Our lives are of a mingled yarn, both good and ill together.

I deeply admire Richard Elmore as an actor (he was entrancing as the skeptical art history prof in Pentecost back in '97), but he has settled into the same old mannerisms in role after role: hand claps, planting one foot and then shifting the other slightly, nose-brushes to indicate sarcastic intent, the whiny-to-roaring voice, the primping gestures that call attention to himself rather than to his character.

Bobo met Richard Howard at intermission (from my program, I see that in 22 years here, he has played Romeo, Jaques, Master Ford, Gayev, Angelo, Richard II, Pericles and Hamlet, among many other roles). So I compliment him on the fifth-act soliloquy, Richard in prison, "back in '97" (I'd taken a bunch of Whitworth students), and immediately he corrected me: "that was in '95, actually." Gracious and kind about it, but: Do you REALLY think actors don't treasure their performances? They are woven into the fabric of who they are, what their lives mean.

** "I tell you, the whole world is for men to possess. Heartbreak and terror are not the heritage of mankind! The world is beautiful. No fruit tree wears a lock and key. Men will sing at their work, men will love. Oh, darling, the world is in its morning ... and no man fights alone!"

**
See a couple of (overly large) photos of the Group Theater at
http://www.soulamericanactor.com/clurmantheplay/files/brookfield.jpg
and a picture from the OSF production at
http://www.artscatter.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/paradise_2_jg_1188-1024x680.jpg
[from artscatter.com, a Portland arts blog: from left, Mark Murphey as Mr. Pike (the embittered, anti-capitalist furnace repairman), Michael J. Hume as Leo Gordon (the patriarch, who co-owns a handbag manufacturing business), and Richard Elmore as Gus Michaels (the motorcycle-driving best friend whose daughter Libby marries the Gordon's Olympic-athlete-and-swaggering-but-disappointing son Ben)

a hundred and 38 prudes in La Grande

More silly censorship from Pharisees who want to demonstrate just how admirably high their moral standards are: The Union of Over-Zealous Puritans in La Grande, Oregon, succeeded in stopping a high school production of Steve Martin's *Picasso at the Lapin Agile* -- that is, until Martin himself stepped in to fund a production at the local university, Eastern Oregon State.

[ photo: www.piffe.com; Einstein riding a bike in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1931 ]

(Not) Making it as an actor in Seattle

Laurence Ballard has been a very talented actor in Seattle for many years — and he still can't make a living there, so he has left town.
An examination of how actors don't get paid much -- and of how theater boards just don't get it at all.

Alison Carey, Director of American Revolutions

A New York Times article, "Liberal Views Dominate Footlights," has some real dog-bites-man news: Most American plays are liberal. It's so bad that the 10-year project at OSF in Ashland can't find any conservative playwrights.
Could it be that there's no money in writing plays? The fat 'n' happy stereotype about conservatives, while merely a cliche, is a cliche for a reason. Theater thrives on conflict, on wanting to change things, on undermining complacency. Liberals are the rebels who dare to criticize a country when it goes to war, then pick up the pieces after eight years of inept ... oh, sorry. Liberal rant.
Mamet's Oleanna, on the other hand, is cited as an exception: conservative backlash against p.c. run amok.
(And why has "political correctness" been foisted on the left? As if right-wingers don't have their code phrases and thou-shalt-not shibboleths.)
I mean, is the problem (as the article sort of suggests) with the theatrical establishment (a bunch of liberals who won't let righties darken their stages)? Or is it that smart, creative people of a conservative stripe seek out money-making ventures and not the theater? Or that creativity in itself breeds a hankering for tolerance, diversity, ambiguity? (McCain plays, by and large, to people who see a large proportion of blacks and whites in their moral universe, whether the issue is Iraq, abortion, immigration or the free market.)
But why NOT put on *Stonewall Jackson's House*? Why NOT get white audiences squirming about slavery and blacks uncomfortable about the long-term effects of the welfare state and affirmative action? Why NOT examine our premises all the time? Because that's not comfortable. Because in hard times, people just want pacifiers, to be comforted, a bit of an escape.
All the time, Bobo hears people whining, Oh, times are so hard, there's so much sadness in my life, I just want a little escape.
But there's sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll for that, not to mention late-night TV and gallons of ice cream. We all need to tune out momentarily, sure. But why does it have to be for what matters in life, art and entertainment, the hours we carve out to come together and be parts of a community? Why not reserve plays, movies and books for challening (or at least nudging) ourselves?
I've never bought the argument that times are tough, so we should content ourselves with pleasant pablum. When are times NOT tough? (Granted, this now may be tougher.)
But that argument is hogwash. Hard times are the best times to question our assumptions and foment change.
We could do it here.
Spokane should put on the most conservative-viewpoint play that we can find.
And in general, we should seek to put on plays that UPSET expectations. Even if it's just our expectations about how Play Y or Musical Z "has always been done" or "should" be done.
Added Nov. 11, 2008:
Terry Teachout in the WSJ makes the point that liberal or conservative, the playwright's political stance shouldn't matter, because dramatists should pose important questions and then get out of the way, allowing playgoers to discuss amongst themselves and reach their own conclusions.

Hedda's further adventures

Jeff Whitty wrote *Avenue Q,* the musical with the foul-mouthed puppets.
He's an Oregon native who actually once won a district spelling bee (Coos Bay, 1983).
And he has written "The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler" -- receiving only its second production anywhere at OSF now. (It premiered at South Coast Rep; the design team and the director and a couple of the actors re-appear here.)
It ought to receive many more productions, because it's hilarious and thoughtful -- the kind of comedy that has you laughing at things and then squirming in your seat because you're not sure if you should be laughing at such things. And isn't Whitty perhaps making fun of people ... just like me?
It's about Hedda and Tesman and Lovberg, trapped between performances the play in a world of fictional characters: Medea drops by,
Mammy from *Gone With the Wind* is the Tesmans' servant. You might think no two women could be further apart. But just as Hedda has a hard time imagining being anything other than depressed and suicidal, Mammy has a hard time imagining anything other than being a slave. And the whole thing, hilarious and funny and fast, gets us to asking: Can ANY of us change? Or are we all stuck with our fates? Add in feminism and race (a second black woman who's feeling empowered) and sexuality (two very funny stereotyped gay men from the late '60s, Anthony Heald and Jonathan Haugen, all swishy and drunk, wise-cracking and self-hating) and you've got the makings of a thinking person's comedy (lavishly produced here, but could be not quite so camped up -- and a cast of eight, lots of costumes, a couple of set pieces but affordable, and Bobo was thinking, in a few years, this is the kind of show that could be done in the Civic's downstairs.
Bobo *loved* this show. You need a couple of black women who can sing and dance, and a lot of adept comedians, and a lot of costumes (cameo appearances by the Phantom of the Opera, Annie, Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw, Beast from Beauty and the Beast, "a spunky housewife with three adorable kids" from a TV sit com, and a host of others. But it's all great and thought-provoking fun. The whole thing starts with ornate golden proscenium, red velvet curtains, an enormous portrait of Ibsen with all his side-whiskers. And then, during the shut-off-your-cell-phones curtain speech, you realize that ol' Henrik's lips are moving. A cheap visual trick, but very funny.

"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.

Coriolanus at OSF

Stunning. Went like the wind, despite being talky and political. Laird Williamson directs with energy -- in the round, actors popping up from the cellar, all four voms, running through the crime-scene-taped-off back rows right behind your neck. First time I felt the tragedy of it all -- Coriolanus caught between extreme patriotism and extreme pride, Menenius (Richard Elmore, perhaps joshing too much but still eye-catching) as the father-figure (where IS Coriolanus' dad?) -- the populace, stupid and wavering, bending first one way then the next. We're in a quasi-contemporary, militaristic society: laptops and cell phones, punk militias, vaguely '30s Fascist in its look. The tribunes sway the people, the people allow themselves to be swayed. When's the last time, though, that America had a military hero with magnetism and extreme values? MacArthur? Danforth Comins in the title role as a kind of hyper-articulate, hyper-patriotic and proud RoboCop.
(photo of is Richard Elmore as Menenius, with his back to us, pleading in Act 5 for Coriolanus [Danforth Comins, standing above, with Michael Elich as Aufidius] not to attack and destroy Rome)

The Clay Cart in Ashland

The phrase that kept coming to mind as I watched this ancient East Indian comedy -- Bill Rauch's introduction of non-Western fare to OSF and a kind of sub-continental commedia dell-arte -- was "overproduced children's theater."
That's harsh -- the production has many fine points, a moving last scene, and it's stuck in my head since last night -- but let me explain.
The Clay Cart was written 2,000 years ago. It's full of stock characters. Open playing space, perhaps two dozen in the cast, usually seated on the perimeter, recliningn on pillows, watchign their fellow actors throughout. People jump up, and wham! they're a gambler, they're the king's brother-in-law, they're the guy who guards the door. Playful. Gorgeous set: golden circular playing area ringed by dozens of golden Hindu statues; three dozen exotic lamps hanging from above (and they all swung in unison during the thunderstorms!); three live musicians at the back; a giant foot from some unseen gigantic statue; a blue runway that circled the playing area and was used for "trips" from one location to another. Stock characters, stock situations: commedia-style.
Long and episodic, the structure just felt like one damn thing after another. Very didactic: they hammered home the idea that character matters more than caste, that wealth does not make your virtuous, that selflessness is the highest form of virtue, and so on. Yes, I know. And yes, great literature often boils down to simplicity: Othello: jealousy is bad. But this kept hammering away at it, as if we were a bunch of children. Pretty to look at, mostly well acted. Raspy-voiced Miriam Laube (too giddy-in-love as Rosalind in a Depression-era AYLI here a couple seasons back, was practically born for the central role of the courtesan (accomplished in singing and dance; cf. geishas in Japan).
Plot turns on coincidence: clever, but over-elaborate. Still, the final scene, with one dispensation of justice after another (when it had appeared that the virtuous wouuld be punished and the wicked would get away with it) was surprisingly moving. A final prayer for virtuous leadership, that we should take care of our poor and live honestly in all ways: good reminders. But at 2:45, it was a long sit for platitudes.
Right next door, Dan Donohue was playing Iago. Did I make the wrong choice?
Richard Howard was fantastic as a thief (I saw him as Richard II here in '95, as Gaev in Cherry Orchard here last year -- almost unrecognizable -- and he's in great shape -- there's a lot of skin shown in this play. In an extremely erotic and non-explicit sequence, Laube stripped off her jewels one by one and desposited them one by one into the hands of her eager lover (Cristofer Jean, as the impoverished but virtuous merchant here; a quirky, rebellious Ariel in the Demetra Pittman-as-Prospero Tempest here a few years ago).
So I would have written a mixed review. But for the money, I want more than just stock characters. And all that didacticism -- it felt like we were being talked down to. A lot of stock situations were predictable.
But boy those Hindus are great categorizers: there are 10 types of drama about humans (as opposed to dramas about the gods), and four skills that any actor must possess, and about 27 dialects in the play, and three central gods, and on and on ....

U.S. History Cycle at OSF

Bill Rauch really is shaking things up.
The word's been that the first-year A.D. at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been making his mark by putting a non-Western play, The Clay Cart, for a long run on the indoor Bowmer stage and actually producing a non-Shakespearean work (well, Our Town, but still) on the outdoor Elizabethan Stage.
Two weeks ago, he announced that OSF — sort of on the model of Shakespeare's two interlocking tetralogies on medieval British history — has commissioned 37 plays over 10 years, to be called "American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle."
And some heavy hitters are involved.
Tony Taccone (A.D. at Berkeley Rep, and a truly exciting stage director (Bobo saw his Othello, Coriolanus and Pentecost in Ashland a dozen years ago) and Jonathan Moscone (A.D. at Cal Shakes) will collaborate on a play set in San Francisco in the '70s ... a play about the murder of the then mayor of S.F., George Moscone (Jonathan's father).

They plan 15 full productions at OSF (2010-19); the rest will be done as readings and workshops. Colorado Shakespeare Festival and Shakespeare & Co. in Mass. are also in on the project.
Playwrights include Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel, Crumbs from the Table of Joy), David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Golden Child, Flower Drum Song,Aida, Tarzan), Naomi Wallace (One Flea Spare), Robert Schenkkan (The Kentucky Cycle), Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog, 365 Plays/365 Days, In the Blood; co-wrote screenplay for The Great Debaters; will direct Fences on Broadway next year), and Culture Clash, the site-specific Latino performance troupe (Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, Herbert Siguenza).