OSF: The Great Society

There are two sides to every story, and this year at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival we're witnessing the dark side of the tale of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Two years ago OSF produced Robert Schenkkan's All the Way, the triumphant story of LBJ's first year in office and his principled stand and political prowess that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The play had its world premier in Ashland before making it all the way to Broadway and a Tony Award for best play.

This year, OSF presents the second part of Schenkkan's narrative, The Great Society, which covers the four years after LBJ's re-election, exposes Johnson's tragic flaws and weaknesses, and gives us front row seats as the expense and the unpopularity of the war in Vietnam lead to the dismantling of the Great Society programs that the president championed, and to his decision not to seek another term.

Kenajuan Bentley, left, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and
Jack Willis as President Lyndon Johnson, in the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival production of Robert Schenkkan's
The Great Society. OSF photo by Jenny Graham.

Directed by OSF artistic director Bill Rauch, The Great Society brings back many of the cast members from All the Way, including Jack Willis as LBJ, Kenajuan Bentley as Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Elmore as J. Edgar Hoover, and Jonathan Haugen as Alabama Governor George Wallace. This time Haugen also plays Richard Nixon.

It's a fantastic cast all the way through, but Willis's performance is a tour de force. He spends most of the three-plus hours of the play onstage, and marvelously captures the many moods of Johnson, from power broker to charmer to vulgarian; from champion steer to beaten horse. Sometimes all at once.

The set, designed by Christopher Acebo, was simple yet marvelous, several rows of desks and chairs resembling the senate chamber. Often characters would be lurking in the seats in the background as they were considered by or awaiting a call from the president. In particular, Bentley as King and Danforth Comins as Sen. Robert Kennedy spent a lot of time in the seats, a nod to the fact that they played such pivotal roles in the events of the day even when not front and center. In act three parts of the set are dismantled, upended, and smoking, representing that both the war and the Johnson administration are in ruins.

The production also made constant use of projections, designed by Shawn Sagady. Video and still images of newspaper headlines and photographs; of key scenes such as the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the Bloody Sunday conflict during the march from Selma to Montgomery; and of frequent updates of the ever-mounting toll of casualties from the war were projected on the large, back wall of the set. As Johnson watched a television newscast of Walter Cronkite declaring his conclusion that the war was bad policy, a video clip of the report was projected on the wall. We don't often like projections, which can be a distraction, but in this case they added to the effective storytelling.

It's a thought-provoking play. The Pettus Bridge is now a historical landmark and the President of the United States is an African American, suggesting that we have come a long way. On the other hand, the depiction of the shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson can't help but evoke more recent images of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, suggesting that we have a great many miles yet to go in our march toward becoming a great society.

The Great Society is part of OSF's American Revolutions U.S. history cycle, and was commissioned and co-produced by the Seattle Repertory Theatre. It plays through November 1 at the Angus Bowmer Theatre in Ashland. Both All the Way and The Great Society will then play in repertory at Seattle Rep from November 14–January 4, with most of the OSF cast. There are a half-dozen weekend dates during the run on which you'll be able to see both plays back-to-back. We recommend it wholeheartedly.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival: The Unfortunates

The Unfortunates is a powerful new musical developed and premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and I loved it. Damn it, I'm going to have to stop saying I don't like musicals. 

There's a cool story behind this project. Some years ago Bill Rauch picked up the phone to invite Ramiz Monsef to play the Player King in 2010's Hamlet. We remember the buzz about the play-within-a-play being done by a rap troupe, and we enjoyed what they did. Well, apparently Monsef is a pretty good negotiator. He said he and his buddies wanted to work on a little something-something, and would OSF be a home for that. Rauch said yes.

Good move, because that little something has been workshopped for a couple of years now, earned one of the 2013 slots, and blew us and the rest of the audience away.

The Unfortunates is a collaborative effort directed by Shana Cooper and written by Monsef, his fellow 3 Blind Mice Jon Beavers and Ian Merrigan, and Casey Hurt, with additional material by Kristoffer Diaz. Monsef, Beavers, Merrigan, and Hurt formed the core of the outstanding performing ensemble. 

Apparently Monsef had long wanted to do something on the old blues song, "The St. James Infirmary Blues" (which is derived from an even older ballad called "The Unfortunate Rake," thus the title of this musical). Being blues fans, we know and love the song. Monsef and his collaborators took that song and let their imaginations go, riffing on it to create a phantasm, a dream, a hallucination, a life that passes before your eyes. 

Ian Merrigan as Big Joe, and the rest
of the cast of The Unfortunates.
OSF photo.

Here's the story they came up with: a group of men are in a prison camp, where they will be executed. One by one they're taken away. One of these men, Joe, is insensible with fear and grief, kneeling and holding his fists in fighting position in front of his bowed head with a photograph of his sweetie gripped between his fingers. Through chance and the sacrifice of his comrades, Joe's the last to go. But before he does, he slips into the story of the song his friends sang in their last hours: "St. James Infirmary Blues." He becomes Big Joe, the thumper for King Jesse's bar, who in addition to keeping order made sure the dice always turned up sevens. He is useful for and defined by his fists, which are huge. He loves Rae, Jesse's daughter, who was born with no arms, and who sings like an angel, but he can't bring himself to speak for or to her. Jesse allows a hustler to win an hour with his daughter, a bet lost because Big Joe failed to pound the floor with his gigantic fists at the roll of the dice to make sure the house won. After this initiation Rae stops singing and joins the ranks of prostitutes in the bar, to Big Joe's grief and shame. Jesse dies of "the plague" (probably the flu pandemic of 1918), and Big Joe inherits the bar. He cleans things up, which isn't good for business, and at about that time the plague starts picking off the regulars. When it threatens Rae, Big Joe decides to play craps once again to win the money for the doctor. But he returns too late. Rae sold her body to the evil doctor in exchange for the cure, but died anyway, and when Big Joe finds and confronts him, the doctor admits that it was all a scam and there is no cure. Rae reappears to Joe. She has arms, he finds his voice, and he is able to slip out of his ginormous fists and hold her with human-size arms and open hands. The world of the bar slips away and Joe is back in the prison camp, able to stand and face the guard who comes for him with courage, thanks to the song of his brothers in arms.

Yeah, I know. Sounds like a hot mess, or maybe just goofy. Definitely implausible. Certainly not uplifting. I'm glad I knew absolutely nothing about the musical before showing up. I might have skipped it in order to see The Tenth Muse a third time, and that would have been a real shame. Because this was one of the most joyful things I've ever seen.

The story works because it doesn't begin to try to be realistic, and instead uses all the arts and magic of theater to tap in to deeply held human fears and hopes, pulling from and across cultures for symbols, tropes, archetypes, all in service of the theme of our indomitable human capacity to create and feel joy. Awesome. Besides, psychological realism is overrated. 

And it works because music is the story; it is the inspiration, the theme, the conclusion. It is what this play is about. Without the music, the story would have made a pretty good comic book, and it would have been cool, but it wouldn't have been a play. I woke up the morning after seeing The Unfortunates with the music in my head, my ears, and on my lips. Part of the joy of this music is the artists' dexterity across genres. They used a through line of American ways of telling stories with music—the blues, ballads, rock, gospel, rap, and again and always the blues. I suppose the music has had the roughest edges smoothed out to be the hummable, crowd-pleasing, foot-stomping, hand-clapping stuff of musicals. That's cool. I was entertained by the little old ladies making a bee line for the CD sales table after the show (I hope they purchased; this little old lady did!). But if I had magical powers I would create a time machine and spirit myself back to the midnight workshops at the Black Swan when they were riffing and jamming and figuring this all out.

Finally, I have to hand it to the costume shop and costume designer Katherine O'Neill. Our faithful readers (both of you!) know that I tend to tweak the costume design at OSF. Here, the costumes were essential to the  story, and they designed and executed them beautifully. Here was their tall order: the story needed a costume for a lovely woman with no arms; great big giant fists—each bigger than the guy's head—that look reasonably realistic and that open and close and will stay on but can be slipped out of at just the right time; and arms that can be pulled out from the shoulder almost to the length of the stage. Plus clowns, prostitutes, preachers, barflies—oh, and rooks (yeah, like the bird). It all worked really well and made sense, in a wonderful outsized comic-book-superhero kind of way. The set designed by Sibyl Wickersheimer was slick too, accommodating the live musicians (yay for live music on stage!), drawing us into the scene, and moving us quickly between bar and prison camp locations.

I take back every grumpy thing I ever said about the recent proliferation of musicals at OSF. Good call, Bill Rauch; good call.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival: King Lear

Director Bill Rauch cast two actors we admire as King Lear, splitting the grueling 130-show Oregon Shakespeare Festival season between them. We never miss Michael Winters's work in Seattle as well as at OSF if we can help it, and we have enjoyed Jack Willis in the past couple of years that he has been performing here at OSF. When tickets became available, the Weisenheimer secured seats for performances by each actor, and we looked forward to it all year. We were not disappointed.

Asking which Lear was "better" is like knowing two old men with different but fatal ailments and asking who is sicker. We saw two different characters named "King Lear," but each within the bounds of the same story and a cohesive vision for the production by Rauch.

We saw Willis's Lear on our first afternoon here. His Lear was choleric, bombastic, snide, entitled; a hard-drinking, hunt-loving, bull-in-the-china-shop man's man. He was remote from those around him from the start and only became more so as his private demons, including sexual frustration and inadequacy, dragged him further into his personal hell. Willis's interpretation took some risks and stretched the elasticity of the text, to mostly persuasive and effective results. This Lear did not go gently into that dark night. He succumbed with rage and at the end a touching resignation.

Daisuke Tsuji as The Fool and Michael Winters as Lear in
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of King Lear.
OSF photo

Two days later we saw Winters play Lear. This Lear was vulnerable, befuddled; seemed genuinely well-intentioned and surprised, as well as furious, when his "retirement party" didn't go so well; and fought against the darkness closing in with bursts of a range of emotions and attempts to grasp at those around him. This Lear was probably just holding it together and maybe could have continued to do so until the pins were knocked right out from under him and he could not get his balance back despite lurching and pinwheeling his arms to try to right himself. Winters hewed more closely to the text and its ambiguities, especially that balance between flaws of mind, body, and character that must be so challenging for an actor, and crafted that balance brilliantly. This Lear finally fell with heart-bursting anguish.

For the rest of the ensemble playing to these two different men, we thought we detected more wariness and determined loyalty to Willis's Lear; more frustration, affection, and physical interaction with Winters's.

Jack Willis, pictured above, alternated with Michael
Winters in the title role of King Lear. OSF photo.

A moment that exemplifies the differences between these Lears is near the very end: Cordelia and Lear's reunion before they are captured. The line is, "Do not laugh at me, / For, as I am a man, I think this lady / to be my child Cordelia." Willis says this over his shoulder "confidentially" to Kent, and it is endearing and plays for a bit of a laugh. Winters says the line looking directly at Cordelia, with his arms outstretched to her, with aching loss and hope.

The rest of the ensemble is as glorious as the two brilliant actors playing Lear. The two characters I was most interested in are Kent and the Fool. They interact the most with Lear, and are loyal to him even as they see his folly clearly. They are the truth tellers in the play and I find those characters fascinating—especially Kent in his predicament, as he has to dissemble and disguise in order to continue to be true to Lear after telling the truth to him and getting banished.

Daisuke Tsuji was a wonderful Fool; we know he has outstanding clown skills. He's Lear's conscience, needling him, trying to distract him, and trying to call him to a better self when he rages. Tsuji starts the play in a seat as part of the audience, and it was hilarious to watch the people around him get increasingly annoyed as he got increasingly restless and finally burst forth with inappropriately loud and long laughter, just as he got up and joined the action. Armando Durán's Kent was everything I had hoped for from a Kent. He is the counterpoint to Lear, the person who is behaving as a king should but this king doesn't, with a proper understanding of duty, loyalty, his station, and his responsibility to protect.

We've been coming here long enough to know that Vilma Silva and Robin Goodrin Nordli are outstanding actors, and it was a delight to see them so well-matched in the major roles of Goneril and Regan, respectively. They nailed it. Silva's Goneril is a frustrated leader, someone who could have and probably should have been wearing the pants in the family if that had been allowed. As exploitative as she is, you can almost sympathize, certainly understand, her temptation to seize an opportunity to exercise her talents. Nordli's Regan is babied, not too bright, supremely manipulative, usually drunk, and probably a little nuts. In other words, her father's daughter.

There is so much more to a production of a play than the text, and one of the most enjoyable aspects of seeing a play is watching how the artists bring the text to life. There were a number of smart additions to, or interpretations of, the text. For example, there was a lovely bit of symmetry as disloyal son Edmund picked Gloucester's pocket for his keys in order to betray him. Later, faithful son Edgar surreptitiously replaced blind Gloucester's money in his pocket, refusing to accept it for guiding and protecting him. 

One change to the text—well, stage directions anyway—provided an elegant solution to the Fool's disappearance. The text indicates that the Fool and Kent help Lear off the stage in act 3 scene 6, and after this the Fool does not appear again. In this production, Lear accidentally and without noticing mortally wounds the Fool in a tussle as the Fool and Kent attempt to restrain Lear in his frenzy over an imagined Goneril escaping justice. The Fool dies without Kent or Gloucester noticing in their haste to rescue the King; Edgar discovers it which only adds to his horror, and he removes the body at his exit ending the scene. 

As effective as these interpretations and additions were, there were changes to the text that were not so salutary. There were a number of times when a line or word just sounded jarringly wrong, and I found myself thinking "Did Shakespeare really write that?" After the play I looked up all of these moments that I could remember and, it turns out, no, Shakespeare did not write that. Now, I recognize that the text of King Lear is especially problematic (basically two different versions have come down to us). And I'm not such a purist that I cannot abide any fiddling around with the text. Deletions and rearranging the sequence of scenes and speeches are par for the course. However, if you are going change the author's words, there should be a good reason—and you want to be sure your writing is on the level of the author's. Whoever was changing the text in this production is no Shakespeare. And the only reason I can suppose for the changes would be to try to make the language more accessible to today's audience. Just one very small example: Kent is railing against Oswald, Goneril's steward, and threatens to "daub the walls of a jakes with him" after treading him into mortar. In this production, it was "daub the walls of an outhouse with him," which is a startling introduction of American English into the middle of a (mostly) unadapted Shakespeare play. "Jakes" is a fine old word. Armando Durán, playing Kent, is an excellent actor. Did Rauch really think we would not get Kent's meaning? That shows an unjustifiable lack of confidence in his actors, and an unnecessary lack of confidence in the audience. 

We were in the Thomas Theater (which I still think of as the New Theater) in the round, in contemporary time, and the set was beautifully spare and simple, making small details even more effective, such as Lear tearing a map into three unequal portions (the largest intended for Cordelia) and the crumpled pieces of paper reappearing over and over again throughout the play, a tangible reminder of Lear's folly. The scene where Lear is shut out in the storm was marvelously stirring with some flashlights and a fan, all manipulated on stage by actors and stagehands. At OSF, where they have the resources to get fancy, it was delightful to see some good old-fashioned theatrical magic made with the simplest of props and the talent of the cast and crew. The lighting and sound throughout were extremely well done. The design choices helped ensure that there would be little separation, physical or emotional, between us in the audience and the characters on stage. Both productions we were in "terrible seats" (as we overheard an actor from the production describe them), directly, and I mean directly next to the throne set midway up a stairwell from the stage proper to an exit at the top of the theater. A good deal of action, not just entrances and exits, happened on this stairwell, and while it did mean a little bit of craning our necks, we didn't mind. It was worth it to be terrified by Goneril, who was close enough to pluck my eyes out. 

Finally, a wish. I would love to see a production of King Lear that casts the same woman as Cordelia and the Fool. There are relatively few good parts for women anyway (compared to the number of roles for men), and Cordelia really is a crummy part by itself. But playing both Cordelia and the Fool would make it an amazing role, especially for a woman who has terrific clown skills (there are some!). It makes sense logistically. The Fool does not appear until after Cordelia's exit for France, and Cordelia does not appear again until after the Fool mysteriously and permanently vanishes. In fact, knowing that the younger actors played the parts of women and of fools, it seems entirely possible that the role was played by the same boy in Shakespeare's time. It also makes sense artistically, as we the audience recognize the same actor who played Cordelia returning to continue to be the King's conscience and darling in another guise. It would make one of Lear's last lines especially poignant: "And my poor fool is hanged." 

Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Cymbeline

Here's my fantasy about Cymbeline: Shakespeare, at the end of his career (1610ish), wrote act V, scene v of Cymbeline as a sort of technical exercise in plot and threw it over the fence to Fletcher and said, here, upstart, you write the rest. And he was showing off. And then Fletcher wrote three hours of soap opera to cover everything that happens at the end. I know, heresy...but you never know...

The end of Cymbeline unravels 19 plot points by my count one right after another. It's like being at a bar sitting through some guy's three hour set up for a 19-punch-line joke. I do love a good long set up, and as long as the wine is flowing, what the hell. Whether you're reading it or watching a performance, if you can slog through the first four and four-fifth acts, the ending is a hoot.

I think the director's job in Cymbeline is to make sure everyone can keep it up right through the end; the resolutions need punch to prompt our laughter as it all just gets so silly and the ending is entirely happy. ("Oh, I forgot to tell you! I gave the queen fake poison." "Hey, he's a girl! And our sister!" "Oh, I can tell you that. I killed him." "Hey King, I stole your kids after you were such an asshole to me. Here's the bill for raising them." "Thanks for saving my life and all, but I have something better to do than save yours right now." "The soldier who saved your life? Yeah, that was me." And on and on.) 

Anthony Heald as Dr. Cornelius and Robin Goodrin Nordli
as The Queen in OSF's production of Cymbeline. OSF
photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Director Bill Rauch's Cymbeline at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was high-energy, even on a cold night, between raindrops, to a half empty house as relatively few of us braved the elements for a rarely produced Shakespeare play. The cast wrung belly laughs out of the small, damp audience. I even got a kick out of the silly costumes. Seriously, I never seem to know what the designers are thinking when it comes to costumes at OSF. It seems like they do stuff just because they can. This year, they apparently had a bucket of pointy ears to use up donated from the set of Lord of the Rings. I suppose it was all a bit of pop-culture-reference fun, as there were also broad references to Disney's Snow White and other iconic fairy tales.

I have no complaints about any of the performances. Everyone played their symbolic and one-dimensional characters to the hilt and all were thoroughly entertaining. I am going to call out Robin Goodrin Nordli as the wicked queen. We know she has comedic chops; lately, though, she's been delicious playing Shakespeare's evil women: a note-perfect Lady Macbeth a couple years ago and a particularly revolting Regan in this year's King Lear. The nameless queen in Cymbeline is the archetype of myths, and she plays it up to be the stuff of childhood nightmares after reading too many Grimm's fairy tales. 

Also, Peter Frechette was terrific as the royal interpreter of American Sign Language (ASL) to Howie Seago's Cymbeline; skillful and often moving, without competing with Seago's fine performance. I loved what they did with ASL—in particular, having the wicked queen and her horrid son Cloten (a hilarious Al Espinosa) communicate with Cymbeline in gross, hackneyed hand gestures, clearly never having bothered to learn his language even as they joined his family, while those who love and are loyal to him never fail to communicate in proper and fluent ASL when Cymbeline is present, even when he's being a dick.

I suspect Rauch chose to do Cymbeline in the same year as King Lear to highlight the relationships between parents and children, their duties and loyalties to each other. In this spirit, Rauch expanded on Shakespeare's apparitions, adding ghost moms for Imogen and the princes in addition to the ghosts of Posthumus Leonatus's parents. That's fine. It didn't detract, but I can't read too terribly much depth into Cymbeline no matter how many dead parents you throw in. Shakespeare wasn't covering any new ground with this one. Indeed, it's a bit of a pastiche as shadows of finer characters from Shakespeare's career make a curtain call. With Cymbeline, it's best to go big or go home, and OSF went big for an entertaining, satisfying evening.

OSF: All the Way and Party People

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival took us back to the 1960s and the civil rights movement with two marvelous world premiere plays commissioned as part of American Revolutions, its U.S. history cycle. All the Way was written by Robert Schenkkan and directed by Bill Rauch, and Party People was written by UNIVERSES and directed by Liesl Tommy.

Jack Willis as LBJ. OSF photo
by Jenny Graham

All the Way is the story of the first 11 months of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, from the assassination of John F. Kennedy through election night, 1964, when LBJ swamped Barry Goldwater. It's a fascinating study of Johnson, played brilliantly by Jack Willis, and portrays the hardball politics it took to pass the Civil Rights Act and the challenges LBJ faced on the way to the nomination that summer.

LBJ is an interesting character. He won passage of the civil rights act through pure force of will and political skill, and many of the programs this year's candidates are arguing about sprouted from his presidency. Yet he was clearly a flawed individual, and his handling of the Vietnam War was ultimately his undoing. The play portrays a moment after the signing of the Civil Rights Act, after which Johnson supposedly proclaimed, "We have lost the South for a generation." Sure enough, in 1964 LBJ won by a landslide, with Goldwater getting just 52 electoral votes, from his home state of Arizona and the rest from five states in the deep South. It's been more than a generation, and they haven't flipped back.

The set was clever and changed deftly from office to hotel room to Senate floor to campaign trail to convention hall. The acting was top-notch all around, but in addition to Willis I'll single out two other great performances: Richard Elmore was truly creepy as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and Jonathan Haugen terrific as Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

Christopher Livingston at Malik. OSF
photo by Jenny Graham.

Party People is a fantastic play created by UNIVERSES, a theater collective including Mildred Ruiz-Sapp, Steven Sapp, and William Ruiz, a.k.a. Ninja. They, along with a host of OSF company members, tell the story of the old veterans of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, through the high-tech lens of today's hip-hop generation. 

Young men Malik (Christopher Livingston) and Jimmy (Ruiz) pull off a reunion of the Panthers and Lords at an art gallery exhibit that tells their stories. They use multiple video cameras and screens, hip-hop, gospel music, spirituals, dance, and recorded interviews artfully interspersed to tell the stories of the oppression and racism the two groups were faced and were fighting. It also revealed lingering tensions between the groups and their members, even a generation later, as the old leaders had escaped the limelight but were still fighting the fight, and being watched by the FBI.

There's some great musical talent in the cast. Sapp, Ruiz-Sapp, and Ruiz are good. We're always taken aback, too, at the musical talent of Michael Elich. When we first saw him he was kicking butts as Aufidius in Coriolanus back in 2009, but he's a musical guy, too, playing Harold Hill in The Music Man and the pirate king in Pirates of Penzance.  

We're typically skeptical of the use of high-tech effects in theater,  tending to prefer to let people tell the stories. The whiz-bang is sometimes used as a crutch, or employed for no discernable reason, but this production used such tools liberally and it worked. Ruiz was creepy as a clown who was the MC of the reunion and dug at the foibles and contradictions of pretty much everyone in the room. The set was a pretty simple stage with multi-level metal scaffolding at one end, with the word REVOLUTION in big, lighted caps at the top and multimedia screens behind the scaffolding. The show was engaging, fresh, exhilarating, and thought-provoking.

Party People runs at the New Theatre and All the Way at the Angus Bowmer Theatre in Ashland through Nov. 3. See both for some great perspectives on one of the more interesting and challenging eras in U.S. history.

Props to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for its commitment to American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle. The 10-year program will commission as many as 37 new plays--the same number in Shakespeare's canon--about key moments in our nation's history. Two other plays have been produced in the series: American Night in 2010 and Ghost Light last year.

OSF: Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella

When I was in college, my boyfriend and I had a date to go to a faculty piano recital. When we told my father where we were going (expecting to impress him for being so grown up and "cultured"), he said "meh" (or whatever the then-equivalent was), to our surprise. He dismissed the recital saying we weren't going to hear anything beautiful, and that it was just going to be artists working out their own technical studies and pet projects and trying to impress each other.

He was right. We left at intermission.

L-R: Miriam A. Laube as Medea, Laura
Griffith as Cinderella, and Jeffrey King as
Macbeth. OSF photo by Jenny Graham.

Which brings us to Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (MMC). This is a project of Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Bill Rauch's that he's been working on and thinking about and staging occasionally since college. It's three productions of three discrete plays staged in an elaborate cut-and-paste ping-pong mash-up of scenes. Think three of your favorite movies playing in split screen at the same time with someone else constantly pushing pause and play and flipping between full screen and split. Yeah. Pretty fucking annoying.

Look, we get it. We really do. The insights, counterpoints, rhythms, and themes (hey look! all three plays have kings in them! look! children are discarded in all three plays! look! women are disappointed by men! look! sisters!); the gender and identity stuff; the homage to theater and its forms, especially "populist" theater (whatever); the challenge to the audience to listen and choose; all of that. We do get it. We got it in the first 20 minutes. (The play lasted 180.)

I don't mind being challenged at the theater, intellectually and emotionally. Indeed, I love it. I'm not just looking for "entertainment" as the word is used when accompanied by a sneer. But I do expect art.

Juxtaposition isn't art.

You have to make something with your materials. I can talk to people whose families taught them to make paella and I can source a lot of really fresh, seasonal, top-notch ingredients and I can carefully season my pan and I can lay out three different recipes for paella side-by-side and maybe do a blog post and a video about what I've learned, all of which may prepare me to come up with inspiring and fascinating possibilities for my very own creative interpretation of paella. But until I cook it up in a pan, it's not good to eat. 

You can put a man and a woman right next to each other but unless they make love, they aren't going to make a baby. Unless they use fertility technology, which sounds like about as much fun as MMC (test tube theater). 

You get the idea.

Nothing was created here. It was smart, clever (too clever by half), technically complicated and brilliantly executed. I can imagine that it was stimulating for the artists involved. But in the end, it was just an intellectual exercise, a technical study, an academic endeavor, produced on a very grand scale. No story was told, no characters were created or developed, and whatever was lovely or moving about it came from the individual plays and the valiant performances of actors trying to act while someone else on stage from a whole different play was talking. (Or singing. Ugh.) 

(For an example of a play that does create something while imaginatively placing canonical plays and characters in new situations, we thoroughly enjoyed The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, directed by Bill Rauch here at OSF in 2008.)

The pity is that we think there were a couple of really fine productions buried in MMC. I would love to see Madea staged. Jeffrey King and Christopher Liam Moore were amazing as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, respectively. Please stage that Macbeth. And while I don't have much interest in Cinderella, I'm looking forward to seeing much more of the actor who played her, Laura Griffith, and godmother K. T. Vogt later this week in Animal Crackers.

But here's my final word: I'm willing to have a clunker now and again (not too often...these tickets are expensive) if it means we also get plays like Party People and The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler and Equivocation. Rauch is bringing OSF into the 21st century and clearly attempting to broaden its audience, and taking some risks to do so. And if this kind of exploration and study and experimentation helps Rauch and all the other artists involved do what they do so well (most of the time), then I'm all for it. But it's kind of like sausage-making. I just don't want to watch it.

MMC plays in the Angus Bowmer Theater at OSF through Nov. 4.

OSF: Equivocation (STOS)

I have in the past complained about our big theaters' seeming lack of commitment to local talent, especially in their propensity to import shows from out of town. But the Seattle Repertory Theatre is bringing Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Equivocation to town November 18 to December 13 and I am thrilled. I can see it twenty more times!

A few notes about why this is better than, say, a recent high-visibility import (the Weisenheimer was way too kind). If the Rep's Web site is to be believed, this is the real deal--the entire OSF cast, director, and entire artistic team--and they are superb. Also, this show is good.

Everything about OSF's world premiere production was pretty much perfect. Dazzling writing (Bill Cain) and directing (Bill Rauch). This play is funny, sweet, disturbing, relevant, layered, intricate, wicked smart, and moving. The deceptively simple set, costumes, props, lighting are the perfect palette for some very powerful scenes. Anthony Heald and Jonathan Haugen have long been two of our favorites here in the OSF company and they are extraordinary; Gregory Linington always quietly impresses; I think John Tufts' career is one to watch; and Richard Elmore and Christine Albright are perfectly cast; all deliver superb performances. The continuous staging and ensemble roles are seamless.

I think this is going to be an important play. Don't take the little kids; the torture and execution scenes are too intense for them, and they'd pick up some good anglo-saxon vocabulary that you might not want them to. But if I had middle-school or high school kids, I'd take them. It would be a great opening to talk about power, torture, principles, honesty, and integrity...and history....and theater...and art and writing...and family...

More from the Weisenheimer here.

OSF: Equivocation

"I don't like theater," says Judith Shagspeare in Act I of Equivocation. Then again, she's never seen Equivocation. The world premiere of the play by Bill Cain, directed by Bill Rauch at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is the most mind-blowingly fantastic theater Weisenheimer has experienced in a while, nipping at the heels of the 2005 OSF production of Richard III as most favorite ever.

On it's surface, Equivocation is about telling truth to power and not going to the gallows for it. But it's about so much more. It's about political power, in the early 1600s and now, with themes of scheming and spying and torture front and center. It's about art's power or inability to make a difference. It's about loyalty and family and religion. It's about Shagspeare writing "The True History of the Powder Plot." It's about posterity and consequences. It's about incredibly clever writing and joyous language. It's an astounding piece of work.

Rauch gets letter-perfect performances from a small cast, most playing multiple parts. Anthony Heald leads as Shag, writing the Powder Plot, which turns out not to have a plot or an interesting ending, and to be Macbeth instead. Richard Elmore is fantastic as Richard and other characters, most notably Father Henry Garnet, who teaches Shag about equivocation -- answering the real question asked, not the one literally posed. Jonathan Haugen is amazing as the good-natured, agreeable company member Nate and as the king's enforcer, Sir Robert Cecil. Christine Albright shines as Judith, delivering soliloquies though she's not that fond of them. John Tufts and Gregory Linington are actors and conspirators and guards and lawyers and executioners. (That's Heald, left, as Shag and Haugen as Cecil in the festival photo by Jenny Graham above at right.)

The production moves deftly between rehearsal and stage, between the dungeon and the court, as Shag figures out how to equivocate on his gig to write the "official" version of history, and to tell his truth as well. It is purposely playing this season, at the same time as OSF's productions of Henry VIII and Macbeth, with which it makes a sweet trio of theater.

Equivocation runs at OSF several times each week through the end of October. It comes to Seattle in November for a run at the Rep, and the plan is to bring this same cast north. Do not miss it. I want to see it again tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.

OSF: The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler

In The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler playwright Jeff Whitty (an aptronym) has created a bizarre world in which fictional characters reside. They live on so long as people still think of their characters. When they don't, the characters pass away.

Hedda Gabler decides she doesn't like this arrangement. Gabler, the title character of Henrik Ibsen's 1890 play, commits suicide in that script because of the purposelessness of life. In the world of Further Adventures, characters stay in character. Living on the Cul de Sac of Tragic Women, Hedda is perpetually depressed and keeps killing herself. It doesn't help that her enabling husband, Tesman, keeps handing her the gun. He realizes nobody want to see a play about him, and if Hedda changes, POOF, he's gone. Their neighbor, Medea, can't stop murdering her children. Promotional material for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production asks, "Does she need a bigger gun or a better author?" Hedda opts for change, and sets out to become a happy, well-adjusted woman.

This change isn't so easy as one would hope. To do it, Hedda has to cross the dark forest and get to the furnace of creation, from whence all characters emerge. Some last only a few minutes, others endure for centuries. For the journey, Hedda is accompanied by her slave, Mammy from Gone With the Wind, who has understandably decided that change would suit her as well.

In a riff on Steven Sondheim's Into the Woods, they encounter a number of other fictional characters along the way, including Dorothy Gale, Icarus, a group of Jesuses (including one battered by Mel Gibson and another from Godspell), Annie, Leatherface (who chases down Annie with a chain saw when she starts singing "Tomorrow"), and an investigator from C.S.I. who is interruped by a hand lotion ad (TV characters come with commercials).

Most importantly, they encounter Patrick and Steven, a couple of aging, prancing, boozing, self-loathing queens who dispense a great deal of the wisdom and comedy in the play. (Weisenheimer didn't recognize them, but found several other reviewers who felt they were based on characters from The Boys in the Band.)

After a perilous journey (that included Patrick, Steven, Mammy, and Tesman enjoying cocktails while rowing across the lake in a boat called The African Queen) everyone gets to the furnace of creation. Hedda gets into the mind of Ibsen, who makes her happy, and Mammy emerges as a jazz diva. Steven and Patrick don't change, however. They did manage to get into the mind of their creator, but "there was an open bar."

Change turns out to be bad. While Hedda and Mammy are happy, they're no longer memorable and begin to fade away. In the end, they go back to the old routine, continuing their suffering so that maybe, just maybe, their audiences can learn something.

Robin Goodrin Nordli is marvelous as Hedda, reprising the character she played in OSF's production of the Ibsen play in 2003. Nordli has played a number of great roles, including Margaret in Richard III in 2005, Weisenheimer's favorite production ever, and Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac, which we voted best of festival in 2006. Kimberly Scott was amazing as Mammy. All of the performances were super, really, but special kudos to Anthony Heald and Jonathan Haugen who played Patrick and Steven respecitvely and hilariously.

The play includes one great inside joke. In an early scene, the utterly depressed Hedda emerges drinking her morning coffee from a smiley face mug. My Sweetie, though typically much happier than Hedda, can be a bit grumpy in the a.m. before she gets her java fix, and also has one of those smiley mugs. When I saw Hedda with hers I had to laugh like hell!

The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler premiered at the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California in 2006 and it was directed there by Bill Rauch, who also directs the OSF production, and directed it's production of Hedda Gabler in 2003. Further Adventures is a marvelous, smart, fun show. It runs through the end of October. Catch it if you can.

OSF: The Clay Cart

The 2008 season is the first for Bill Rauch as artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and The Clay Cart, a 2,000-year-old play from India by Sudraka, is Rauch's gift and challenge to his audiences.

While The Clay Cart is not Shakespeare, it does use many of the Bard's familiar devices: mistaken identity, class struggle, incompetent officialdom, sex, gambling, bungled tasks, religion, more sex, and a major character who seems dead but isn't, really. As Sudraka predates Shakespeare by some 1,500 years, one wonders if the Bard got a look at the ancient text and borrowed a few ideas.

This production is a true feast to the eyes. The cast gad about in wispy, veil-like costumes, and they're mostly goodbodies (though a few Weisenheimer-like physiques are thrown in for balance.) Charudatta is an impoverished merchant, but he hangs out in pretty nice digs! The set is opulent, with a circular stage fronted by a collection of golden statues of various Hindu gods. Only one piece seemed out of place: a huge foot in the background that was intended to be the part we could see of a gigantic statue of Brahma. That probably worked for most, but a giant foot always makes Weisenheimer think of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Charudatta is a stand-up guy but one circumstance after another piles up against him, to the point where his neck is on the chopping block for the murder of Vasantasena, a lovely courtesan who is something of a town treasure. She was not really dead (another Monty Python trigger!), but they waited until the axe was about to swing before Masseur, an indebted gambler turned monk, swooped in at the last second, Vasantasena at his side, to prove both that Charudatta is no murderer and that the king's brother-in-law, Samsthanaka, tried to kill Vasantasena, left her for dead, and tried to frame Charudatta.

Charudatta cashes his good-Karma points at the end to straighten things out, and starts banking Karma for the future by sparing the king's brother-in-law and letting him keep his land. The good guys win in the end. Yay!

Christofer Jean as Charudatta and Miriam A. Laube as Vasantasena were outstanding as the leads. Weisenheimer is taking quite a liking to Laube, though my Sweetie pegs her as a "song and dance actor." There was plenty of space for over-the-top performances in this show, led by Brent Hinkley, who was ridiculously evil and bumbling as the king's brother-in-law (a relationship he felt the need to announce constantly) and the hilariously bad moustache clearly pegged him as someone who would come to no good.

In all, The Clay Cart was a beautiful show with an uplifting message of hope. Everything's going to turn out fine.