OSF: Water By The Spoonful

Would you be interested in a play set in an internet comment thread? Sounds dreadful, right? Before seeing Water By The Spoonful, directed by Shishir Kurup at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I probably would have said that a website is not good dramatic material. Ugh. Don't go there.

Well, playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes went there, with exquisite, beautiful results. 

The design roles are often the last to get mentioned in talking and writing about theatre, if they're mentioned at all, which is really a shame, because the design elements—the shape of the stage and its situation relative to the audience, the set, the costumes, sound, lighting, props—all have so much to do with the experience of theatre. Theater is enacted in physical time and space, and it is one of the most collaborative arts. 

Daniel José Molina in OSF's Water by the Spoonful. 

So I'm going to start there. In Water By The Spoonful, Sibyl Wickersheimer's set was nothing short of genius (she also designed the fantastic Unfortunates last year). It was abstract, spare, and simple, and added so much to the storytelling. The set consisted of 13 simple, illuminated squares, with the space of a narrow path between them. The boxes upstage were cantilevered like an open laptop. The row that formed the backdrop displayed the website community members' avatars when they were online. All of the boxes were illuminated with a shimmery and, yes, watery blue until they were needed to evoke the setting of a particular scene in watercolor washes. 

It was fascinating to watch how director Kurup used the spaces in between the squares and the spaces on the squares to create a sense of space, distance, and connection, and to help make it abundantly clear when people were interacting online and when they were interacting in person. Geoff Korf's lighting was integral to the physical set and the story, and he and Wickersheimer collaborated on video design that helped make the story come alive. The sound by John Nobori also helped make clear the distinctions between in person and online, indoors and outdoors. And costume designer Raquel Barreto avoided the OSF goofy costume trap. The costumes were appropriate and relevant, and the characters seemed comfortable wearing them.

All of these design choices were critical because the story weaves together the lives of the members of an online recovery website founded by "Haikumom" with Haikumom's family and their history. It is a powerfully moving story about some of the incredibly tough barriers that keep us apart and traces these very human characters' superheroic attempts to connect anyway. I'm not going to do a synopsis here because I'm not going to forget the story, almost anything I could say would spoil its unfolding, and really, you should drop everything and see it if it plays anywhere near you, or even read it. 

When you do see it, I hope you see performances as outstanding as we saw. Each character has demons and in the course of wrestling them each character is awkward, brave, annoying, heroic, clueless, wise, tragic, comic. Each actor embodies and portrays their own particular character's particular demons and journey. Vilma Silva as Haikumom gives an indelible performance of a character who is unforgivable and forgiven, irredeemable and redeemed, unfit and a blessing. Daniel José Molina's acting is like jazz; he's playing with more notes, more chords, and more combinations under his fingers than most actors. His Elliot gives the story energy and forward motion. Bruce A. Young is heartbreakingly adorable as Chutes&Ladders, and Celeste Den as Orangutan makes you want to shake her and hug her. Barret O'Brien is appropriately cringeworthy as Fountainhead and it's fascinating to watch him become a "real" person as John. Nancy Rodriguez is back after several years' absence from OSF, and we enjoyed her return as Yazmin, Elliot's cousin. 

Water By the Spoonful is actually part two of a trilogy. I don't know why OSF didn't start with the first play, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue, but we're looking forward to the third play, The Happiest Song Plays Last, at OSF in 2015. As part of her research for these plays, Hudes interviewed her cousin Elliot, an Iraq war veteran, and other family members and wove these fictional stories out of the emotional truth of her family's experiences and relationships. The process sounds fascinating. The results are great art.

OSF: Romeo and Juliet

Tuesday we kicked off a two-week visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival by attending a performance of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Laird Williamson.

Alejandra Escalante as Juliet. OSF
photo by Jenny Graham.

Romeo and Juliet always seems to be a challenge. It is performed so often—this is the 13th time it has been produced at OSF since the festival began in 1935—and the text is so familiar that one has to wonder what else they're going to do with it. In this case, Williamson chose to set the play around the time of the Gold Rush in late 1840s California. But frankly, I didn't find myself thinking much about the setting during the show. It was still just about two kids from feuding families going ga-ga for each other. 

The two kids are played marvelously by newcomers to the festival. Daniel José Molina makes his OSF debut this year as Romeo, and Alejandra Escalante is in her second year, having played Juliet in Measure for Measure in 2011. It seems the temptation is to either cast the two leads as numbskull teenagers and discount their love, or as deadly serious and forget they're kids. Williamson, Molina, and Escalante strike a good balance between the two. 

The rest of the performances were solid, too, but a couple of them stood out. Isabell Monk O'Connor was great as the nurse to Juliet. Jason Rojas, another new face to OSF, was fantastic as Mercutio. OSF veteran Tony DeBruno, in his 20th season at the festival, was spot-on as the friar, though his note to Romeo doesn't get delivered in time, which leads to a tragic end.

It is not always so, necessarily. The first time we saw Romeo and Juliet in Ashland, the leads were played by John Tufts and Christine Albright; while they finished the play stone dead in the Capulet crypt, they eventually married in real life. Though that 2007 production pre-dates the Weisenheimer blog, it remains memorable in that it was the only time we've been rained on here in eight years attending the festival. While we were under cover of the roof, I was worried about Albright in particular, who spent the night getting drenched wearing naught but a flimsy nightgown for the show. Somehow she avoided pneumonia. They've gone on to be regulars here, and Tufts this year completes a three-year run as Hal, with the lead in Henry V. We look forward to what the future holds for Molina and Escalante.

Romeo and Juliet runs through Nov. 4 at the Angus Bowmer Theatre in Ashland.