Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Shrew, Robin Hood, Midsummer, My Fair Lady

In between plays about abdication, death, murder, the plague, prison camps, the slave trade, torture, madness, rape, and book burning (more on those gems in upcoming posts!), we appreciated some pleasant and entertaining romps in this, the strongest season we've seen in nine years of coming to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

The Heart of Robin Hood set and cast. OSF
photo by Jenny Graham.

The Heart of Robin Hood directed by Joel Sass in its US premiere is a recent project of playwright and director David Farr that premiered at London's Royal Shakespeare Company in 2011. Farr collected the various Robin Hood legends and assembled them into a story that is, not surprisingly, somewhat Shakespearean, with its silly men, a journey into the forest, and a cross-dressing parentless woman who calls her man to his better self. Some of our favorite actors were in this production—John Tufts, Kate Hurster, Michael Elich, Jonathan Haugen—and all turned in fine performances. Erica Sullivan was delicious as the horrid sister. The acrobatic business with a ring that served to evoke Robin's perch in the trees was cool. There were sword fights. It was fun.

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Nell Geisslinger as Kate. OSF
photo by Jenny Graham.

I've said most of what I want to say about the play itself Taming of the Shrew in my review of GreenStage's excellent 2012 production directed by Mark "Mok" Moser. Since then, Seattle Shakespeare Company's production set the bar for Shrew earlier this year in a production brilliantly directed by Aimée Bruneau and starring Kelly Kitchens as Kate, David Quicksall as Petruchio, David S. Hogan as Grumio, and Brenda Joyner as Bianca. It was set in a trailer park—which, let me tell you, worked. OSF's production directed by David Ivers and set at a boardwalk in the 1950s was fun but not as satisfying as either of those Seattle productions. The strongest feature here was Nell Geisslinger as Kate. We have been curious to see her in a leading role after several years of watching her carry off smaller parts, and she rocked it as Kate. Sadly, her Petruchio was not her match. John Tufts as Tranio and David Kelly as Gremio once again put their outstanding comedic chops on display. Jeremy Peter Johnson as Hortensio and Christiana Clark as Biondello also held up their end of the funny business. The set and costumes were a kick, and the family wedding/vacation album slideshow at the end was worth lingering for.

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Rachael Warren belts one out.
OSF photo by Jenny Graham.

People love, love, love Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady, based on Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. I don't get it. The story is an "insult to womanhood and manhood from the first word to the last" (with apologies to Shaw, who said that about a production of Shrew). I don't like the ending, and Shaw wouldn't have either. The high school kid next to me fell asleep, and I almost put my head on his shoulder for a little nap myself during some of Eliza's more boring numbers. (To be fair, I believe Rachael Warren was about as terrific an Eliza as there could be.) 

We rushed tickets thinking what the hell, we are so close to seeing the entire 2013 lineup, plus the Weisenheimer likes musicals more than I do, and the holy trinity of Jonathan Haugen, Anthony Heald, and David Kelly is not to be missed reading the phone book aloud, and this is bound to be better than that. 

It was, even though Haugen couldn't make the show. We heard that he was injured in a fall on the wet set the rainy night we saw him in Robin Hood, and that he's going to be ok, which is a relief. Get well soon. Haugen, Heald, and Kelly are so talented, and so funny, and have worked together so long, and have such good timing, that we're sure we missed a lot of really outstanding performing. Haugen's a classically trained singer and his voice is amazing. But I bet most folks in our audience never knew what they were missing. Kelly stepped in for Haugen as Henry Higgins, and was completely convincing and absolutely outstanding. We know Kelly is a brilliant actor, and this just increases our awe and respect for his talent. I also hadn't realized he is such a good singer. The understudy for Kelly's usual part, Colonel Pickering, was Mauro Hantman, and he acquitted himself well. 

The "Get Me To The Church On Time" number featuring Heald as Alfred P. Doolittle and the ensemble in some truly joyful dancing delighted me. And I loved the choice by director and music director Amanda Dehnert to set the show in a period theater, which meant we were seeing some of the business of theater like actors warming up and getting into and changing costume. The ensemble stayed on stage throughout most of the play, sitting on risers immediately behind the primary action, sometimes like observers, sometimes like a choir, and sometimes interjecting a bit of business in character. This production used the score for two pianos. The pianos were hiding in plain sight in the middle of the stage. (As we settled in, I was searching the perimeter of the set and muttered, "Where'd they put the pianos?" The Weisenheimer laughed and said, "You mean those two big black pieces of furniture in the middle?") All of the action happened around, behind, between, and on the instruments, and pianists Matt Goodrich and Ron Ochs, in addition to playing brilliantly, were unflappable. 

And, yes, with the possible exception of me and the sleepy kid next to me, the audience loved it. 

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The Midsummer cast. OSF photo by Jenny Graham.

We saw A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Christopher Liam Moore outside on the Elizabethan stage on a decidedly unsummery night. This was the coldest night of our outdoor shows in this unseasonably early fall weather here at Ashland, and there was little in the play to keep us warm. As the Weisenheimer observed, they wrung all the eroticism out of it. The play was set at a Catholic parochial school in 1964. I read later that timing was intended to be Vatican II by way of explaining the headmaster priest (Theseus, played by Richard Howard) and head nun (Hippolyta, played by Judith-Marie Bergan) shuffling off collar and habit and getting married. Give 'em an English mass and they'll take a mile, I guess. The schoolgirls and boys Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and Lysander were too childish without ever seeming to grow up. The fairy costumes were silly even by Midsummer standards, even by OSF standards, and Titania's costume just plain malfunctioned. Terri McMahon did a great job of literally holding it together. 

A challenge in Midsummer is integrating, or contrasting, or doing whatever you're going to do with the fairy world and the people world. This is basically Puck's job. Gina Daniels was a spunky Puck, but all the work fell to her as the rest of the fairies were cast with children, one of whom at least really needed to be tucked into bed, poor little guy. I'm skeptical of video in plays, and projecting a video of Daniels around the facade to convey Puck flitting around the forest at her work was one of most egregious examples of how not to use video in a play that I've ever seen. And throughout there was some sort of white noise going on that might have been a malfunction in the sound system, or might have been intended to be crickets and such, but sounded to me like a poorly loaded dishwasher running. 

Fortunately, the play was saved by a merry band of teachers, coaches, lunch ladies, and janitors who put on their own school play to celebrate the solemnities. Here, the costumes and props were delightful as they used whatever was at hand—cafeteria trays, colanders, basketballs, mops—to adorn themselves and their theatrical. It was wonderful to see Brent Hinkley in a role with a good amount of stage time, as gym coach Nick Bottom, and he took all the stage time in the world to die as Pyramus, going through pantomime after pantomime of nasty ways to go, keeping the audience in stitches. Jon Beavers was a wonderfully nerdy Francis Flute, and I loved the choice to have the character actually be so moved by playing Thisbe that he forgot himself, found a voice as an actor, and turned in a touching performance. K. T. Vogt continues to steal every single scene we have ever seen her in. As Pam Snout playing Wall, she too found her voice and overcame her stage fright with the help of the cellist (yay for a live musician, Michal Palzewicz, on stage!) by turning her lines to song, set to that famous bit from Carmen. 

The opportunity to see all these plays is a dream, and so in the end these four plays, in words from Midsummer, need no excuse, and all is mended. 

OSF: Animal Crackers

I generally think it's not a good idea to try to out-do the legends. As great as Steve Martin is, Peter Sellers is Clouseau, and I refused to see Martin's remake of The Pink Panther. The Gus Van Sant remake of and the Richard Franklin sequel to Psycho both seemed like bad ideas. Did Hitchcock goof up? Heck, I wouldn't even go see the 2003 version of The In-Laws. What, you're going to do it better than Peter Falk and Alan Arkin? Serpentine, Shel! What's next? Keanu Reeves as Charles Foster Kane?

Now, I recognize that aversion to remakes is a little funny for someone who goes to the Shakespeare Festival every year! After all, the Bard only did 37 plays (more or less) and, barring any amazing discoveries in London attics, there won't be any more. So all of the Shakespeare shows are remakes. We've already seen four or five of them more than once just in the eight year's we've been attending. I'm glad people still do Hamlet even though Olivier played the Dane pretty well. Next year OSF is doing A Streetcar Named Desire, and I don't mind seeing another production, (though I pity the poor fools who have to play Stanley with Marlon Brando peeking over their shoulders.)

Anyway, I had mixed feelings when I heard that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was going to produce the Marx Brothers classic Animal Crackers this year. On the one hand, you probably shouldn't mess with Groucho. On the other, the Captain Spaulding role was played by Mark Bedard, one of the flat-out funniest actors among the OSF regulars. On the third hand, the production wasn't really a remake; according to the Playbill it was "reconceived from an adaptation" by Henry Wishcamper.

The show, directed by Allison Narver, did not disappoint. Bedard was fantastic as Groucho, nailing the voice and the look and the walk. He had a bunch of good Groucho gags, but also was nimble in playing off of the audience and ad-libbing. K.T. Vogt, who was hilarious last year in The Imaginary Invalid, was a scream as Mrs. Rittenhouse; Jonathan Haugen was marvelous as both the butler Hives and the art-loving Roscoe W. Chandler.

Two performances came as delightful surprises. John Tufts and Brent Hinkley were featured on the cover of the Playbill in a scene from Henry V. The next night they turned up as Ravelli and The Professor—the Chico and Harpo characters—in Animal Crackers. And talk about trying to out-do a legend! While Groucho was a genius, he's been aped by many an actor. Hinkley did an amazing job taking up the horn of Harpo, who for my money was the most brilliant actor of the brothers, without uttering a word.

Animal Crackers was a lot of fun, and a great exclamation point on our annual trip to OSF. Alas, there are just three performances left; Animal Crackers wraps on Nov. 4. It's playing in the Angus Bowmer Theatre in Ashland.

OSF: As You Like It

When it comes to productions of Shakespeare's As You Like It, my Sweetie, the official scorer, has expectations for Rosalind that may be slightly unrealistic. As near as I can understand it, she wants Rosalind to be sort of a combination of Emma Peel, Marie "Slim" Browning, Harriet Vane, Annie Savoy, Wonder Woman, Oprah, Pussy Galore, and Elinor Dashwood. That's going to be hard to pull off, though I'd be happy to give Diana Rigg or Lauren Bacall a shot at the part.

Peter Frechette as Touchstone in OSF's
As You Like It. Photo by Jenny Graham.

Erica Sullivan is no Diana Rigg or even Barbara Feldon, but she did a fine job as Rosalind in this year's Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of As You Like It, directed by Jessica Thebus. Christine Albright was great as Celia, Rosalind's best friend and cousin who is banished from the court by the very crabby and paranoid Duke Frederick, played with menacing zeal by Michael J. Hume. Wayne T. Carr was a wonderful Orlando, steadfast in most of his affairs but on the clueless side when it comes to wooing and writing poetry that he leaves tacked to trees all around Arden Forest.

In addition to Sullivan, who goes undercover as a man, Ganymede, when she and Celia flee to the forest, Thebus flips gender roles on two other characters. Kathryn Meisle had the sort of stage presence Sweetie wants from Rosalind in her portrayal of Jacques, the melancholy philosopher; Kimberly Scott was a riot as Charles the Wrestler, who loses in an upset in a hilarious bout with Orlando early in the play.

One disappointment was missing Howie Seago in the role of Duke Senior. We've seen Seago, a deaf actor, many times over the last several years at OSF and have always enjoyed his performances. He was particularly great as the ghost of Hamlet's father in Hamlet a couple of years ago. It's clever the way Seago's characters use sign language, and others in the play translate. The Duke's role was understudied admirably by Jonathan Haugen. Seago was unable to appear in Henry V later in the week, too. We hope that he is back soon from whatever kept him out last week.

All in all, As You Like It was a pleasant romp in Arden Forest. There's just one week left to see it; the show runs through Oct. 14 on the Elizabethan Stage in Ashland.

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.

Dang it! We might have to make TWO trips to Ashland next year.

The 2010 Oregon Shakespeare Festival season is looking so good that we might have to make two trips to Ashland next year.

The member early ticket purchase window is about to open, and so I was nosing around the OSF Web pages. With 2009 wrapped up after record ticket sales, the site now has next season's casts listed. We'd already heard in June that Dan Donohue, who was so great as Iago in OSF's 2008 production of Othello, was coming back in 2010 to play Hamlet. But there's lots more fascinating casting news on the site now.

The most interesting nugget I found was in the cast for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Seattle favorite Michael Winters will be playing "Big Daddy" in the Tennessee Williams classic. Winters was amazing as Prospero in this year's production of The Tempest at Seattle Shakespeare Company, and did a great turn as Grandpa last year in You Can't Take it With You at the Seattle Rep. (That's Winters as Prospero at right in a Seattle Shakes photo by John Ulman.) Winters has played at OSF before, but not since Weisenheimer and my Sweetie, the official scorer, have attended.

The rub is that Cat is one of the festival's early-season plays, running Feb. 20 through July 4, while we always go in September. A May trip to Ashland may be in order.

We're also jazzed about The Merchant of Venice, which will star Anthony Heald as Shylock, Jonathan Haugen as Antonio, and Vilma Silva as Portia. We're big fans of all three. Heald and Haugen were co-winners of our "Wisey" award for 2008 best supporting actor for their performances in The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler. They also were together in this year's Equivoaction, which is coming to the Seattle Rep later this month surrounded by considerable Wisey buzz. Silva, too, claimed a Wisey, for best supporting actress, in 2008. She and Heald were marvelous in this year's otherwise so-so production of Henry VIII at OSF.

Lastly, Weisenheimer is looking forward to Miriam Laube as Olivia in Twelfth Night. Sweetie isn't so crazy about Laube, but I think she's super fine!

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.

Wisey Best Supporting Actor: Heald and Haugen

The nominees for best supporting actor for 2008 were:

Matthew Ahrens as Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. Green Stage.
Michael Elich as Aufidius in Coriolanus. Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Anthony Heald as Steven in The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler. Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Jonathan Haugen as Patrick in The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler. Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

The Wisey goes to Anthony Heald and Jonathan Haugen.

To give a single Wisey to either actor would be like giving an award to Rosencrantz and snubbing Guildenstern. Heald and Haugen played Steven and Patrick, two stereotypical gay characters modeled after The Boys in the Band, in The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler at OSF. They are beautifully drawn characters marvelously acted, providing lots of wit, bitchy commentary, and a substantial dose of the play's wisdom as well. Prancing around in their pastel bell-bottoms and vests, Patrick and Steven help the characters in their quest to break out of their stereotypical molds. Several succeed, though the duo does not because, while roaming the mind of their creator, they were sidetracked by an open bar.

Ahrens was marvelously besotted as Sir Toby in Green Stage's Twelfth Night. He may have won the Wisey if he hadn't nearly spilled our wine! The characters often took refuge in the audience in this Shakespeare in the park performance. Elich was a menacing and athletic Aufidius in the seldom-performed Coriolanus.

But Heald and Haugen were shining stars giving memorable performances in a great play and take home the Wisey for best supporting actor.

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.