OSF: Two Gents, Tempest

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival produced The Tempest and Two Gentlemen of Verona this year and they were....ok. But we've noticed a bit of a trend. Of the four Shakespeare plays each year (and OSF is dropping down to three next year), one or maybe two of them is great, and the others are just....ok. One shines and the others fizzle. How can that be? Are they economizing with some of the Willy shows on preparing, thinking, creating, and rehearsing time? They wouldn't do that....would they??? Or is it just one of those things?

Dennis Arndt in OSF's The Tempest.

We wouldn't have missed The Tempest, directed by Tony Taccone, out of gratitude to Dennis Arndt for many years of great performances in Seattle (he's an OSF alumnus, but this is our first time seeing him in Ashland). He brought a sensitivity and totally believable pathos to the role of Prospero. However, the production did him no favors. The casual, conversational approach to speaking Shakespeare's lines might have worked well in the black box Thomas Theatre, but didn't quite carry in the Bowmer. 

And nothing about the set helped him out. It started out promising enough, with a dramatic and beautifully set tempest scene. I liked the idea to create an expansive, abstract landscape, and it was a lovely shape, curved up at one corner to be a hill or what have you, and clever traps throughout. But once the clouds and waves magically rolled away, we were left with...wine colored shag carpeting. It didn't exactly transport me, at least not anywhere I wanted to be, and it made the actors seem small. 

The costumes were goofy and sometimes distracting. For example, the magic robe of rope for Prospero seemed to distract him, and us. I was especially annoyed that the Incredible Hulk green-yellow powder (what is that foul stuff??) distracted from an energetic and compelling performance by Wayne T. Carr as Caliban. And while I love meta humor as much as anyone, nods to other work (like Angels in America) seemed out of place in this show.

We saw Two Gents outside in the Elizabethan Theatre, directed by Sarah Rasmussen and cast with all women, and as I mentioned in my Richard III post, the ladies did not entirely nail it. Some of the actors couldn't make themselves clear even with the amplification, and several potentially dramatic moments were swallowed. The Weisenheimer's comment was that the whole production was "beige."

Christiana Clark as Proteus and Sofia Jean Gomez as Valentine
in OSF's Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Here are some highlights, though: Erica Sullivan, supremely skilled and talented, as Julia. Judith-Marie Bergan as Lucetta. Vilma Silva as Antonio. And the whole all-women endeavor was worth it to give K.T. Vogt some meaty stage time as both Launce and the Duke. She has been fantastic in everything we have seen her do here. Kjerstine Rose Anderson also brought the funny as Speed. But, man, Vogt and Anderson had to sweat bullets for every laugh. I don't know if our late September Tuesday night audience was especially soporific or what. Even Picasso, playing Crab, seemed to be half asleep. I think Vogt and Anderson were putting out 60 watts for every candlepower by everybody else at the Lizzie that night. Ladies, I appreciate your labors.

The thing is, Wooden O's Two Gents this summer in the park, directed by David Quicksall, kicked OSF's ass. As did Seattle Shakespeare's Tempest in 2009 with Michael Winters as Prospero, Hana Lass as Ariel, Kerry Ryan as Trinculo, and Peter Dylan O'Connor as Caliban. It's wonderful that we're able to see Shakespeare done well right here in Seattle by the O, Seattle Shakespeare Company and GreenStage. We still love OSF; they've given us a chance to see plays—Shakespeare, other classics, and new work—that we likely wouldn't have had a chance to see otherwise. But it's just a reminder that OSF is not a gimme, and there's some wonderful work being done by small, local companies, presumably on a fraction of OSF's budget.  

OSF: Richard III

We've been looking forward to Oregon Shakespeare Festival's production of Richard III all year, and especially Dan Donohue's turn in the titular role, and we were not disappointed. Richard III was the high point of our first time here ten seasons ago, and we enjoyed seeing another interpretation.

In this production directed by James Bundy, Richard is a comedian; and I absolutely mean this as a compliment. He sees into and through the dark humor of court politics. Just as a comedian sometimes skewers his audience, Richard skewers those around him, and channels his hostility into a deadpan "can you believe this guy?" and "I can't believe I got away with that" incredulity. He mugs for the audience in his constant asides, and drew more laughs than one or two of the comedies we saw here. Something was niggling at me through most of the first half of the play, and at one point shortly after intermission, some combination of gesture, mannerism, a set of Donohue's jaw, and a particularly meaningful look at the audience, and it came to me in a flash: it was as though he was channeling the brilliant Robin Williams. Of course, this was Donohue's show, and he was riveting. I wouldn't have missed a single turn of phrase and gesture. He held us in the very palm of his withered hand.

Dan Donohue as Richard III. OSF photo.

Most of the women in this production turned up the heat on Richard with sparkling performances. Robin Goodrin Nordli might just be the best Queen Elizabeth I've seen across four productions, three of which were very good (this one, OSF 2005, and GreenStage 2007; Intiman's 2006 directed by Bartlett Sher was completely forgettable). Nordli absolutely nailed the scene where Richard courts her daughter, fooling him but not us, and obviously having no intention whatsoever to give her to him. Judith-Marie Bergan was blistering as Richard's mother. And they didn't get fancy with Queen Margaret, making her all sepulchral or anything. She was played with straightforward venom by Franchelle Stewart Dorn. Tess Hemmerling just about made off with the show as Richard's younger nephew, the Duke of York.

I appreciated the restraint in the set designed by Richard L. Hay. There are very few places where you can see theater outdoors in the tradition of a stage that is shaped the way the Elizabethan is, with its multiple levels, pillars, trapdoor, thrust configuration, and, instead of a backdrop, entrances and exits upstage rather than (just) the wings. The design of the theatre causes the actors to interact differently with each other and with the audience than in a proscenium arch theatre, where the actors are little figures in a diorama. It's not so much that Shakespeare was breaking the "fourth wall" all the time—and never more than in Richard III—as that there was no fourth wall then.

Actors, directors, and designers often don't seem to know how to do theater outside. And to be fair, why should they have that training, since there will be so few opportunities to work outdoors. Which is a bummer for people like me who have seen how wonderful really good outdoor theater can be.

One of the consequences of the lack of training for the outdoor theater is that OSF finally capitulated and installed a fancy schmancy sound system in the Lizzie, a development we were not looking forward to. Based on Richard III, we were relieved. It could have been a lot worse. The amplification was subtle and skillful. Spoken lines still sounded like they were coming from the actor's location on stage, and they wisely refrained from playing around with all the bells and whistles I'm sure the system gives them, only getting woo-woo during the ghost dream scene.

Two Gents a few days later proved that amplification isn't enough if the actors don't have the skills to be clear. Several of the younger cast, though miked, were difficult to understand. Most of the principal actors in Richard III have played that stage for many years and know what they're doing, so they were easy to understand. They created characters and scenes and drama and told a thrilling story, not with technology, but with their voices and bodies and skill; and for that: bravo.

OSF: The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa

It can be a hit-or-miss prospect to set Shakespeare plays in a radically different time and place. We've seen Hamlet as a greaser, The Taming of the Shrew featuring boy and girl gangs, A Comedy of Errors placed in the wild west, and Two Gentlemen of Verona set in a modern prep school. West Side Story is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in 1950s New York. It worked for Akira Kurosawa to set Macbeth in feudal Japan for Throne of Blood, though a stage production of the same at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2010 was an utter disaster that we chose, mercifully, not to review.

Terri McMahon as Margaret Page and
Gina Daniels as Alice Ford in The Very
Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa. OSF
photo by Jenny Graham.

We are delighted to report that, as crazy as it sounds, it totally worked for OSF to transport the Bard's wives of Elizabethan England to the modern-day American Midwest for the world premiere of The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa. This hilarious adaptation was written by Alison Carey and directed by Christopher Liam Moore.

Moore's notes about the show in the playbill call it "a profoundly silly play about deeply serious things." This is an understatement. The central character of Wives is U.S. Senator John Falstaff, hanging around The Hawkeye State after his presidential campaign flamed out in the Iowa caucuses. This leaves him little to do except try to get laid; his targets are every woman on his text message list, with a focus on Alice Ford, the wife of professional golfer Francie Ford, and Margaret Page, wife of farmer George Page. The Pages, solid supporters of Iowa's same-sex marriage law, are working hard at setting up their cheerleader daughter Anne with women, though Anne is straight and has her eyes on male cheerleader Fenton. Throw in a trip to the Iowa State Fair, a 600-pound cow made of butter, and a giant bust of Falstaff carved from manure, and you have the makings of a heck of a comedy.

The actors are all so great it seems unfair to single out any, but I will note a few favorites. David Kelly is a marvelous comedic actor who anchored last year's Imaginary Invalid (alas, unreviewed, but our favorite of the 2011 festival) and is beautifully slimy as Sen. Falstaff. Terri McMahon and Gina Daniels are a riot as Margaret Page and Alice Ford, and concoct several comeuppances for Falstaff, who is easy to fool more than once, when they discover they've received the same sext-message from the senator. (He knows Alice is a lesbian but figures he can convert her.) Robin Goodrin Nordli is a scream as Francie Ford, and especially as her alter ego "Mr. Dodge", a big-money popcorn lobbyist who bears an eerie resemblance to Orville Redenbacher, and in whose guise she approaches Falstaff in order to gather intelligence about her cheating wife, who isn't cheating on her. Brooke Parks is amazingly Teutonic as the German Doctor Kaya, in a feud with Daniel T. Parker's Canadian Rev. Hugh Evans (of the Church of the Unbroken Rainbow) about whose nation's hockey team is supreme. This is not to even mention Judith-Marie Bergan, the Manager of the Come On Inn coffee shop who expects to win a ribbon at the fair this year with her prized boar Sir Sweeney.

Carey's adaptation is true to Shakespeare's story and deftly modernizes it, with all of the dirty jokes and puns we expect from the Bard. Love and marriage win out in the end, regardless of the genders of the participants. Even Doctor Kaya and Slender Shallow, disguised as sheep, find each other and pair up in the end.  The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa is wonderful theater and plays in OSF's Elizabethan Stage in Ashland through Oct. 13.