Last Ashland Theatre Note (At Least for Now)

I suppose I ought to dump this theatre stuff, of which I am so richly unqualified to speak, but I got a bit of education from my car-mates (on the way home from Ashland) that I ought to share.

I was repeating my repeated “insight” that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is best at fast farce, less good at conventional performance.

Of course, wonderbuns, they explained. It’s a rep company. These people work together every day—in fact, some of them have worked together every day (summers, at least) for many years. That’s why they can be good at precisely stuff a more big-league outfit is not good at—intricate teamwork that requires playing off one another. Comedy, they say, is hard, but I bet farce is harder, requiring not just comic timing for the jokes but physical timing sufficient to assure that the bed falls down at the right moment, etc. Indeed, I think maybe the best thing I ever saw at Ashland was a performance of Georges Feydeau’s Flea in Her Ear (1993?) the bedroom farce of all bedroom farces, what with doors banging and people flying in and out in every direction, all the time. The operative word here was “cooperation.”

Works for farce and, more generally, for comedy. That Tartuffe that I enjoyed so much last weekend (link)--they played the script completely straight, but the script itself depended on intricate cooperation, as so often one actor got to finish another's sentence. The downside of all this is that it is a terrible temptation to gimmickry: they've done Two Gentlemen of Verona twice in the last 11 years, each time with a dog. As the manager tells Will in Shakespeare in Love, the audience does love a dog.

Contrast all this with the big star at the big house who seems not to notice that anybody else is on the stage with him—maybe he didn’t exactly fax in his performance, but you do get the sense that he just decamped from his UFO, and that they’ll be whisking him back to Alpha Centauri before the lights go dark. For my money, OSF has had good Hamlets, Prosperos, Falstaffs, etc., but never a really great one, which is said in a way but on the other hand, perhaps just as well.

Afterthought: Still, I can think of nothing that might improve the quality of OSF performance more than simply to cancel the props budget for a season. Some will remember the BBC Shakespeare series that ran through the 80s (and is now, apparently, available on DVD). The sheer cheapness of the productions at times approached the laughable. Often it didn’t work, but sometimes, the utter lack of distraction compelled everyone to focus on the Bard. Best Cleopatra I ever saw is the one by Jane LaPotaire (link, and scroll down for review), which seems to be unfolding in a couple of rented rooms upstairs over a candy store, but where Cleo, left to carry things on her own, got it all just about right.