Ashland Theater Note: Macbeth

I had thought that I'd never see a really first-class Macbeth, because the play requires two over-the-top performances--Macbeth and his Lady--and you couldn't expect two that strong in the same place: like matter and anti-matter.

I think the current Ashland offering pretty much proves me wrong: Peter Macon as the King and Robin Goodrin Nordli, seen yesterday with a pig-snout on her nose, were just about as powerful and evenly-matched a pair as you could hope for. The result was all you could want in a Macbeth: rapid, scary, pathetic, blood-and-thunder theater dynamic enough to hold any live audience, with enough inner life left over to win forgiveness from an academic. Macon, who turned in a good Othello last summer, seemed even better suited for the role of the King: eager, ambitious, warm-hearted and just gullible enough to think that he could do it. Nordli, who seems to have tackled just about every fat female part in the canon, was mostly his match, although Macon did have a kind of raw energy that would just spill over the rest of the stage whenever he was present.

But Mrs. Buce adds--and I think she is right--that the director did betray Nordli in one important respect: she stepped on Nordli's big speech. That would be the mad scene, the one where Lady Macbeth says "out, damn spot," and "who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him." Nordli started out at the top of a long ramp, her face in shadows; she was followed by three children in black who seemed to be a part of the witches' intern program. By they time you could see her, you realized that she was covered with so much--what, pancake makeup? A mask?--that was supposed to make her look crazy and just made her look like she was on crystal meth. I can't for the life of me understand why they didn't just let Nordli be Nordli and finish her lady's life with all the range and subtlety she had displayed all along.

Besides the leads, there is surprisingly little in Macbeth that you really remember. For a company that likes to hoke it up so much, the witches were surprisingly conventional--at the beginning, almost perfunctory, although they picked up steam later. Josiah Phillips, such a fine Sancho just yesterday, was a bit of a disappointment as the Porter (a matter of some personal concern since this is the only Shakespearean role I still want to play). Rex Young as Banquo presented a ghost sufficient to scare the bejeeezus out of us. As to the rest of the young men, I admit I kind of have trouble keepimg them all straight in my mind anyway.

Macbeth may not be the greatest Shakespeare play, but it is the greatest something-or-other. In particular, it is my hands-down pick for the ideal "first play" in high school. I know, teachers always fall for Romeo and Juliet on the mistaken notion that the kids will like it because it is about young love. They forget that it is an old person's view of young people. Not to mention that dialog in Romeo in Juliet is some of the most stylized and in the canon. Meanwhile Macbeth is all murder, madness and betrayal and what's not to love about that?

Ashland Theatre Note: On the Razzle

I guess my favorite Tom Stoppard play is Professional Foul, done for BBC TV back in 1977, about philosophers in Prague under the Soviets. It’s the only one I can think of where he gets a completely right mix between Deeper Meaning and his natural silliness. Others, even the best of them, always seem to get a bit labored whenever they get a bit serious: I like them all a lot, but I almost always have to keep my fingers crossed (and I haven’t seen the new trilogy, Coast of Utopia).

So my second favorite would be On the Razzle, the one about grocery clerks on a spree--the one with no redeeming social value whatever (but Ben Brantley in the NYT offers some interesting notes on what a serious interpretation might look like (link)). As such it is pure, distilled Stoppard, with all the virtues that phrae implies.

I’ve thought for a long time that what the Oregon Shakespeare Festival does best is farce. This is farce. They do it well. Indeed, the nearest thing I can think of as a complaint is that it’s so obviously their strong suit, they have trouble coming up with anything really unexpected. For my taste, I’d rather have written On the Razzle than the Declaration of Independence itself.

Update: For some further thoughts on farce at Ashland, go here (link).

Ashland Theatre Note: Tartuffe

In Tartuffe, the folks at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival do what I always complain that they don’t do: they trust the text. And what a text it is: Molière’s original as translated by Ranjit Bolt is in iambic quatrameter—sic, four beats—and rhyming couplets. You’d think it would be impossible to sustain, but with pell-mell enjambment and ping-pong versification—ending each other’s rhymes—it is so smooth as to be almost conversational It’s the smoothest bit of versification I’ve heard since Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate—another parlor trick that shouldn’t ought to work, but does. With a capable cast and a minimum of distraction, it’s an all-round success. Heck, he even colored the faux 17^th Century stage in muted pastels, so as almost to call attention to the fact that he wasn’t calling attention to anything but the verse.

Update: For an extension of remarks, go here (link).

Ashland Theatre Note: As You Like It

There are so many things to like about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of As You Like It, that it’s a shame there’s a queer kind of vacuum at the center. The play displays, first of all, an exuberant physicality—lots of little kicks, pirouettes, and high-fives, obviously choreographed by somebody with great care (I assume the director, J. R. Sullivan?). This kind of thing can be a distraction if it takes over but whoever put it together made sure that each little gesture makes sense in context and helps move the plot-line downfield. Indeed a critical plot-point is a wrestling match, so elaborately crafted (on the model of a Thomas Hart Benton painting—thanks, Hal) that it garnered a round of applause all its own.

The setting is—rather, settings are—deliberately anachronistic. This can be a dodgy business, but here I think it mostly worked. The “court” scenes leapt right out of 1930s Batman, which made sense because it helps to establish the mood of social instability and casual violence that frames the story. The “country” scenes were more on the order of Garrison Keillor, which was acceptable, though for the life of me I can’t imagine why they insisted on leaving Duke Senior in a bowler hat. I do regret the failure of nerve that impelled them to replace the original Shakespearean song texts with early country and funky cowboy. Granted as the tune, melody, we have no idea what, exactly the Shakespearean players sang. But the text is Shakespeare and it has its purpose which should not be lightly regarded.

[But speaking of Shakespearean texts, what is it with the sonnets? This is the second show in a row we’ve seen where they felt they had to tart up the script with a bit of sonnet action—hardly evil in itself, but not serving any obvious positive purpose].

Casting was never less than adequate and sometimes wonderful. The play has to have a good Touchstone and a good Jaques, and this performance had both—also a bunch of other good performances in a variety of roles. The surprise of the day was Danforth Comyns as Orlando. By common understanding, Orlando is a Labrador retriever role if there ever was one—the tenor lead who has no more function than to stand still and look pretty, like the groom on the wedding cake (someone has said that Rosalind will spend her life doing Orlando’s thinking for him). But Comyns reminds us (once again?) that there are no empty Shakespearean roles—he gives Orlando grit and sinew and makes Rosalind’s enchantment plausible as I have never seen it before.

Which brings us to Rosalind and her cousin/companion Celia. Matter of some delicacy here. I grant that Rosalind may be the toughest role in the Shakespearean canon: a girl-boy-girl (sometimes a boy-girl-boy-girl) who speaks about love and womanhood with a clear-sightedness that is nearly unique. No wonder that almost every good actress wants to give it a swing. And you find yourself rooting for Miriam Laube, who understands that she has a great opportunity, and struggles to embrace it.

Yet at the end of the day, you get the feeling that she just can’t find the right note. Part of the problem is that she is caught in a crazy syncretic mélange. She has a voice of a cabaret singer; but they decked her out a costume left over from Hee Haw. Then to top it off, they put her through a display of swoops and kicks so manic that she looked like the speeded-up celluloid of an old Buster Keaton movie. And here, unlike in other parts of the show, there often seemed to be little or no relation between the character’s moment and the physical byplay. Hardly any wonder that in this thicket, Laube never seemed really able to find her own (one saving grace: I loved the way she did the epilogue).

An added complication was Julie Oda as Celia. Anybody who saw Oda in The Importance of Being Earnest knows that she is a glorious comic talent—funny and sexy and full of energy all the time. As with Danforth Comyns as Orlando, she squeezed more out of Celia than I have ever seen before, but that’s a problem. I don’t blame Oda here, who was just being her adorable self. But if Rosalind is not to dominate, then at least they must work as a team. And an As You Like It without a Rosalind is a play with a vacuum at the center.

Ashland Theatre Note: The Tempest

Nobody doubts that Shakespeare’s Tempest is full of dynamite verse, some of his best. It is possible to argue that the play is static, in that Prospero the magician knows all and control all. In this summer’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival performance, Derrick Lee Weeden finds a plausible way to sidestep the problem: his Prospero is near exploding with passion, anger, regret, perhaps even lust. You can think, if you worry about that sort of thing—woops, he might just get fed up and blow it all apart.

This is Weeden’s 17^th season at Ashland –more or less the same time frame as Prospero’s exile from Milan. Weeden has grown into the part: he’s worn and weathered, a man who has known betrayal, and has learned simply to survive. Weeden has a somewhat formal elocution-teacher style of speech which doesn’t work for everything, but seems to fill this role well. He’s also got an odd little falsetto trick that he’s learned to use to give just the right comic touch to a role that can use a little comedy, but not too much.

Libby Appel’s production is straightforward, not too tricky. She interpolates a collage of Shakespearean sonneteering which actually works pretty well in its place. She rings in a duchess in lieu of a duke for no more obvious reason than to provide an extra role for a woman (Greta Oglesby)—but it works fine, so no complaints. She gives us a singing Ariel (Nancy Rodriguez) with a posse of singing, dancing, rope-climbing sidekicks—the kind of showmanship that Ashland does well, but which this play, at least, can sustain. Dan Donohue as Caliban shows again that he is an actor of remarkable range—he did a first-class Dvornicheck in Stoppard’s Rough Crossing a few years back, and followed it up with a wonderful Henry V, neither an obvious preparation for Prospero’s savage underling (having a black Prospero lord it over a white Caliban is an invigorating touch).

Ashland Theatre Note: Winter's Tale

A word now about the Ashland festival performance of of Winter’s Tale, which prompted my little jeu d’esprit about Shakespearean creativity, infra. I said earlier that in its presentation of King John, Ashland did a fine job with an unpromising play. In Winter’s Tale, they did a lot less with a lot more.

I’ve got great affection for this play, and in fact, Ashland did a really satisfying job on it just a few years back. But this year, they fell victim to the Ashland vice: they weren’t willing to trust the text.

You got this almost from the opening note in William Langan’s Leontes. Langan knew he was jealous, alright, and he wanted to tell us about it: he pranced, he waved his arms, he scuttered across the stage, and most of all, he shouted—oh, dear, how he shouted, in a part, that cries out to be played with cold fury and restraint. At first I thought he was trying to play Richard III; by the end I wondered if he was stretching for Groucho Marx.

Leontes pretty much dominates the first half of the play, so the presence of other creditable performances (there were several) wasn’t really enough to distract attention from him. Something harder to anticipate occurred in the second half. Ashland usually does better with the lighter stuff, and at low comedy, they can do really well. And indeed, Christopher DuVal as Autolycos could pull tricks out of the script as fast as his character could pull goodies out of a mark’s pocket.

The trouble is, Autolycos is not supposed to be the main event. He’s a change of pace, a foil, a sly and wry critique of the pastoral world around him. Here, they let him run away with the whole thing. The great sheep-shearing, which should be the centerpiece, ended up being a kind of side show (and as an aside, the odd little “folk ballet” looked for all the world like a Thomas Hart Benton painting of a slave auction).

The giveaway was the performance of the young lover Perdita, played by Nell Geisslinger. She has some of the best lines in the play (not to say the entire Shakespeare canon). She didn’t seem perfect for the part, but she seemed to give it a good shot. Or so it was until what I take to be the high point of her role. She speaks of:

Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes

Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses

That die unmarried ere they can behold

Bright Phoebus in his strength.

To my taste, this is breathtaking: the perfect combination of lyricism and black irony that gives Shakespeare his particular tang. Yet for some reason, god knows why, they had her sing them—and not all that well, either, to a not particularly memorable tune. Why in heavens’ name one would want to stamp on one of the grandest of all Shakespearean lyrics is beyond me—unless, as I suggested before, they just don’t get the point.