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.

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).