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We’re turning a corner in the cultural life of our nation, and you can see it happening at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF): along with other pleasures, their 2015 season includes a production of a modern classic from Taiwan. In America, a country working on representing the traditionally under-represented populations, our 20 million Asians have remained, by and large, an “invisible minority.” In the arts and media, even though it’s increasingly routine to see members of a range of marginalized groups in central roles, this phenomenon hasn’t yet fully extended to Asians. And now is just the right moment for it, and the western U.S. is just the right part of the country. As the global center shifts away from Europe, the U.S. west coast—also known as “the gateway to Asia”—needs to show leadership in responding to the myriad cultural influences that come through that gate. OSF Artistic Director, Bill Rauch, is courageous and terrifically forward-looking in bringing to his northwestern American festival a seminal play from Taiwan, a vital part of the vast Chinese-speaking world.
This makes sense both culturally and financially. Apparently, mass audiences want to see the country’s changing demographics reflected in their entertainment. According to Anthony White (Anthony White Casting, Hollywood), already two years ago there was a major surge towards “black and brown casting.” The leading T.V. sit-coms, for example, feature black families; these families range from the well-to-do (“Black-ish,” an identity comedy-drama) to the very, very rich (“Empire,” on an entertainment dynasty, often compared to the 1980s’ “Dynasty”). Viewers for these shows “cross color lines”—that is, millions of white people are watching these shows right along with millions of everybody else. On the subject of wildly successful T.V. shows featuring Latina actresses, Paul Lee (President, ABC Entertainment Group) remarked: “If you look at shows now that seem to lack diversity, they actually feel dated, because America doesn't look like that anymore.” [1]
But it’s still something of a novelty to see Asian faces on America’s stages and screens. Across the arts and entertainment world, employers who talk about their successes with “diversity trends” may well have hired every kind of minority but Asian. Mostly, to do contemporary work in the U.S., Asians have formed their own theatres, film production companies and festivals, awards, and so on.
Until now. “It’s not about the color black now; it’s about the color green.” This from Cheryl Pearson-McNeil (Senior Vice President, Nielsen consumer ratings corporation). Shows are casting whoever will appeal to those with the most “buying power,” also known as “disposable income.” And here’s where the new Asian audiences come in. Their population is growing the fastest of any group: 58% between 2000 and 2013. Even more, they are far and away the most educated of any group, and with that comes jobs that give them money to spend. Or what Pearson-McNeil calls “green.”
As a result, at least a few Asian-American male faces have recently been showing up in leading roles on screens both small and big. On television, “Fresh Off the Boat” is about a Taiwanese family and its kooky cultural quandaries. It features the marvelous Randall Park as the father (he is Korean-American, and played Kim Jong-Un in the hyper-stylish and irresponsibly lambasted film, “The Interview”). Audiences in the U.S.—like everywhere else—have been charmed by the Indian-British actor Dev Patel, prime mover of “Slumdog Millionaire” and the two “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” movies. Actor John Cho has moved way up the ladder, from the tasteless “Harold and Kumar” Korean- and Indian-American buddy-stoner movies, to the appealing, oblivious love interest (of a white woman) in “Selfie.” It’s also slowly becoming less surprising to see Asian male faces in supporting roles: as just one example of many, Steven Yuen was the Asian face in the aggressively multi-racial “The Walking Dead.”
In the theatre, audiences expect to see foreign Asians on brief cultural exchange tours, performing centuries-old Japanese kabuki or Chinese opera. On Broadway, one might see Asian-American faces in Asia-related revivals, such as “The King and I,” “Miss Saigon,” “Flower Drum Song,” or “Pacific Overtures.” But writing on the 2014-2015 season, theatre reporter Patrick Healy (NY Times) pointed out that, even though Off Broadway would be having three new plays by Asian-Americans, “such new works are rarer on Broadway,” and that “while there have been African-American productions of ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ and ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ there has yet to be an Asian-American Big Daddy or Stanley Kowalski.”
All of this makes it historic that OSF has brought a living Taiwanese playwright to direct his own, contemporary play that deals with Taiwan-China history—which is, of course, our history, too—featuring five Asian-American actors in a multi-cultural cast, and then having it run a full season of 75 performances from April through October. Somehow I found it touching that this production was simply folded into the other many festival goings-on without any extra emphasis or tacky media attention.
For those of us committed to the arts as a bridge between people and nations where politics fail, Artistic Director Bill Rauch has stepped up to the proverbial plate in a very big way.
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Wild, wild southwestern Oregon. Photo by L.T. Renaud.
“America is too big!” complains my European émigré artist friend in his 90s. He says it’s too difficult to create the synergy the arts need when everyone is so spread out. And indeed, as I’ve said before, America’s cultural policies ping-pong wildly between trying to “unify” the country, and to honor our “plurality.”
On the unifying side, for example, in the 1870s the Chautauqua Movement sent specialist lecturers and performers of all kinds from New York out to the millions of people in rural areas and “boondocks” across the rest of the country. Before Chautauqua peaked and then petered out in the 1920s or so, these Cultural Types, moving west, administered culture “to mold the mind of the nation.”
On the plurality side, there was Angus Bowmer. Bowmer conceived of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and jumpstarted it in an abandoned Chautauqua building in Ashland, Oregon, in 1935. He thought the theatre should be an organic outgrowth of each unique community: “Theatre must come from the people. You cannot superimpose theatre on local culture.”
A large part of the charm of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival springs from Bowmer’s own romantic story. He was born in Washington, in 1904, just fifteen years after it became the U.S.’s 42nd state. He spent his early life in places that were undeveloped or just scarcely developed—without roads or schools—so his autobiography, As I Remember, Adam, features tales of a nomadic life lived in tents, lots of serious mud to be waded through, remote settlements that could only be reached by boat, or loose communities with perhaps a store and a blacksmith and really nothing else.
Bowmer’s grandfather and father would go into these pioneer areas and start newspapers. Then they’d use the papers to agitate for a bridge, or a judge, or some shops. With this strategy, they created, out of barely-there outposts, sixteen real towns with deep civic feeling. Bowmer’s grandmother was a dedicated teacher of declamation based on Delsarte’s system for stance, gesture, breathing—everything for full embodiment and expression of an idea, or a text. His parents were musical, and had a radio show popular in Washington and Oregon.
These elements, taken all together, could very well dispose a young person towards the theatre: immersive training in declamation and music, the ability to create community, media savvy, a dedication to public service, a sense of adventure, and physical stamina. And disposed he was.
As a young man, Bowmer spent a few intrepid years with an itinerant performing group, and managed to cross paths with a gifted teacher of Expressive Speech in high school. As a teacher himself for six years in subsistence-level villages, whether hired to teach English or basketball, Bowmer produced plays—triumphs of ingenuity and resourcefulness: reluctant fellow teachers and the Class No-Good discovered their latent dramatic talents; restless, scruffy children and their exhausted parents, desperate for entertainment, came to life building sets for Shakespeare; costumes were made from scraps of cloth that students brought from home. One description: “The stage was a platform erected at one end of the gymnasium, composed entirely of driftwood scrounged from the beach. The scenery was made from lumber covered with paper, which was ordered through a school supply house and ‘painted’ with colored chalk.” At the Universities of Washington and Stanford (California), Bowmer met with both a formal education in Shakespeare and the notion that theatre scholarship and practice are entirely interdependent. He traveled abroad, became a sophisticated theatre viewer, and went home to Ashland, Oregon.
What is striking about Bowmer’s trajectory is how much of it is right there at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival today. For all the festival’s impressive national recognition, it remains fundamentally a collection of productions of, by, and for the people of the northwest, from California to Washington. It creates community. Unlike many west coast theatres, Ashland tours a few shows but isn’t trying to “get to New York”; they are rolling up their sleeves with an eye to producing shows with integrity in Ashland, an out-of-the-way former lumber town turned tourist destination.
“From up and down the rivers and creeks… young and old turned out.” Photo by L.T. Renaud.
OSF’s commitment is Bowmer’s: to provide entertainment for the public. Describing one isolated Finnish “town” that was enlivened with Saturday night dances and music, Bowmer wrote: “From up and down the rivers and creeks and over the dykes and through the woods, young and old turned out.” It certainly feels as if those people are still coming, arriving by horse and buggy, and on foot. Even now, 88% of OSF’s audience members still come over 125 miles to attend.
But they aren’t only viewers; they are participants. Remarkably, as late as 1959, auditions were open to the public! Today, the huge theatre-making mechanism of the festival is kept in working order by 700 volunteers. And no matter where the actors come from originally, a sizable number come to stay. As a result, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival struck me as a delightful, internationally celebrated community theatre, combining the reach for cultivated excellence with a healthy dedication to small-town theatre hokum.
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Nature walk. Photo by L.T. Renaud.
From the start, Bowmer chose the town of Ashland in part for its tourist appeal. Today, the town has a something-for-everyone feeling about it—from upscale shops to nature walks; from trendy culinary and film festivals to homey galleries and crafts shops. Many people come for the spa culture. Ashland certainly has two things that make a town a Town for me: a conspicuous number of first-rate new and used bookstores, and a serious number of stunningly preserved architectural gems from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If memory serves, in the 1970s, the entire town had a Shakespeare theme, including the goods in the stores and the dishes in the restaurants, as well as the costumed characters in the streets. This idea seems to have outlived its usefulness to the festival: now I only came across a few nostalgic vestiges of the Shakespeare motif—a stalwart bookstore displaying various editions of the current and recent seasons’ Shakespeare plays; a food place with Shakespeare food quotation painted in calligraphy on the front window—but for the most part, outside the theatres, Shakespeare surfaced around town spiritedly when he did, but only here and there.
Portrait: hotel room desk with OSF’s plentiful study materials. Photo by L.T. Renaud.
On top of all these offerings, Ashland has always been a town that made learning a priority, and true to Bowmer’s many years as a teacher, OSF has a vibrant educational component: there are public events, lectures, seminars, free performances, publications, and more, all providing a further dimension to a visitor’s theatre-going. There were far more opportunities than I could take advantage of in a short visit—I saw six shows in four days—but in the discussion I joined after one show, both the audience members attending, and the cast members hosting, made lively and worthwhile observations.
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Much Ado About Nothing. Claudio (Carlo Albán) accuses Hero (Leah Anderson) of infidelity on their wedding day, as a distraught Benedick (Danforth Comins, left), Don Pedro (Cristofer Jean) and Leonato (Jack Willis) try to get to the truth. Photo by Jenny Graham.
Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare
Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Runs February to November 1.
The floor of the stage was completely covered with astroturf, and over that hung an enormous bower of strands of rose-like flowers in perpetual cascade. Long chandeliers peeked through. We were at an upper crust home where everything noteworthy transpired outside on the perfect lawn: flirtations, trysts, practical jokes, betrayals, dastardly plots. Leonato’s household was an ongoing garden party for his daughter Hero and niece Beatrice, who lived in their pastel-colored frou-frou dresses and had a maid who sipped champagne with them, lounging on lawn chairs.
Everyone was welcome at Leonato’s! Guests arrived: a contingent of the military, returning from battle and still dressed in army fatigues, looking for all the world like Iraq War veterans. There was friendly chit-chat about the numbers of dead—“none of name”—before the talk turned to the more urgent matter of love.
Don John was the requisite villain who botched up Hero’s marriage out of malice toward the groom, Claudio, who was his fellow veteran. Don John was played by actress Regan Linton, in a wheelchair. This gave Don John the disaffected cast of a delicate soldier gravely injured in the war, and made his two nasty cohorts “angry vets” such as we see in the media, or in our neighborhoods.
This up-to-the-minute context rendered Beatrice, who is traditionally played with an effervescent wit, as an uppity Feminist, with one side of her head shaved, getting the better of Benedick not with her clever repartee, but by flipping him her middle finger on an exit line.
Again and again, the language of the play took a backseat to the concept and to striking images. These images served as shortcuts to the meaning in the lines. So that even though the language was handled in workmanlike fashion, it never drove the production. And although this meant that the full potential of the play was not achieved, what we lost in verbal play, we gained in a style of visual gags and events that was perfectly aligned with the goal of engaging public entertainment. Audience members young and old were clearly captivated throughout.
Shorthand for funny things in the text: here was Benedick wiggling his toes in silly socks, and pondering his love-predicament while doing his fitness workout. Here was Beatrice hiding behind a chair to hear her pals in their ruse to expound on Benedick’s love for her, moving the chair to get closer, and then impossibly closer—a sight gag so exaggerated and sustained that the audience’s laughter completely drowned out the delicious dialogue. Shorthand for sad things in the text: there was an added interlude in which wedding guests, despondent after Claudio has humiliated and abandoned Hero, tenderly dismantled the flowery bower and made a ritual of arranging the flowers in a mournful circle. They were so purposeful at this, and the interlude occupied so much stage time, that I expected Hero later to rise from its center when she reclaimed her life. Finally, the whole action was only a pretty way to signal “sad,” but slowed the tempo and didn’t serve any dramatic purpose.
The usually minor character of Conrade, sidekick of the corrosive Don John, appeared at first to be troubled by the nasty plot they were hatching to scotch the happy wedding, then seething after his capture. This character’s participation in the plot carried a weight Shakespeare couldn’t have foreseen: he was played by the quietly expressive Armando McClain, an actor of somewhat Middle Eastern aspect. The sight of this character—not much more than a moody mischief-maker—bound and gagged, was horrifying out of proportion with the intentions of the play—and when his fate was then decided by Dogberry, a ludicrous ham with no inherent right to power over anything, for me, it was simply too literal and topical not to strike a very sour note. Frankly, it’s even more disturbing to think that this Guantanamo-esque image might not have troubled the audience.
As is always the case for me, the production came most alive where there were wonderful voices. Two voices brought such effortless force to their characters that they dignified the performances around them, and shifted the emphases of the play in exciting ways. The first was Leonato, played by Jack Willis. This role is mostly played, or underplayed, as a kind of Polonius—Leonato means well but is fatally limited in his understanding. Here, Willis’s gorgeous, flexible voice made him an understated leading man for me: his daughter’s disgrace was his tragedy—his line over her lifeless body, “Do not live, Hero,” was so simple, so seering that it was like an inverted Lear over Cordelia’s body—and the lessons learned in the play were Leonato’s lessons. What a gift it was to hear this nuanced voice negotiate the sparkling language. The other remarkable voice belonged to Cristofer Jean, who played the Prince, Don Pedro, brother of disgruntled Don John. His crystalline diction and lovely timbre conspired with his elegant posture to interest me more than usual in the subplot he brought to the fore: Cupid (Shakespeare) was amiss in his duties not to have given this princely man a love interest of his own.
Stage floors are usually left bare so the actors can walk crisply on the hard surface. Here, the astroturf looked difficult to walk on, especially where actresses wore ill-advised heels, and gave everyone a squishy walk that worked better for the comic sections than the dramatic ones.
In my book, a successful production is one that leaves me with a lot to think about—positives or negatives aside—for a long time afterwards. This show did that.
Long Day's Journey into Night. Directed by Christopher Liam Moore. Lighting Design by James F. Ingalls. Set Design by Christopher Acebo. Costume Design by Meg Neville. Composition/Sound Design by Andre J. Pluess. Photo by Jenny Graham.
Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Christopher Liam Moore. Runs March through October.
This is a play to interest everyone who loves the theatre.
Playwright Eugene O’Neill essentially put America on the world theatre map: he was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1936); he won three Pulitzer Prizes for Drama in the 1920s, and one in 1957, not long after his death, for this very play, considered his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night.
At a time when Russia had its Chekhov, Norway its Ibsen, and the United Kingdom its Shaw, America had farces adapted from France and Germany, vaudevilles, and melodramas. Even in 1920, George P. Baker, an influential Harvard professor of Drama, took stock of the U.S. plays he could recommend to the public, and concluded: “Surely we have the right to hope that the next decade will give us an American drama which, in its mirroring of American life, will be even more varied in form, even richer in content.”
O’Neill fulfilled that hope. He brought to the stage the dark and mysterious sides of human relationships, and explored them in language familiar to the audience. He created original styles and forms for his plays, from realistic to expressionistic and beyond. He worked closely with the “new stagecraft” revolution of his time, when the work of geniuses Edward Gordon Craig (English) and Adolphe Appia (Swiss) were being absorbed into American set and lighting design. As designers were replacing two-dimensional backdrops with painterly or architectural three-dimensional environments for the plays, the complexity of O’Neill’s characters went hand-in-hand, leaving behind what he called “the old, ranting, artificial, romantic stuff” of the 19th century.
It was a brave decision the Oregon Shakespeare Festival made to include this difficult play in their season.It is long, and brooding: nevertheless, it gives audiences an important, ever-rarer chance to see this type of long-form, probing American drama. They might even recognize it as one forebear of today’s television dramas.
The story pertains to a family in which the mother has been addicted to morphine by a quack doctor, while her husband and two sons are alcoholics. The action revolves around the terrible things they say to each when they are under the influence of their respective substances, and their efforts to get more of them. The play contains many elements of O’Neill’s own life—addiction, illness, disenchantment with his father, etc.—and the style of acting that’s required is confessional and psychological in the way that we’ve inherited from Lee Strasberg’s “method” for the Actor’s Studio—based on a complete misunderstanding of the work of the Russian Stanislavsky, but nevertheless persistent in popular U.S. acting culture.
Indeed, the play is so historically significant that it almost hardly matters that the play is so dated. For one thing, we now know that drug addiction changes the chemistry of the brain, so that continual injunctions from her family for the mother, Mary, to just try harder not to use the morphine read as ignorant, even boorish. One stirring exchange: Mary, played by Judith-Marie Bergan, finally stopped pretending for an instant that she hadn’t returned to her morphine use, and broke down “piteously” to her husband: “James! I tried so hard! I tried so hard! Please believe!--” That is, Mary herself doesn’t know why her efforts at self-discipline have failed. I wasn’t sure why this affecting interchange was played upstage. Her husband’s reply: “…For the love of God, why couldn’t you have the strength to keep on?” Then the moment slipped away, and they went to lunch.
Then there is the demented amount of alcohol the father and his two sons consume alone and together—the alcohol their mother encourages them to drink, the alcohol they all hide, sneak, share, decry, and joke about. Emotionally, the play already has the mutual-torture feel of Strindberg’s work, but these are also people whose primary occupation is pickling themselves in poison and then saying poisonous things to one another. What makes Long Day’s Journey a period piece is that Freud’s ideas are no longer current—many of them even discredited—and that today’s mass media overloads us with talk on topics that were kept hidden in O’Neill’s time (remember the shock of Betty Ford’s 1978 public disclosure that she was addicted to alcohol and pain killers).
That said, OSF’s production of the play is very fine, and they certainly do a great deal to bring levity to the proceedings. The first thing we heard as the lights came up was laughter. They kept the dialogue moving at a clip, using the “overlapping” technique developed by the Lunts in the 1920s and ‘30s: people who live together speak at the same time. The actors wrung every bit of humor out of the lines where they could, including the running jokes: again and again, one person turns on the light someone’s recently turned off, and vice versa; they are all watering the whisky decanter, thinking they are fooling each other. Taking his cue from O’Neill’s own remark on the play, director Moore has focused on the theme of “forgiveness”: I only wonder whether everyone was played so likeably that we never saw them do all that much they needed forgiveness for.
The play was performed on a thrust stage, which brought the actors close for the most part; there were open “rooms” and hallways suggested, without walls, at the back and above, where the actors seemed to recede into a filmic sort of blur or haze. There was an evocative, long staircase to the upstairs that invited a little more use than it got, but sometimes a set isn’t fully used because it arrived late in the rehearsal process. O’Neill specifies that the father, James Tyrone, opens the play wearing don’t-give-a-damn, shabby gardening clothes—but he looked fine to me. Judith-Marie Bergan did her best with some of Mary’s more maudlin lines, and played a fetching “memory” scene lolling girlishly on the floor. Jonathan Haugen (son Jamie) has mastered the difficult art of speaking in the half-voice used in television acting, while also being heard—and understood!—throughout the theatre. I saw Danforth Comins (son Edmund) play the tiring matinee show, after having seen him just the night before as Much Ado’s demanding lead, Benedick. It was particularly impressive because nowadays, some theatres calling themselves “repertory” are actually a cross between a non-repertory theatre and a road house. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival can afford to make more of the fact that their repertory festival program—and their casting policy!— engages flexible, repertory actors.
Overall, some viewers might feel that the spirit of O’Neill’s younger self still lingers in this mature play of his: a 2003 New York Times real estate ad reads, “The most famous Point Pleasant [New Jersey] resident was Eugene O’Neill, who married a local girl named Agnes Boulton and grumbled about being bored through the winter of 1918-19, as he lived rent free in a home owned by Agnes’s parents.” But many audience members were clearly touched, even weeping, by the end of the show. Perhaps this signaled the “forgiveness” that was on the minds of both the playwright and this production’s director.
Guys & Dolls. Nathan Detroit (Rodney Gardiner, front left) can't seem to get Sky Masterson (Jeremy Peter Johnson, right) to take a bet on strudels and cheesecake. (with Robin Goodrin Nordli, Curtis Holland). Photo by Jenny Graham.
Guys and Dolls, based on stories by Damon Runyon. Music & lyrics by Frank Loesser, book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows
Directed by Mary Zimmerman. Runs February to November 1.
What a splendid show to choose for Ashland’s theatre season!—a virtually perfect musical from the American canon. We even glimpse in it a classical comic structure that Shakespeare used: two parallel love stories, each with its own set of obstacles, tie together at the end. Older audience members will no doubt remember the show from the 1950s, when it began its long history with the entertainment field’s highest prizes, revivals, film adaptations and recordings. Younger spectators, or anyone seeing the show for the first time, will be enchanted by the gambling shenanigans carried out by all parties: the crew of gangsters and loiterers, the sexy sweethearts who revolve around them, and even the earnest missionaries bent on saving them all from themselves. Gamblers turn earnest; missionaries gamble. This is the peculiarly American world where the extralegal and the morally superior converge. Here, they converge while singing and dancing.
The story of the show’s creation is a story in itself. It features Damon Runyon, who moved from Manhattan, Kansas to Manhattan in New York, and set himself up to write in an all-night Jewish deli in time to watch the underworld come to life in 1920: the U.S. law against making or transporting alcohol persisted until 1933, and created a class of experts in the making and transporting of alcohol. Runyon wrote short stories (collected as Guys and Dolls in 1932) about his epoch’s low-level hustlers and larger-than-life characters in sports and entertainment—often on the wrong side of the law—and famously fuelled his efforts each day with sixty cups of coffee, two packs of cigarettes, and multiple dinners. He created—out of whole cloth, he said—the mythical gangster-ese ubiquitous today anywhere there is a mobster character speaking.
The OSF version we saw is essentially the Guys and Dolls that opened as a Broadway show in 1950. That show had two producers, a series of well-known writers who drew storylines and characters from Runyon’s stories, and the great Frank Loesser. Readers here might recognize Loesser as the one who wrote, for example, the incomparable jazz duet classic, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” For OSF, director Zimmerman chose to move the show back to the 1930s of Runyon’s original stories, so that the setting is Depression-era rather than the post-WWII-malaise era of the original musical. As a result, true to the period, the main background was a wall entirely covered with a Chinese-Art Deco pattern.
What a treat to see the show in a cozy theatre with a few live musicians! Here the 1930s setting most served a purpose: music director Doug Peck has re-worked the original score, written for a large orchestra, into a brassy one influenced by the brilliant jazz explosion of the 1920s and ‘30s, to be played by eight musicians. It was all a little loud the day I saw it, and the singers were working at fullest volume to keep up. But overall, this approach to the infectious music and songs was a clever way to set the tone for the whole show, and gave it cohesion, too.
The transformation of Miss Sarah Brown has been handled differently in the many productions I’ve seen. My favorites have been ones inspired by her line that she’s had a “quiet upbringing,” so that when she hits Havana and starts, well, ringing like a bell and burning like a bridge, as she says, it’s because she’s in love, and there’s no turning back when she gets home. Here, the character had a dour nature to start, and then embraced her drunken fun in Havana. At that point, it was such a pleasure to see the actress, Kate Hurster, look and sound so pretty and simpatico, that I was sorry to see her go home and seem to gloat over having Gotten the Guy.
Once you’ve seen Marlon Brando play Sky Masterson on film, it’s hard to un-see it. But Jeremy Peter Johnson is very skillful, and he sang unforgettable songs that weren’t in Brando’s score. The chorus of gangsters was played, and sung, and danced with great charm and energy, as an assortment of distinct, imaginative cameo roles, and added a great deal to the goings-on.
The different locations were indicated in part by miniatures placed around the stage: models of skyscrapers for the city, and sailboats for Havana. They had to be moved on and off, which made the stage very busy. In an ingenious bit of ellipses, we learned that Sarah has accepted Sky’s invitation to Havana when a model plane made its way overhead, across the length of the stage on a wire. I was puzzled by “the miniature” as a central metaphor for Guys and Dolls, but I wouldn’t give up the chance to see that little plane, and when the audience gave it an enthusiastic reception, it deserved it.
Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. Master Yuan (Paul Juhn, center) and Blossom (Leah Anderson) have some fun behind the blanket, unbeknownst to Blossom's husband Tao (Eugene Ma, left). Photo: Jenny Graham.
Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, by Stan Lai
Directed by Stan Lai. Runs April through October.
(Note: I have written on Lai’s work, among other places, for Scene4: here, and also here.)
This play out-Shakespeares Shakespeare in its mixing of comic and tragic tones. It does this, in part, by doing the same thing Shakespeare did in so many of his plays: it has two different stories run in parallel worlds, and then collide. The title of the play tips us off to its method: it juxtaposes one play, Secret Love, with another, Peach Blossom Land. Each of these two takes place in two locations. There is a frame story, with several threads of its own, around all of that. All the stories and threads bump up against, mirror, trip over, and shake each other up. It is a huge, rangy, hilarious, heart-breaking, eccentric, play that would have made Shakespeare proud. Then, too, like Shakespeare’s own A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this one has a dream-within-a-dream quality that is one signature of Stan Lai’s revered theatre work.
Secret Love starts as a love story in 1948, when China is fighting the civil war that will divide her: two Shanghai students are in love, but she’s leaving for another city with her family. They meet in the park to say a goodbye they don’t think will be forever. Before she returns, though, the Communists have taken over the country, and the defeated ruling party and two million others have fled to the nearby island of Formosa. Mainland China and Formosa—now Taiwan--won’t have contact for the next forty years. In late 1987, the two lovers meet again and learn that they’ve both been in Taiwan all that time. But unable to find each other sooner, they’ve married other people, while keeping one another in their respective hearts as a “secret love.”
The history of peoples divided will be very familiar to the general U.S. public from the cases of Germany and Korea. The partitioning of Germany into the Communist East, and non-Communist West after World War II engendered an entire body of film and literature, and The Wall that separated families, loved ones and colleagues became a world symbol for politics running roughshod over humanity. The two Germanys returned to one in 1990, not long after China and Taiwan opened communications: broken families were reunited, but often scarred and alienated. Korea is known to some from the Korean War of the 1950s, and to others from Korea’s flourishing, current pop scene. Korea was also divided after World War II, into the Communist North and the non-Communist South. The tragic separation of Korean families persists today. Lai’s Secret Love invites us into these same disturbing, unresolved matters as they pertain to China and Taiwan.
Peach Blossom Land is the classical, comic counterpart to Secret Love. The first section opens in a simple home, with a lusty wife, her lover, and her cuckolded husband. These need no explanation—they are the same stock characters we know from commedia dell’arte, and from the comedies they people today. The story unfolds in fast-paced, highly physical commedia fashion: pratfalls, pantomime, penis jokes and rubber pancakes. Verse lines contain funnily terrible rhymes. Our cuckold, with dignity wounded, hies himself off to fish downstream in turgid waters, loses his way, and stumbles across Shangri-La. Here, Lai gives us a priceless parody of “utopian” New Age-speak, with its annoying blabber about Tranquility and Serenity. But the real downside of Shangri-La is that its inhabitants have only stayed unperturbed for a couple thousand years by remaining completely ignorant of history. After some time, the fisherman misses his wife and goes home, hoping to bring her back with him. But, as we know, there’s no going back, and this part of the play, unlike the dramatic one, is left hanging…
The device that brings Secret Love and Peach Blossom Land into collision is simply delicious: their two theatre companies are accidentally booked for rehearsal on the same stage at the same time. What to do? They both demand to see the schedule, shout, and bully each other. Each tries to prove its show takes priority. If they both stay, how can they possibly use the space together? Should they take turns? They decide to rehearse at the same time. The stage space is divided. Someone trips and steps across the line. Someone tries to move the line. They begin their scenes. Gradually, they are speaking lines that make perfect sense in each other’s plays. These share motifs of longing, history, and illusion. The actors of the two stories that seemed so far apart—one modern, historical and dramatic; the other classical, fictional and comic—have discovered points where they effortlessly overlap.
Around all of this, there is a frame story that Lai uses in part to develop new material with the actors in each theatre he travels to. Now we’re not in either of the titular plays, or even in the rehearsals for them: now we’re in rehearsal for the entire production containing the two plays and their rehearsals. Here, successful completion of any task, large or small, is a hit-or-miss proposition. Someone is fumbling to set up a microphone after we’re already watching, a scene painter has his own ideas about what to paint, here’s someone with a skateboard, now a door is missing, here’s a woman on an unexplained mission to find a character who’s not in the play, and the clock is stuck at 3:59. After the show is “over,” one of the drops falls down, and a bunch of blossoms from a much earlier scene tumble down on a cue that no longer exists. It’s kind of Brechtian in its backstage-on-stage-ness, and kind of Surrealist in its random elements that we each connect however we do, or don’t. It is philosophical: reality is elusive.
And now the multi-cultural front-of-scene “artists” are arguing, Pirandello style. The director—played by an actor—is complaining that the non-Chinese actors aren’t acting “Chinese” enough, don’t have the depth of feeling for the tragedy; the Caucasian actress is reminding him she’s not even Asian; like the inhabitants of Shangri-La, an Asian-American in the show knows nothing about Chinese history. When the Latina actress speaks, is it her “white” accent or her Spanish accent that’s put on, and which one will keep her her job in this Chinese play? Should they all speak with “Chinese” accents—and what are those? Walk “Chinese”? Actually, the Chinese-looking actors are, for example, Korean-American and Singaporean-Canadian. Also: does it matter whether the classical part of the play looks authentic? Would it be better simply to use natively Chinese-speaking actors, and have subtitles?
This is an unflinching, playful send-up of the American preoccupation with multi-culturalism. The production isn’t perfect: there were some timing and vocal problems when I saw it just after it opened. (In truth, though, the loopy group playing “classical Chinese musicians” more than made up for a lot.) But the show excels as a Grand Experiment, and in it Lai creates a space for the core questions we need to formulate a theatre more than superficially “inclusive.” It’s interesting to note, for example, that although China was performing Shakespeare’s plays within Shakespeare’s lifetime, and has absorbed playwrights from Chekhov to Kushner, the English-speaking world has no Chinese plays—classical or contemporary—in its canon. And how will we do them? Is it a goal for us to see a Chinese-Caucasian Raisin in the Sun? A culturally diverse Long Day’s Journey?
When the rehearsing actors call for help from OSF’s artistic director, Bill Rauch, we are reminded that this show, made up of parts, is in turn part of the larger theatre festival, and a reference to nearby Medford reminds us the festival is in Oregon. On one level, Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land is an apt and moving metaphor for efforts by China and Taiwan to co-inhabit their part of the world. By extension, it reminds us that we are also part of their world, and that China and America will do well to share the stage based on their overlapping concerns, philosophical bent, and crazy sense of humor.
Fingersmith. Sue (Sara Bruner, below) listens to hear how the con is going upstairs with Gentleman (Elijah Alexander, left), Maud (Erica Sullivan) and Dr. Christie (Bruce A. Young). Photo by Jenny Graham.
Fingersmith, by Alexa Junge, based on the novel by Sarah Waters
Directed by Bill Rauch. Runs February to July 9.
Construction. Victorian. Gothic. Layers. Narrative. Detail. Horror. Desire. These are the kind of coordinates where Fingersmith is located.
At the play’s opening, a young woman has just seen Bill Sykes kill Nancy--but it was only a play of Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and the murder can be erased just by telling the story’s ending a different way.
Witness. Murder. Story. Truth-shifting.
Watching this play felt like being inside an Escher painting: we think we are on one staircase, but it only leads to that one, which leads nowhere but to another one, which wraps around inside, but which turns out to be outside.
The way the stage space was used reinforced this feeling of disorientation. Over and over, we thought we knew all the playing areas, but the number continued to grow. Initially, all our attention was stage right, on a close household of petty thieves and orphaned babies. Then it was a jolt to land, all the way across the wide stage, in the airy, near-empty rooms of a country estate. Maybe the light fell on a man on an overhead walkway we didn’t know was there. Or a room vanished on a turntable. We could make out a staircase. A projection made it appear that the back wall had opened. Suddenly a scene came forward, down off a corner of the stage. Suddenly the upper walkway led to a seedy room with a bed. A floor turned into a road with a car driving on it. What was a door from the outside before turned into a door from inside a madhouse.
Sarah Waters, who wrote the original story of Fingersmith in 2002, has since seen her fiction named “Best of,” shortlisted, and turned into film, television shows and stage plays. She’s coupled detailed research with her love of the weird, dark strain in the Victorian era, and attracted a dedicated following.
Gaunt faces. Shadows. Whalebone.
Alexa Junge, who adapted the novel for the stage, has written for some of the best known shows on television: Friends, Sex and the City, West Wing, and more. For the movies, she wrote Lilo & Stitch 2 and Mulan II. For radio, she contributes to NPR’s This American Life. She’s brought an affection for storytelling-about-storytelling to this play.
Locked door. Blood. Whip. Drawing easel.
Characters don’t know who they are, or where they came from, so they are vulnerable to anyone who can provide an identity for them. And provide they do, according to whatever best serves them at the time. After that, their stories shift.
The trick of the play is that each element of the story changes multiple times. So that being an audience member watching is like being the reader of a “page-turner” novel. You keep watching to find out what happens. There isn’t very much why, but there’s a great deal of what. From the play’s beginning to its ending, a hundred things happen, the characters learn one false truth after another, but never learn much about themselves.
Deception. Replication. Puzzle.
More coordinates: Dickens, for the hive of pickpockets in Victorian London, and the surprise of an orphan’s identity. Pygmalion, for the poor young woman schooled to fit into an upper class household. Sweeney Todd, for the visceral sense that dark corners in poor London harbor gruesome acts—perhaps of selling pies made of ground up people, or, as in this play, teaching a child to whip the insane.
In this historical period (1860s), we’re still some years before the great lesbian culture of the early 20th century, so it’s interesting that two of author Sarah Waters’ recent books take place just after World War I. The years around the war allowed women room for freer expression of same-sex desire. But Fingersmith is of an earlier, more covert time. At the country estate, Uncle has brought his niece from the asylum to his home, where he invites men to attend her readings of pornography. When she and her supposed lady’s maid seduced each other, I was all for it, thinking it was finally some genuine feeling in the story—but I confess I saw more of it than I needed to. And when the seduction turned out to be just another trick in the plot, I wished I had seen even less. But the point of it—that they had more reasons to be drawn to each other than they knew—was very welcome.
Pattern of secrets. Corset. Glove.
All the actors’ performances were persuasive. Vocally, some were able to handle the three-hour performance better than others. There is a spectrum of opinions about whether stage accents should be authentic or only suggested; I’m afraid I lost quite a bit of the dialogue to the heavy accents. Everyone wore his or her beautiful costumes beautifully, and this is a dying art so it was a pleasure to see.
The direction was terrific throughout. Director Bill Rauch moved us through the story with absolute clarity. He avoided pitfalls of over-characterization and fussy blocking. Scenes were spare, and deliberate, and always had a shape. Group scenes were rhythmic, and intimate scenes were played with directness.
Hats off to the creative team that brought together the sprawl of different elements that made up this unusual production.
Pericles. Pericles (Wayne T. Carr) cradles his wife Thaisa's (Brooke Parks) lifeless body. Photo by Jenny Graham.
Pericles, by William Shakespeare
Directed by Josef Haj. Runs February to November 1.
Pericles reminds us that Shakespeare was a man of the theatre. Many of his plays are magnificent to read. But Pericles comes roaring fully to life when played on the stage.
One reason is that the story takes place in six imaginary countries. So a lot of the fun is to see how different the countries are. It’s like watching a whacky travel brochure come to life. In this production, the first, evil kingdom was a little bit Star Trek—a good way to signal that we don’t need a real map to locate the action of the play. Then there were a few Middle East-ish countries, and there was an India-ish. Each country was distinguished very simply, with a few costume details, a set piece here or there, and a different stage area. In one place, everyone stood with very erect posture; in another, they sat on the floor with rug and cushions, and so on. But best of all, the actors used Shakespeare’s language to create place by creating the people who lived there, bringing out the sounds and rhythms in the text. The devilish Antiochus: death-like dragons, desert, desire, dead cheeks, death’s bet. The sympathetic, healing Cerimon: secret art, blest infusions, stones, nature works, cures.
The story also takes place on the sea. Pericles travels on a stormy sea; he loses his wife and crew to the casual cruelty of the sea; he is shipwrecked. But he also gains a daughter there, and names her Marina, for the sea; and it’s the sea that returns Pericles, his wife and his daughter to land alive. The sea is also a metaphor for the unknowables of life, and for the inner storms of grief Pericles has to endure. He endures relentless loss, through no fault of his own, for no reason but that the sea of life drowns, wrecks, nourishes or floats us as it will. That Pericles endures with dignity and faith is what elevates his character to Job-like stature.
Anyway, for this play, you need to have a good sea. And this production has a great sea. When the ship was submerged, covering the entire floor of the playing area, copious amounts of sea-colored silk were shaken into enormous waves. There was a slit where Pericles could stick out his torso to curse the storm. The waves are so high, he says, that they “wash both heaven and hell.” It looked as if the places we’d seen him so far had all been flooded.
This part of the storm alone would have been satisfying, but there was much more. There was a storm-at-sea video projected the entire width and height of the back surface. It was absolutely realistic, as if we were in a disaster film. I don’t like to be in a film if I’m in a theatre. But this projection didn’t replace or overpower the silk sea; it amplified it, complementing it in color, scale and tone. In addition, to create the feeling of being on the deck of the ship, Pericles sat on a small platform hung from cables and raised slightly, so he was suspended with no ground beneath him. Altogether, silk, projection and suspension were ravishing.
Pericles (1607) shares with The Tempest (1611) its tempest, an inquiry into power, and also a focus on a father-daughter relationship. One of Shakespeare’s techniques (and a characteristic of kabuki, too) is to contract and expand time: a voyage across the sea might be completed in an instant, but a train of thought might be prolonged. In this play, the scene in which Pericles leaves his baby daughter with another couple is a few dozen lines long, but the scene in which father and daughter recognize each other after fourteen years is 160 lines long plus a song by Marina. It unfurls heartbeat by heartbeat, breath by breath, “point by point,” as the bereft Pericles makes his way back from three months of wordlessness to exquisite, metered poetry: “…Give me a gash, put me to present pain,/Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me/O’erbear the shores of my mortality/And drown me with their sweetness. O, come hither/…”
This is as beautiful a scene as any in Shakespeare. Wayne T. Carr and Jennie Greenberry both moved gorgeously, and inhabited the emotional life of the lines with quiet ferocity and delicacy. Greenberry sings like an angel. Throughout, Carr was a first-rate King Pericles.
Across the board, the actors spoke the language with the level of nuance we need to enter into the characters’ experiences with all our senses. Brooke Parks played both the wicked queen and the love of Pericles’ life, Thaisa; Scott Ripley played several roles; his twinkly, loving King Simonides, Thaisa’s father, was a memorable treasure. Mostly everyone played multiple roles. Gower, the narrator, was a somewhat thankless role, but he often played in the aisles, which helped.
In a production otherwise so pitch-perfect, I couldn’t make sense of the music (except for the nutty accordion trio). We were treated to a guitar-violin-flute ensemble to start with, and award-winning music director Jack Herrick, taking his cue from the many references to music and songs in the text, infused the play—he called it a “playsical”—with his own score. But his “fairly eclectic, somewhat folksy, somewhat techno” points of reference were jarring, and the invented lyrics were truly dumb. Surely he had something interesting in mind—it just never made it to mine.
This production is proof positive that Pericles deserves a bigger star in Shakespeare’s constellation of miracles.
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This is the 80th year of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Artistic Director Rauch wrote in the theatre program’s welcome message: “And yet we know from our namesake author that this glorious past is merely prologue for all that lies ahead.” The 2016 season includes two less-produced, longtime favorites of mine: Timon of Athens and Richard II. And a staging of Great Expectations: interesting idea. (See link below for full season.)
It’s a marvel that OSF continues to develop its Asia focus in 2016. The Winter’s Tale will be both Asian and Asian-American; Vietgone is a love story in an Arkansas refugee camp. In Fall 2016, OSF will host the Consortium of Asian American Theatres and Artists for conference and Festival.
Shakespeare, American canon, new plays, Asia focus: all of OSF’s good theatre makes an incalculable contribution to U.S.-Asia relations. In this way, it betters its own community and its region, and fosters world community.
Ashland. Photo by L.T. Renaud.
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Footnote: [1] At the same time, women, providing an element of diversity in a male profession, suffer from what has been called “Hollywood’s devastating gender divide,” whereby women carry leading roles in only 12% of the top films, and this number has been slipping several points yearly since about 2000.
Note: I’d like to thank Dr. Tom Knauss and his wife, Suzanne, for their thoughtful and challenging conversation, which contributed greatly to my thinking about the festival.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Online Video Series: Know Before You Go
Extensive trailers, backstage views, interviews, and more
Much Ado About Nothing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHflb7LPTdc&index=3&list=PLQj1k-BmYkxq_uGFieZX15BWoZYEmx36A
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEyHJMY6YLQ&list=PLQj1k-BmYkxo9VUeXUGsoHptTkqKn0DgC
Guys & Dolls
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwMFt444H2k&list=PLQj1k-BmYkxrH_mcH6s6QbzE6eWnSZsh3
Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQj1k-BmYkxpJjw0E4F8SjD2sSN4PX_cx
Fingersmith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x3R8Qxl6No&list=PLQj1k-BmYkxoYn5oPmS4H4T-vzUY9B4fb
Pericles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp91cwMVL9A&list=PLQj1k-BmYkxpADnYloPmzQDlO4Udvo9la
Reading
Angus L. Bowmer, As I Remember, Adam: An Autobiography of a Festival. Oregon Shakespeare Festival Association, 1975
Delectable reading on the festival and a life lived for the theatre.
Kathleen F. Leary and Amy E. Richard, Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Images of America Series. Arcadia Press, 2009
Excellent, affectionate selection of photographs telling the history of the festival.
Complete Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2015 season:
“Much Ado About Nothing” directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz; “Guys and Dolls” directed by Mary Zimmerman; “Fingersmith” adapted by Alexa Junge from the book by Sarah Waters, directed by Bill Rauch (world premiere); “Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land” by Stan Lai, directed by Stan Lai; “Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat” directed by Kate Whoriskey (world premiere); “Pericles” directed by John Haj; “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” directed by Christopher Liam Moore; “The Happiest Song Plays Last” by Quiara Alegria Hudes, directed by Shishir Kurup; “Anthony and Cleopatra” directed by Bill Rauch; “Head Over Heels Script” by Jeff Whitty, music & lyrics by the Go-Go’s, directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar; and “The Count of Monte Cristo” adapted by Charles Fechter, directed by Marcela Lorca.
Announcement, 2016 season:
https://www.osfashland.org/press-room/press-releases/2016-announcement.aspx
Opening photo: Downtown Ashland. Nature and the arts. Photo by L.T. Renaud.
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