"UniSon" at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

After two really long plays, it was something of a relief that our Friday evening play was a more modest 90 minutes long. We didn't really know what to expect of this piece, called UniSon,  being a world premiere written by the group UNIVERSES, which created the extremely interesting Party People that we saw here a few years ago, and afterward at Berkeley Rep.

The Play

UniSon is "inspired by" the poetry of playwright August Wilson. Wilson is best known for his series of plays about the African American experience across the decades of the 20th century, but apparently he wrote poetry, too.

The play focuses on a Poet (Steven Sapp) and his apprentice (Asia Mark) and an ensemble of seven Terrors, representing seven people from the Poet's life that have, well, terrified him in one way or another. The Poet leaves a trunk full of unseen poetry when he dies, instructing his apprentice to burn it all. As she reads through the poems, the seven Terrors kind of take turns interacting with with the Poet.

The Production

The stage is backed with a wall of ten video monitors that largely show pictures of seemingly random objects. And center stage is a big trunk and a chair and a small bar for the Poet.

The screens also show lines of poetry and the names of all the poems as they come up in the play. Unfortunately, the first lines that come up are a quote from Wilson saying basically that there is public art and private art, and poems are private. As a result, it feels really uncomfortably intrusive that we are reading and hearing this poetry that he clearly didn't want anyone to read.

The play itself wanders through a bunch of plays and scenes, with some themes kind of showing up, and lots of Terrors, of course. But it never really crystalizes into a coherent message. The individual performances are fine, the music is good, individual scenes work reasonably well. Indeed, some are quite strong. But the lack of a unifying thread makes it all seem like rather a jumble. And the overarching feeling of transgression, that we're prying into a portion of someone's life that he didn't want to share, is more palpable as the show goes on.

Bottom Line

We all left the theater feeling like what we saw was well done and fairly interesting, but not very satisfying. And the discussion as we headed back to our house was not much about the substance of any of the Terrors and such, but mostly about the ethics of appropriating material from a writer who clearly would not have wanted this show to be made.

In the grand scheme of the festival, I'd say this isn't one of their better efforts. Again, the quality of the production is high (setting aside that one of the TV monitors went blank midway though the show, and its blackness was oddly distracting, particularly when the rest of the wall was a uniform pattern). I had hoped to gain some insight into Wilson as a dramatist through the lens of his poetry, but that was not an element here. And given that there wasn't any other clear message, it just kind of feels like a theatrical exercise without a real purpose. Full of sound and Terrors, as it were, but signifying nothing.