Ashland, 2022

 After a two-year hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we were finally able to return to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this year. Like all theaters, they are having to come back a bit tentatively, so I have to say the scope of the festival was dramatically less than what we're used to. But it was a treat to be back in lovely Ashland, seeing some of our favorite artists.

So, what's changed?

The two most striking changes in the festival this season were the reduction in the number and scope of the plays offered, and the absence of rotating repertory casting.

The 2022 festival season contained seven total plays, down from the previous eleven. But it wasn't just the number of plays that was reduced. There are fewer performances of each play, and many of the plays are just smaller. For example, one show had a single actor; another had three, and yet another five. This is not a comment on quality--those shows I listed were among the very best we saw. But it reflects both the difficulty of producing a large show when one needs to take precautions to prevent spreading disease and a caution about expending resources on a show when it's uncertain how many people will actually come to see it. The scheduling of the shows was also spread out so that there was no overlap at the middle of the season as there has often been. Some shows ended in July, others didn't begin until August. So it wasn't possible to see all the season's offerings in a single visit. We settled on making two trips, which was fine.

Another victim of the pandemic was repertory casting. Needing to isolate the cast and crew of each show meant that repertory casting was essentially impossible. Overlapping casts and crews would greatly increase the risk of spreading illness across multiple shows, so this seemed a reasonable precaution. It was disappointing to us in the audience, who enjoy seeing actors stretching across a variety of roles. And I imagine it must also have been a blow to the actors who rely on that level of work.

The bottom line here is that there are fewer shows, fewer performances of each, with smaller casts and no chance to be cast across shows. That means a lot fewer opportunities for each artist--a dramatically scaled-down festival.

I should add that another thing that has gone somewhat missing in all this is the festival's eponymous bard: of the seven plays, there were only two Shakespeare works. Although I realize the pandemic necessitated a retreat from the festival's commitment to produce the entire canon of Shakespeare's work in a decade, this pacing suggests that they might be backing away from the canon even more than that, which would be disappointing.

But what about the plays?

Between our two trips, we managed to see all seven of the shows on offer. Of those, I would say two were outstanding, two were very good, and the other three were disappointing on some level.

The best

On each of our visits, we saw one outstanding play, clearly better than the others. For what it's worth, both were in the Thomas Theater (the smallest, black-box theater), but both were ambitious new shows.

unseen

This was the show for the first half of the season in the Thomas. Written by Mona Mansour and directed by Evren Odcikin, it was a west coast premiere. The central character, Mia (Helen Sadler) is a conflict photographer who has been documenting the conflict in Syria when something happens. Her memory has holes, and her ex-girlfriend, Derya (Nora el Samahy), and her mother from California (Caroline Shaffer) try to help her piece together what physical and psychological trauma has landed her here.

The acting, design, and direction for unseen were all amazing. It was clearly the best show we saw on our first visit.

Confederates

After unseen closed, Confederates took over the Thomas Theater, and it's another powerhouse production. Another west coast premiere, this one's by Dominique Morisseau and directed by Artistic Director Nataki Garrett. The writing is just brilliant, with more layers than I can fathom, and the production design brilliantly illustrates the parallel challenges navigated by a modern-day black university professor and an enslaved woman during the American Civil War. We know from Sandra (Bianca Jones)'s opening monologue that this is going to be difficult material, and it is. And while Sara (Erika Rose) demonstrates from her first scene that she well knows the difficulty of staying in line with the masters while still trying to remain true to herself and her family, Sandra's similar conundrums only become apparent as the play progresses.

Using the other actors to portray characters who fill remarkably similar roles in the lives of the two women, on a stage that places the professor's office and the slave shack side-by-side (great scenic design by Nina Ball!), we get a visceral appreciation for both how much and how little has changed over the decades between their lives. I can't do justice to this play in this brief summary. It runs through October 29--go see it!

The next level

Two more shows stood out as being good productions, definitely of a caliber I expect from OSF.

How I Learned What I Learned

This is a show I had seen before (but not blogged about; it was in May, 2019, while I was on blog hiatus). Ubuntu Theater Project (now Oakland Theater Project) co-produced this show with Lorraine Hansbury Theatre and Marin Theatre Company. It's a one-actor show by August Wilson, sort of autobiographically describing his life as a black man in America (or more particularly, Pittsburgh, where he grew up). That production starred Steven Anthony Jones, and he again played the role in Ashland.

I had thought the Ubuntu production was good, though Jones had some lapses. I thought he was much better in the Ashland version: both more confident and more personal. And it didn't hurt to have a bigger budget, so better lighting, a fancier set (also by Nina Ball!), etc. It was just a more polished and convincing production. As noted earlier, a solo show is not something I would ordinarily go to Ashland to see, but the quality of the production was definitely up to their standards.

King John

One of the few Shakespeare history plays I had not yet seen in person (though I have seen a filmed version from Stratford), this was a fairly unconventional staging, directed by Rosa Joshi of the upstart crow collective (who co-produced this), with a cast that is all female or non-binary. After a few minutes, the gender thing just stops being an issue, and you just get into the drama. I have to say that they play (though the ending is a bit weak) holds up very well: it's much clearer, more direct, than most Shakespeare histories. And the cast was really solid, with particular props to Jessika D. Williams as the Bastard (she had impressed me several years ago at CalShakes).

This is another show that is still running, through October 29. If you're making the trip to see Confederates, you can see this, too. Worth it!

The other three

I don't have a lot to say about these. I'll just write about them in the order we saw them. Suffice it to say that none of these would justify a trip all the way to Ashland, but it's not a complete waste of your time to see them if you're there.

The Tempest

I hate putting this on the list of inferior productions, but it belongs there. I love the play in general, and a number of my favorite actors are in the cast. The problems I saw here were directorial. As far as I can tell, either director Nicholas C. Avila didn't know what message he was trying to send, or he didn't figure out how to craft that message out of his actors. But when we saw the show in early July, it had been running for a month, and still hadn't found a direction. Maybe it's better now. I hope so, but I don't have a lot of hope. It's still running, through October 15. But mostly it felt like a waste of a lot of talent, and that's not something I've ever encountered at OSF before.

Once on This Island

This show is very well done. Good music, dancing, energy. Unfortunately, there is no real substance to the story. It's pretty much a story about the happy downtrodden Haitians trying to live happily in the shadow of the colonizing French. And the dream of crossing the racial/class barrier that gets thoroughly thwarted. So it was kind of pleasant, but quite unsatisfying. I'm not sure what the point of this was. Also still running, through October 30th.

Revenge Song: A Vampire Cowboys Creation

I had such high hopes for this one. It's by Qui Nguyen, who wrote Vietgone, which I've seen twice and loved both times. And this promised to be sort of similar, a musical about a queer, swashbuckling woman (Julie d'Aubigny--a real, historical figure), trending toward superhero status. I just feel like the show wasn't ready for prime time. It felt very uneven, maybe unfinished. My expectations of a show at OSF are for something definitely more polished. And it was compounded by the fact that the sound mixing was terrible. Every time actors started to sing with the band, their voices got dropped, making it difficult to hear what they were singing. That's pretty inexcusable.

Again, there's some real talent in the cast and design crew. We even had to postpone seeing this from early July (rain) to September, and it still felt unfinished, and the sound was a problem. That's very disappointing. You, too, can still be disappointed if you go see it before it closes on October 14.

Summing Up

It was awesome to be back in Ashland, both times. The town is much as we remembered it, though a number of businesses did not survive the shutdown, and some of our favorite restaurants have folded. But there aren't a lot of empty storefronts, and new restaurants (some of them excellent) have opened.

That said, we were there for the Independence Day weekend in July, and where Ashland would normally be packed to the gills, there were tables at restaurants, empty seats in the theaters, and parking spaces available. The outdoor theater shows had pretty good crowds, but the indoor theaters felt about half or maybe two-thirds full at best. On a holiday weekend in the peak of their season. When we returned in September (after Labor Day), it was definitely not crowded.

So I have to say I'm concerned about the future of the festival. Fewer shows, lower ticket prices, fewer performances, smaller crowds. All that adds up to a serious drop in revenue. I can only imagine that they must be struggling. And next year's season looks to be much the same: seven shows, including a solo show, only two Shakespeare plays. and so on. I hope by next year people will feel more confident about going out and about, taking trips to see theater and such. Only time will tell.

"This Much I Know" at Aurora Theatre Company

 

Aurora Theatre Company photo, uncredited

Oh, my. Now that I've broken the ice and written a posting, it seems like time to revisit posting about plays.

This world premiere of a play by the creative team that brought us the acclaimed Eureka Day (playwright Jonathan Spector and director Josh Costello) is really terrific, so I felt like I needed to use the vast reach of this blog (yes, that was sarcasm) to try to entice a few more people to see it.

The Play

First off, this is a well-crafted piece of writing. It's clever without being full of itself, and thoughtful but without straining the brain. Inspired in part by the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman (notably Thinking, Fast and Slow), the play explores how (or whether) people make decisions and choices and how they react to events outside their control. So we have three characters: a professor, his wife, and a student, but all of the actors portray a variety of characters as the narrative slips in and out of time.

Ultimately only the professor's character really gets fleshed out--we have many questions left about the wife and student. But that's a detail, really; the overall effect is still quite satisfying.

The Production

The staging is nice and simple, though there is a fairly busy wall that gets projections, talking portraits, and a number of flags popping out of it. The rest is mostly space for the actors, with a few simple items: blocks that serve as chairs, a desk, etc. And we mostly get to focus on the three actors. Lukesh (Rajesh Bose) is a self-assured professor of psychology who analyzes everything. His wife, Natalya (Anna Ishida), has her life upended by an accident. And the student, Harold (Kenny Toll), arrives in Lukesh's office having been ostracized from the English department for his white-nationalist views. As Lukesh struggles to hold together his relationship with Natalya and Harold comes to grips with his relationship with the rest of the world, we're drawn into background stories that take us to Stalinist USSR and modern Russia, the world of online racism, and a number of Lukesh's lectures that increasingly intersect with his personal life.

Through all of this, the players are shifting in and out of their roles. It's quite a deft choreography, and mostly keeps the play pretty seamless. There are two intermissions in the just-over-two-hour play, which seems a bit much, but they are the two logical breaks in the story, and I suspect the actors need a breather.

Bottom Line

It's really refreshing to see solid, new work like this. The script is really interesting without being over the top, and the acting and direction are quite wonderful. The show is probably a little bit longer than it needs to be, but it's well worth it, and never drags. I quite enjoyed it!

The show runs at Aurora through October 2nd. I definitely recommend seeing it.

Revisiting an Old Friend

 I know.

I don't do this anymore. I got tired of the effort it took to produce even a modest-length "review" of the plays I saw, when very few people were even reading the results. I felt bad because I knew a few people, at least, had come to expect my posts, and in truth, I missed writing them.

And then came The Plague, and the Master of the Revels closed all the theaters. In fairness, I had stopped blogging about theater well before COVID-19 was even a twinkle in some Chinese bat's eye. But it soon became clear that not only was my attempt at "Too Much Theater" impossible, but we would all get to experience "Not Nearly Enough Theater" for far too long.

And now things are opening up again, and we're seeing shows in person (the less said about the lessons we learned with online performances, the better, though maybe I'll blog about that someday). But that's not what brought me back here. It was rereading a play.

Searching for a Reading

Last summer, when it appeared theaters were going to get to reopen for real, and we were all vaccinated and excited about life again, my wife and I got to be guinea pigs. A few years earlier at the Shotgun Players' annual gala we had bought the rights to host a private, staged reading, and the reading itself was scheduled for late April of 2020. Obviously, that didn't happen. We had planned to use the beautiful set that Nina Ball had designed for Shotgun's production of Henry V that was supposed to open right as COVID shutdowns hit--they were in tech rehearsals, and never got to open. It was terribly sad for the artists, of course, but I also took it personally as I'd been allowed to sit in on quite a number of their rehearsals, and really felt like a small part of the gang. Plus I really wanted to use that set!

My thinking had been that we ought to do a reading that would take advantage of Nina's brilliant little interpretation of Shakespeare's Globe Theater inside the Ashby Stage, and the play that came to mind was Bill Cain's Equivocation. We'd seen its world premiere at Ashland in 2009 and also when it played at Marin Theatre Company the following year. Terrific play, partly taking place in the Globe: Perfect!

But as the pandemic wore on, that play felt less pertinent in the moment, and we ultimately settled on a reading of Lauren Gunderson's wonderful play, The Book of Will. We had seen it twice in Ashland in 2018, and had been looking forward to it playing at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in the summer of 2020 before it got canceled. So it was both a chance to give that play a deserved shot in the Bay Area, and also a celebration of the role theater plays in our hearts during difficult times. It was kind of the ideal show to use to reopen the theater after more than a year away, and it, too, is largely set on the stage of the Globe.

So that's all good, but also not the reason I'm writing this.

Old Play, New Context

When we were planning the reading of Equivocation for 2020, I read through the script for the first time in several years. (I have two copies: the OSF script used for the premiere and also the published version--I really like this play!) The play revolves around the premise that in 1605, while Shakespeare was working on his new play about King Lear, the government tries to hire him to write a new "history" play, but this time about current history, specifically the Gunpowder Plot.

This leaves our playwright in a quandary. The king is, after all, the patron of his theater company, and with theaters having been closed by outbreaks of the plague for several years, a commissioned work would be welcome revenue. But the company is divided over whether to accept the task. The play will have to delicately balance the official government line with portrayals of the conspirators and their views. The playwright struggles both with his company and with the government, all while the story of the Plot is still coming to light. Art, truth, and expediency all seem to conflict. Can he write a play that is true and still get it approved? Are we being manipulated? Is he being manipulated?

A Little History Lesson: A House Divided

The years 1605-6 were busy ones in England, but really, for several centuries the whole country had been in nearly constant upheaval. Must of that period is familiar to theater-goers through Shakespeare's "history plays" that cover the period from the early 1300s to the mid-1500s. Throughout those years, England was wracked by questions of succession, usurpation, and the legitimacy of its kings. Even when the Tudor era put an end to the Wars of the Roses, religion came to the fore, and for several generations the country ping-ponged between Catholicism and the Church of England.

Despite a fair degree of adherence to actual history, Shakespeare's history plays both bend history to fit dramatic needs, and also carefully select themes that will pass the approval of his contemporary censors. Not only does Shakespeare have to craft his plays so his audience will enjoy them, but he also needs to make sure the current monarchs will permit the plays to go on.

With the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 and the succession of James I (brokered by Sir Robert Cecil, the Secretary of State), Protestantism seemed well established in England, though there remained devoted, mostly closeted, Catholics (and indeed, Shakespeare may have been one). Jesuit priests were officially banned from the country, for example. And the Protestant King James was not universally loved, both because he was Scottish and because he was deemed a bit of a lightweight in the ruling department, perhaps more interested in the trappings of the office than the job itself. So in November of 1605, a group of English Catholics conspired to blow up the House of Lords (and the king) during the opening of Parliament, an event known as the Gunpowder Plot. Though the plot failed, the event was used to justify further restrictions on Catholics, and to this day the anniversary is commemorated as Bonfire Night.

So, then: a deeply divided nation, tenuous leadership, and a scandalous attempt to overthrow the government. And even in the aftermath, conspiracy theories that agents of the crown might have aided the plot, knowing they could exploit the event for political gain.

The Play, Then and Now

Cain originally wrote Equivocation in the aftermath of 9/11 and the ongoing Iraq War, and the themes of government coercion and propaganda, lies, torture, and conspiracy theories all resonated strongly. Exploiting a national tragedy to unite divisive factions, even if the story doesn't quite ring true, was a big theme of the play.

The parallels with 9/11 were quite clear at the time, with a big, violent event used to pull the nation and the world together, with threats of further terror used to justify curtailing travel, increasing surveillance, and eventually, invading foreign countries. One can easily equate the incidents and the responses to them--that was certainly palpable when I saw the play in 2009-10.

So in late 2019 I re-read the play to make sure it would still feel timely a decade later. And boy, was I surprised to find that it resonated in whole new ways! The play hadn't changed, but the social context for the audience was very different.

In pre-pandemic America, the notion that the government might be trying to rewrite (or even, pre-write) history was all too credible in the land of "alternative facts" and "fake news". An unqualified new head of state, pulling the levers of the Deep State, manipulating stories and perhaps even staging them--all terribly familiar in the Time of Trump. Cain's exploration of the role of Truth is even more fascinating that it had been a decade earlier, and honestly, the ambivalence of the answers are even more poignant in the current environment.

It was truly eye-opening to see how a play that had been so rich and timely when it first came out was in many ways even more on-point in a dramatically different world ten years down the road.

And that was all before January 6, 2021. I mean, how much more pertinent can we get? An actual insurrection attempting to overturn the results of a presidential election is right up there with putting gunpowder in a tunnel under the Parliament. And the spin doctors casting doubt on everything and everyone--motives, actions, words--everything is up for grabs.

All I can say is that I continue to be amazed at how prescient Cain was in his writing. But really what that means is that he wrote something really good: a piece of work so deep and complex and real that it provides a framework for gaining insights into future conditions that change over time.

Nerdy Shakespeare Notes

Aside from the deep issues addressed in Equivocation, there is a whole layer of "inside baseball" material for the Shakespeare enthusiast. On top of his background as a Jesuit, playwright Cain has strong credentials from his work with Shakespeare's plays: founder and artistic director of the Boston Shakespeare Company, he has also directed Shakespeare plays from coast to coast. So this play is full of playful nuggets that appeal to Shakespeare nerds.

In addition to the delightful digs about Shakespeare's acting ability and his penchant for killing off his characters (and particularly, kings), Cain intertwines history with his own story in at least three different ways. One obvious one is the character of his daughter, Judith. There is no evidence of them having anything like the relationship depicted here. A second is the family rivalry with the Cecils. Although scholars have long linked Robert Cecil's father, William, to the character Polonius in Hamlet, I believe Cain's linkage of the younger Cecil to the Scottish Play is entirely novel. In any case, the snarky digs and clever creations make Equivocation a treasure trove for a Shakespeare nerd.

Why Do We Do This?

I will admit that a few bits of the play seem less timely, or at least less urgent, than they did before. The debate over torture and its use and abuse as a tool of investigation is no longer front-page news, for example. But the bigger dynamics at play--government versus private interests, art as a tool for finding (or obscuring) truth, artistic integrity, fathers and daughters, entrenched dynasties--all still work delightfully.

And ultimately, this is what all literature, all stories, all art should be about--holding up a mirror to our current selves so that we can investigate who we are and what we think, feel, and believe. And that's not a one-time offer. Revisiting a book or a play or an artwork isn't just a way to reinforce something already known or have the same experience again. To paraphrase Heraclitus, you can't step into the same story twice. It's reopening the learning. It might reinforce, but it might replace or adjust or augment what came before. There is always value in revisiting stories.

My first viewing of Equivocation was a milestone for me--both the play and the production were eye-opening, and it's been a touchstone subsequently as I think about plays and the theater. Reading it, and hopefully seeing it again lets me both re-evaluate what I recall I got from it the first time and experience new reactions as well. Even if it's the same story, I'm not the same person, and this is not the same world, and there will be new thoughts to think.

Of course, not every piece of art deserves all this much attention. Part of the ongoing reimagining of theater today deals with pruning some works from the canon and introducing new and different ones. I'm all for new works and new voices, but it's important to remember why some of the classics are genuinely classic, and why some modern works are better than others. Some repay ongoing study with rich rewards, and I'm pleased to find that Equivocation seems to fall in that category.

"Birds of a Kind" at Stratford Festival

Stratford Festival production photo by David Hou

For the last show of this year's visit to Stratford, we caught another premiere, Birds of a Kind, by Wajdi Mouawad. This was the English-language premiere of the work, but more about that later.

The Play

I wasn't sure what to make of this play when we were deciding which shows to see. My wife and I both kept calling it "Birds of a Feather", which is how "La Cage Au Folles" was sometimes translated into English, and that is totally not what this play is about (though ironically, it was originally written and produced in French). The show itself had a fairly interesting and long journey into production, but it all seems to fit.

So what is it? This is a play about identity and belonging, about prejudices and karma. We start with the rather odd meeting of a couple of college students: she (Wahida) an Arab-American, but very much American, he (Eitan) an Israeli-American Jew who is somewhere on the autism spectrum. They manage to overcome the awkwardness of the meeting and fall in love.

Things start to fly apart at a family Passover seder where Wahida is to meet Eitan's family. It does not go well. We start seeing the layers of experience and prejudice that underlie the attitudes of Eitan's family members. His parents live in Germany, though the father grew up in Israel. The grandparents are estranged for (initially) unexplained reasons.

None of this description is going to do justice to the play. It's deep and complex, and the characters are rich and interesting, and the language bounces among English, Hebrew, German, and occasionally Arabic and bits of Yiddish. Projected supertitles appear during the non-English parts, and it works well. But the key is noting how various characters slip in and out of languages as they change topics and/or feel the need to exclude others from the conversation.

Eventually all the questions are answered fairly well. Some of it I found fairly predictable, but nonthing about it was trite or simple, and there are layers of the plot and story that we're still talking about almost a week later. This is a good and interesting play.

The Production

Super complex. I believe all the actors in the play had to speak in at least two, and often three, languages. That's fairly common in Canada, which famously has two official languages. But finding that many fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers might be tough. Indeed, talking with people around the Festival, we heard stories of some of the actors struggling a bit to learn such large parts in unfamiliar tongues. But to our ears, it turned out pretty convincingly, though at least one of the actors seemed to struggle a little with the Hebrew.

The acting was unsurprisingly strong, this being Stratford. Jakob Eiman as Eitan and Baraka Rahmani as Wahida were a strong core, and Sarah Orenstein as Norah and Alon Nashman as David were quite powerful, though in very different ways. David is loud and angry and opinionated; Norah is reticent and rather mournful. But both project great power on stage. This was a great use of the close quarters of the Studio Theatre, where every seat feels right on top of the stage.

But what really comes through is the stories. The refugees of various sorts adjusting and surviving in unfamiliar lands, the vows never to return to places that must be broken, the stories one tells oneself to get through a day, a year, a lifetime. And ultimately, the importance people put on belonging to a group, and how that relates to race, to genetics, to family, and to acceptance or the lack thereof.

Bottom Line

It's a really powerful story, told in a very challenging way. It's not always pleasant, and it's not about struggling to a happy-ever-after ending. But it feels very real, in a difficult and searching way. A lot gets crammed into a small space and condensed time, but that's the beauty of theater.

The show runs in Stratford through October 13. This one would justify a trip to Canada--it's really that good.

"The Front Page" at Stratford Festival

Stratford Festival ensemble production photo by Emily Cooper

This one was a tough call. The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur is a classic of the American stage. Some even think it's one of the two or three most exemplary American plays. So with the Stratford Festival staging Michael Healey's adaptation of this show, I really wanted to see it. Not to mention that it would be my chance to finally see a show in the Festival Theatre. On the other hand, during our visit it was opposite a new and interesting sounding new play (Mother's Daughter by Kate Hennig). So we split up and I went to see The Front Page while the rest of the family went to see Mother's Daughter.

Adding to the dilemma: the morning before these two competing matinees, we attended a panel discussion called "Tudormania", about the ongoing interest in the Tudor family of British royalty. A couple of academics and playwright Hennig made a good bridge between the previous night's Henry VIII and Mother's Daughter, which focuses on Queen Mary, the bridge between Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Countering that is that the previous night while having a nightcap at the pub and trying out our new Trivial Pursuit: The Shakespeare Edition at the bar, we met one of the company members who is in the cast of The Front Page. Moot point, I guess, since I already had a ticket, but definitely added incentive to go see my new friend's play, rather than the play of the writer I briefly met after the panel discussion.

Short answer, Stratford is just a cool place where you can meet interesting theater people.

The Play

So, anyway, the play I did see. It's set in the press room of the Chicago criminal court building, where a group of beat writers are awaiting the execution of a controversial convicted murderer. Writers Hecht and MacArthur were both reporters themselves, so it's kind of a fun insight into the lives of a group who were not highly regarded. It's also a view into the corrupt local government that Chicago was so famous for, particularly during Prohibition. This adaptation also adds some elements of gender (more female roles, with more lines and more agency) and plays up the racial elements more, too.

It's pretty amazing to hear elected officials from 1928 (in this case, the sheriff and the mayor) attacking the free press and accusing them of (literally) "fake news"--there truly is nothing new under the sun. In fact, a lot of the issues raised in the play could easily come out of today's headlines. We have elected officials monkeying with the timing of an execution (and indeed, with whether to execute at all) as leverage for an upcoming election, pandering to specific elements of the electorate. And we have various of the reporters reporting the story with varying levels of, shall we say, creativity.

One of the more pointed sections of the dialogue comes when Wilson (E.B. Smith), the only African American writer in the gang, discusses why he can't afford to write anything that isn't scrupulously sourced and verified, since there are elements in town who would love to shut down both him and his black-run paper for any excuse. Similarly, when the sheriff is handing out tickets to the execution, he gives a pair to each of the writers, but not to Wilson, who has to go a little extra to get his.

As the play progresses and the plot devolves, there are a number of little humorous twists in the plot, all adding up to a developing farce, as we finally get an escaped fugitive hiding out in the press room while one of the writers , Hildy (Ben Carlson), aided by his boss, Mrs. Burns (Maev Beaty), tries to secure an exclusive story without the others even knowing the fugitive is there. It's silly, yet somehow believable that a paper would go to such lengths to score a scoop.

For all the hijinks, there are a lot of meaningful bits and threads running through the play--it is much more than it appears on the surface. I'm not clear that it really qualifies as one of the truly great American plays, but it's not a mere screwball comedy, either.

The Production

By now it probably goes without my saying that the quality of the productions at Stratford is pretty consistently amazing. One of the things this show takes advantage of is the large repertory company. Although there are a good dozen meaty roles in the play, there are also a number of small parts. Rather than doubling or tripling the casting, Stratford can pull actors with big roles in other shows and assign them to small roles. For example, the minor but amusing role of the gangster Diamond Louis is played by Michael Blake, who on a different day will play the title role in Othello.

I should comment on the Festival Theatre, of course. I had taken the backstage tour of it last year, so I'd been inside (and backstage...), but this was my first time seeing a show. It's quite a large house, seating well over 2,000 people, though it wasn't close to sold out for this Wednesday matinee. But the design is wonderful. Built to mimic the original festival tent from the 1950s, the audience nearly surrounds a large, three-quarter thrust stage (i.e. there are people on three sides of the stage). That provides a much more visually rich, intimate experience, even in such a large space. It's a big stage, but it works really well for a show like this, and I know they use it for a lot of their big musicals now, too. As a theater, I have to say I like it better than the Avon Theatre, where we saw Little Shop the previous afternoon, which has a more traditional proscenium setup. And the Studio Theatre is a wonderful little black box with very steeply-raked seats on three sides, so it is also three-quarter thrust, just on a much smaller scale. Next year they will open a new theater, so there will be four--wow!

The combination of the theater and the terrific cast makes the more-than-three hour run time bearable (with two intervals), and director Graham Abbey keeps the pace lively without being too manic (until the farce comes to a head, of course) and the set design by Lorenzo Savoini is really evocative of a government office building of the period.

Bottom Line

I really enjoyed the show. For what it's worth, the rest of the family also enjoyed Mother's Daughter, so we now have a copy of the script so I can read it. As noted earlier, I don't know that this play is really up near the top of the American stage canon, but it holds up remarkably well for a modern audience, at least with the adaptations in this version.

And I'm pretty much coming to the conclusion that any show at the Stratford Festival is going to be worth seeing, between the production values and the choice of scripts. I heard remarkable things, for example, about last season's production of To Kill a Mockingbird, which apparently was able to plumb some of the history of American racism in ways that I've never seen a U.S. production achieve. I'm sorry I missed that one.

So it was fun to see this Canadian interpretation of a different American classic. It's scheduled to run through October 25th, in case you find yourself in Stratford.

"Henry VIII" at Stratford Festival

Stratford Festival production photo by Emily Cooper

Sometimes it feels like I've seen all the Shakespeare plays (though there are still about a handful I have neither seen nor read), but there are quite a few that I have seen rarely, or once. I have great memories of seeing Henry VIII at Ashland on my first trip there, about ten years ago. It was wonderfully done, and riveting in the outdoor Elizabethan theater. So given the choice of seeing it in Stratford this week or joining the rest of the family to see Billy Elliot, I chose Shakespeare.

The Play

My strong memory was that although King Henry VIII provides the context for the play, it was largely a play about Cardinal Wolsey and Katherine of Aragon. And that is really the case, at least for most of the play. The political machinations of Wolsey (Rob Beattie) do occupy much of the bulk of the play, and they largely come at the expense of Katherine (Irene Poole). I found the play engaging and the politics fascinating, though I gather my reaction is somewhat atypical. I was looking at a cute poster they sell in the Festival shop, depicting a flow chart for determining which Shakespeare play to watch, and Henry VIII is indicated for those who want to take a nap.

The play is talky--there isn't a lot of action. But in the intimacy of the Studio Theatre it's all right there in front of you, and even from my position in the front corner where I was often behind the actors, there was always a lot to see, and the actors mostly play the thrust stage almost as if they were in the round, so I didn't feel like I was missing much.

I will say toward the end, after the rather unremarkable transition from Katherine to Anne Boleyn and the subsequent birth of Elizabeth, the play gets a bit mawkish in foreshadowing the amazing impact she will have on the nation. With this play coming out relatively soon after the death of Elizabeth, it's understandable that there is some necessary hagiography, but it really kind of diminishes the impact of Henry as a historical figure if he's just the necessary forebear of the future Queen Elizabeth I.

The Production

This is a sort of play where the Stratford Festival really excels. Although there are not a lot of big roles, there are a lot of actors required, and the repertory company has plenty. Plus, they have a huge storehouse of period costumes, so even though the little theater doesn't accommodate a lot of set pieces, the costuming is lush and varied, and the lighting makes it all quite vivid.

King Henry himself (Jonathan Goad) is good, though hardly the major force one expects from other depictions of that ruler. This Henry seems quite willing to let others run rather amok and only sort it out when he must--much more passive than I would expect. On the other hand, if Henry is diminished by his lack of vigor, it gives more room for lesser characters to shine a bit. Tim Campbell's brief early stint as the Duke of Buckingham is one such, and Stephen Russell as the Lord Chamberlain is another.

But really, as usual, the cast and designs are just solid throughout. It's really a joy to see such vibrant, detailed renderings of Shakespeare's plays.

Bottom Line

Maybe I'm weird, but I really liked this play. And judging from the enthusiastic response from the full house, I'm not the only one.

I find this history play rather more approachable than most (perhaps because I'm not particularly steeped in British history myself), and quite enjoy the politics and such. I'm happy I got to see it again. The play runs through at least mid-October, and is well worth seeing if you're at the festival.

"Little Shop of Horrors" at Stratford Festival

Stratford Festival production photo by Chris Young

We're making a quick stop at the Stratford Festival this year on our way to New York. Only two days here, but two plays each day. First up is a musical for everybody: Little Shop of Horrors. I've seen this on stage once before, and also enjoyed the musical version of the movie, so really, what could be bad?

The Play

I think this story is pretty well known. On Skid Row in New York City there is a flower shop run by Mr. Mushnik. He has two employees, Seymour (an orphan who Mushnik raised from childhood) and Audrey, the battered girlfriend of a sadistic dentist. Business is bad on Skid Row, and so is life. Just as Mushnik is about to give up and shutter the business, Seymour puts one of the exotic plants he raises as a hobby in the window. Suddenly, everything changes, seemingly for the better, but of course there is a price to pay.

As musicals go, the songs are mostly pretty good (written by the team of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, who combined to write a lot of successful Disney movie scores). But this is also an adaptation of a Roger Corman "B" movie from 1960, so it's a bit dark. All in all, that blends pretty well. Some of it is a bit dated, but like most older movies about even older periods, you have to look at the intentions of the time as well as the sensibilities of the present. For the most part, it works well.

The Production

As with every production I've seen at Stratford over the last two years, this one is excellently done. Great acting, design, and direction. This is a particularly tricky show to produce, requiring as it does some major mechanical puppetry, but it seemed to work pretty flawlessly. The lead actors all have strong voices, and the trio of singers who act as sort of a Greek chorus were really very good.

I didn't especially love the set design, which puts Mushnik's flower shop in a circle in the middle of the stage, but I also realize that all the mechanics required to handle the exotic plants limit what one can do. The projections in the background were fun and interesting.

Bottom Line

There's not a lot to say about this show. It's fun, and the production is top quality. The crowd loved it, and the run has been extended well into November. This is the kind of thing I've come to expect at Stratford.