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Articles Tagged ‘Oregon Shakespeare Festival’

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Coriolanus and moving on

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

I have considerable personal history with Coriolanus. I first read the play as an undergrad English major, while I was in love with the man who later supplied half of Seth’s DNA; some years later I studied it in grad school and came to love its complexity; still later, I taught it to students who found it boring till I persuaded them it was about war vs. peace, democracy vs. oligarchy, and pride vs. compassion. So watching the play in Ashland, I was actually watching three plays: the one I read in 1969 when I was a long-haired romantic college girl in love with an arrogant professor twice my age; the play Shakespeare wrote, based on Roman sources, soon after he finished writing Antony and Cleopatra, around 1609; and the play a specific director created for an audience in Ashland, Oregon in 2008–the title role so brilliantly acted that I have to count it among the top five live performances I have ever seen in my life. [read on]

Posted in Oregon, What does it mean? | 8 Comments »

Theatre, the hostel, and Ashland

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

Saw two plays Saturday: The Clay Cart, a beautifully-staged Indian drama–intensely colored saris, open stage, inventive ways to use the ensemble and pillows as walls, cloth on dowels held by three people as ox-carts, descending lamps to create interiors–translated in a way that uses comedy to keep western audiences awake. It is a pretty little melodrama, competently performed with a multiracial cast including some excellent singers and dancers. It’s fluff, basically, but a pleasure to look at. But Saturday night was really powerful: a play about a Marine returning home from Iraq without one of her legs: Welcome Home Jenny Sutter. She ends up in an encampment of homeless eccentrics who share her sense of displacement and respect her grief: for her leg, for her life, for her place in the universe. The character who befriends her is a wild woman named Lou–really the great role in the play, a role Jeannine Haas HAS to play one day, a role I would have loved to play–who has given up her addictions to gambling, alcohol, cigarettes, men, and just about everything that ever gave her pleasure, on the advice of a “therapist” who is really a homeless former hairdresser, and is in (celibate) love with a man who is physically crippled by child abuse and has become a truly saintly preacher. It sounds like the playwright threw in everything but the sink (they don’t have sinks in a tent-town), but the play works because the acting is brilliant, the dialogue is sparse but true to the ear, and the story says to me that the playwright–a woman named Myatt I never heard of before–knows what she’s talking about. [read on]

Posted in Oregon | 3 Comments »

The Life Not Taken

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

Streaked into Ashland under a bright sky in Jeremy’s cobalt blue Miata, top down, icy wind in my hair, sun splashing on snow-patched mountains and flowering trees. It was, as Seth says, “one of those moments you know you will remember for the rest of your life.” Jeremy is dashing. Think Peter O’Toole with a compact muscular body, a tidy white beard, sharp cheekbones and flashing vividly blue eyes. When we left Portland it was raining. We met hail and sleet and later clear sunny skies, we got acquainted and talked about books and art and music and Bob, and forty miles north of Ashland we put the top down. Ashland is a perfect little artsy hippie town, Victorian clapboard houses with clumsily-painted murals of happy hippie scenes on the garages, homemade sculptures in the yards among the daffodils, pretty little stained glass decorations hanging in windows. The town centers on the three theatres; the weather is below freezing at night but up to the mid-fifties (F) in the daytime. The production of August Wilson’s Fences was just right: well-acted and tenderly staged. God, what a powerful script. And I have been thinking since I got here of the life not taken: it’s as though I can see a ghost-image of myself in that other life, the one I dreamed of, visualized, and hoped for but didn’t get. [read on]

Posted in Oregon | 11 Comments »

Off to Ashland

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Tomorrow I’m off to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This is thanks to my old friend Bob, who taught math at Smith while I was teaching theatre there. Bob now lives in San Francisco, and he and his partner Jeremy, who lives in Canada and who I haven’t met yet, are regular patrons of the Shakespeare Festival down in Ashland.  Jeremy will pick me up tomorrow on his way down, and Bob will come up, and we’ll see four plays in three days. They’ll be at a hotel, and I’ll be at a lovely hostel in the dorm. This should be great fun, and it is charged with meaning beyond the obvious. In the 70s, when I was dreaming of making it as a professional actress, my most passionate and persistent fantasy was that I would get a job in the company of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival–a real, regular acting job with benefits and everything. In my fantasy, I could take Seth with me, and eventually I would regain custody of Christopher, and everything would fall into place. If I could just get to Ashland and get a job in that company. It was one of those visions I believed in, my own magical thinking as a twenty-something, right on into my thirties. Every year I schemed and planned and saved in order to get to the auditions, which were held in New York City, and I never got there. It was one of the early proofs to me that visualization is not enough. Now I will really get there. Coincidentally, I read and re-read Shakespeare’s  Coriolanus at the same time (in my early twenties), and in the great sweeps of my romantic imagination I endowed Seth’s father with qualities of a modern-day Coriolan because of his combination of personal achievement (given considerable privilege) and his arrogant dislike of “common people.” Absurd to elevate a merely irascible man to the level of a mythic hero, but that’s the kind of girl I was. And probably still am, viewing the events and people around me as myths and archetypes. I’ve never seen the play performed anywhere but in my mind’s eye, so I’m really curious to see how they’ve managed to stage it for an “intimate” space. If I get a chance, I’ll send blog reports while I’m there.

Posted in Oregon | 2 Comments »