Forsooth! And Zounds! And Other Shakespearean Oaths!
Hello there! Remember me?
You didn’t hear from me last week, because I was off in Ashland, Oregon. I saw five plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, ate fine food with family and friends, stayed up late talking with my college roommate, ate more food, learned how to make chain maille jewelry, ate more food, bought the first quilt patterns I’ve bought in years, ate more food… Well, you get the idea! Here are the five plays we saw, in a nutshell:
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream - I’ve seen about a jillion productions of this. Last winter, I saw the Best Production Ever of this (with acrobats and circus-like tricks), after which I said I never needed to see another production. Alas, OSF’s version didn’t change my mind - it was … serviceable. But there wasn’t anything special, anything over-the-top, anything magical. Although Puck was played by a woman. Why haven’t I seen more versions of this play with Puck performed by a woman?
- King Lear - This play was performed in a black-box theater, and I very much enjoyed the creative staging (including the two bodies left onstage throughout almost all of the second intermission). In this version, Lear killed the Fool, which made sense in a sad, eerie way - I’ve never seen that interpretation before, but it worked. The Fool was *brilliant* (and I’m not much for Shakespearean fools…) And the overall production sort of snuck up on me - I found myself getting really choked up when Lear dragged Cordelia on at the end. (Some audience members were openly weeping…)
- My Fair Lady - Yep. You caught me. This one wasn’t Shakespeare. This was a fun production, with a lot of the staging done “in the open” (actors sat on stage, when they weren’t in their scenes; warm-ups were conducted in front of the audience, etc.) I really liked Eliza’s voice and her general presence. The production didn’t quite make the final transition work - they didn’t make me believe that Higgins’s eyes were truly opened by love - but I’m not at all convinced that there’s anything for the actors to work with. Oh - an astonishing number of things went wrong in this performance - from parasols not staying open to books falling apart to thrown pillows falling off-stage to a thrown engagement ring bouncing off the one possible upright at that part of the stage and winging back to the thrower… The actors recovered from each mini-disaster well.
- Taming of the Shrew - I hate this play. I hate the misogyny and the capitulation of Kate (along with the “Kate has to be married so that Bianca can marry” storyline.) I thought I’d seen a version that worked, when Kate and Petrucio made a side bet for the last scene - she pretended to be tamed, and they shared the money he reaped from his friends. This production was ***BRILLIANT***. (I never need to see another Shrew again in my life.) The setting (in a campy beach town, like Ocean City) was fun. But the main power came from the interpretation - Kate and Petrucio lusted after each other at first sight, and that lust grew to true love as they realized they could trust each other. There were blatant overtones of a fun, kinky, consensual relationship, where each gave as good as s/he took, and the final scene worked in ways I’d never imagined it could. (It didn’t hurt that the entire production was cut down to 2 hours.)
- Cymbeline - I’d only seen this once before, and that production hadn’t been fully successful. This was moreso, but it’s still a problematic play - too long, to wordy, too filled with bizarre coincidence that the characters never seem to notice. The actors were good - Imogen and Posthumous made believable lovers. The production made shrewd use of a deaf actor who played King Cymbeline - other people’s love of the king was shown directly by how well they signed to him. There were some good elements, but the play itself is … meh.
So, now I’m back home. I’ve gone to the grocery store, plowed through my inbox, and now I’m ready to settle back into writing. Perfect Pitch, Chapter 6, here I come!
And you? What’s new with you from the past week?
Mirrored from Mindy Klasky, Author.