Ashland Shakespeare Festival

My friend Halle and I just got back from a trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where we saw Love's Labors Lost (nearly canceled on account of wildfire smoke; featured a giant inflatable pig which inexplicably just sat onstage, completely ignored, for the entire play) and The Book of Will (a modern play about Shakespeare's friends creating the First Folio three years after his death) on the outdoor Elizabethan stage, Snow in Midsummer (a modern ghost/revenge drama loosely based on the Chinese classic play The Injustice to Dou Yi That Touched Heaven and Earth) on the large indoor Bowmer stage, and a very intimate Henry V in the teeny Thomas theatre, where you are never more than ten feet away from the stage. My favorites were Henry V and Snow in Midsummer; Halle's were Henry V and The Book of Will. But everything was of a quality well worth taking a trip for.

I was impressed by how much OSF was putting its money where its mouth was in terms of commitment to diversity and fostering new voices. Out of eleven plays at a festival mostly known for Shakespeare, six were by modern playwrights (if you include an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility), three were world premieres and one was a US premiere, four were by women, and the entire company - actors, writers, directors, and probably backstage as well - was multiracial and not in a token way. I'm sure none of the modern plays that don't have ties to classic western works sell as many tickets as the Shakespeare plays, so there's some real risks being taken.

We also ate some really great food and got driven around by an exceedingly charming taxi driver named Marco of A-Town Cab, who I am going to go rave about on Yelp right now. We're definitely going back next year - they're doing Macbeth and Paula Vogel's Indecent, about the true story of how a 1912 Yiddish play was translated into English, performed on Broadway including Broadway's first onstage lesbian kiss, and got the entire cast and also the producer arrested for indecency. Luckily, the producer was also a lawyer....

I could do longer write-ups of the plays I saw if anyone's interested. I'm a bit torn though as what was most interesting about Snow in Midsummer and to a lesser degree Henry V involved staging that's best encountered unspoiled, and the former also had lots of surprising plot twists. On the other hand, probably most of you will never get a chance to see these productions anyway...

Love's Labors Lost: OSF Ashland

Love's Labors Lost is a very odd play, rarely performed because the language is so difficult. I think it probably reads better than it performs unless the cast and direction is extremely good. In reading, I like it for its sense of a kind of delicate bubble of time, all sunlit foolery and innocent youth, and how the ending shows exactly how evanescent the whole thing was. It also has a very beautiful last line.

This production went in more for broad comedy that takes a sudden shift to seriousness in the last ten minutes. Performed on the outdoor Elizabethan theatre, the set featured a lot of party balloons including a giant inflatable pig on the top balcony, and a rock/pop band onstage. Due to smoky conditions, we ended up waiting in the audience for half an hour while whoever was in charge of safety decided whether or not to cancel the show. Finally someone stuck her head out the top window and gave us a thumbs-up to rapturous cheers. The audience and performers were obviously really excited to have the show go on at all (I learned later that multiple performances had been canceled or moved to a local high school due to wildfire smoke, and this was the first time they'd performed on the stage in weeks) and all attempts at getting audience participation went extremely well.

The comedy was really funny, and I liked the songs. There was a lot of fourth wall-breaking, and some anachronistic added joke lines. The king and his buddies, and the princess and her ladies, start the show in all-white outfits (monastic for the men, cute sailor dresses with color accents for the women), and the men take their vows of chastity by planting a colored paint handprint over their hearts. As the play goes on, the colored paint gets used more and more - they paint emblems on their outfits, attack each other with paint, etc - as they increasingly lose sight of their vows, and they end up with rainbow outfits. Those then switch to red for Act II, and to black for the finale.

The king was the same actor who played Henry in Henry V, which we'd seen that afternoon! Getting to see actors in different roles over the same day or couple days is one of my favorite things about OSF, or any repertory theatre. He was charming, but Berowne, Sir Adrian Whatsisface, and his page stole the show. (Our waitress at the pre-show dinner was an understudy for one of the princess's ladies!)

It was generally a very nicely-done and enjoyable production of a difficult play, though it wasn't at all clear who some of the supporting characters were (Holofernes and those guys - I think they're academics?) and IMO, if there is a giant inflatable pig in Act I, it should descend or ascend or be used in some way by the end. Overall it was a lot of fun, but my least favorite of the four plays I saw. I'd like to see a production that was more delicate and less broad - more like my experience of reading the play.

Edited to add pig.

A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax, by Dorothy Gilman

Just a heads-up that Palm for Mrs. Pollifax (Mrs. Pollifax Series Book 4) is currently on Kindle for $2.99. It's # 4 so I haven't read it yet, but I bet it's good and I suspect you could start there if you like.