FF Friday: Set the Stage, by Karis Walsh

[rachelmanija]

Set the Stage is an adorable fluffy romance between Emilie, an aspiring actress who just got cast at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and Arden, a gardener working at the Ashland park. It's full of very accurate details about theatre (and seems very accurate about OSF in particular, at least as far as the layout of their theatres is concerned) and plants, and has a hilarious running joke about how every business in town attempts to get in on the theatre tourist business by slapping on random Shakespeare references. (Shockingly, no one ever makes a joke about "the Garden of Arden.")

In fact, this novel distinctly resembles a sort of FF Zoe Chant, minus the shifters. But it has lots of loving details of a setting, cozy togetherness, good food, shared activities, instant attraction, constant sexual awareness/tension between the characters, and a general air of comfort reading. It also has a lot of quirky details and problems that one encounters in real life but rarely in fiction, like the genuinely sweet boss at Emilie's crappy fast-food job, a geocaching date, and the horrible dilemma of what to say to your crush when you go see the play she's in and she's just not very good in the role.

It's a very charming book and I am now seriously considering a visit to the OSF. I was last there in high school and it was very formative. They have a super fun-looking play up this year about Shakespeare's buddies trying to reconstruct Hamlet from memory after his death. (i.e., the First Folio.)

Comments

[em_h]

I should send them my chapbook, "Hamlet As Remembered by Thirteen People in a Basement."

[rachelmanija]

Is that for real?

[em_h]

Oh yes. Back in 2009, as one of the weird salon/fringe events at my literary festival, I invited people to the basement of a bookstore without telling them what would happen. When they were assembled, they were challenged to reconstruct Hamlet from memory, with very limited prompts available from A, wearing black gloves and playing an expressionless Prompt Book. I recorded the results as best I could (parts of it moved very fast, and towards the end we were getting pressure to wrap up), and later assembled them into a chapbook. The main thing we discovered is that my friend Maria's partner Hugh is going to preserve Western civilization single-handed after the apocalypse ...

Who goes there?

[rachelmanija]

That sounds fascinating!

Do you know the play Mr. Burns, where people recreate a Simpsons episode after the apocalypse?

[kore]

That is AWESOME.

[em_h]

I just dug out "Hamlet as Remembered …"

A fed the group the first line ("Who's there?"), and it was all downhill from that point:
Who wants to know?
He
Bernardo.
Something the King?
Long live the King.

There's an exchange of badinage. It's something to midnight. Someone's going to head off.

Prompt Book? Can you help us?
and shortly
The Polacks on the ice come later,
and
Enter Mel Gibson. Enter Kenneth Branagh. Enter Mel Gibson.
and
So does Ophelia go crazy because of the hooker stuff?

It was not long before I recorded myself calling out, "Hamlet down the memory hole, people, and it's all your fault!"

[rachelmanija]

Hahaha.

[rymenhild]

a sort of FF Zoe Chant, minus the shifters.

Sold.

[rachelmanija]

Enjoy!

The part that was really hilarious to me was how exactly the crush-at-first-sight played like every Zoe book ever, minus the "Mine!" from an inner beast.

[kore]

Oh, that sounds lovely.

[oracne]

I read a Karis Walsh novel a while back - I think it involved mounted police?