Last New Year’s Eve, I spent the day flying across the
country and arrived to an empty house. I had another semester left on my MFA
and was gearing up to return to rehearsal for two different productions. I was
happy to be pursuing theatre, a thing I love to an irrational degree, however,
there was some sorrow at the high cost of that pursuit including spending most
of three years living on the opposite coast from my husband. This New Year’s
Eve, my work life is every bit as full. I am about to return to rehearsal on Cressida, begin rehearsals for Feral, and am continuing to write Helen. I am every bit as stressed and
scared and excited and humbled and anxious about this set of tasks as I was at
the prospect of finishing my MFA. However, tonight I am at home in Portland,
there is posole on the stove, and when I crawl into bed my husband will join me
and my cat will insist that a purring pillow is way better than a regular
pillow. And so it goes.
As a lover of lists and theater, I have decided to make a
list of favorite productions or theater going experiences a New Year’s Eve
tradition. Last year I wrote on ten, this year I realized that I had already
written more than anyone was going to read in regard to five; so I switched my
top ten list to a five favorites list. Isn’t alliteration the best? Happy New
Years! And to everyone who reads this, thanks.
1) Party People
by UNIVERSES
directed by Liesel Tommy
at Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Party People was
the BEST: moving, daring, inspiring, smart, sexy, serious, full of sound and
fury signifying plenty. The plot revolves around two young artists putting on a
gallery exhibition about the Black Panthers and Young Lords. Veterans of those
movements are brought together for the first time in decades, and wounds that
perhaps never closed are stretched open. A cursory plot synopsis cannot do
justice to the theatrical experience of Party
People, which is as much a dance and spoken word piece as a multi-media
narrative. Party People raises potent
issues of the recent past as well as the present--what became of the civil
rights dream, what did the rise and fall of militant freedom movements signal,
and what of the counterrevolution that the CIA and the drug war ushered in?
Party People also
engaged my inner theatre theorist. Shakespeare mostly owns the history play
genre, with ten plays named for English monarchs. Though Shakespeare populates
his plays with common folk, rebellion leaders, whores, and soothsayers, the
locus of his historical vision is the king. Defined as a genre originating in
Early Modern England and flourishing briefly in the 1590s, of which
Shakespeare’s Henriad is the exemplar, the history play is heavily sympathetic
to the “great man” theory of history. It should come as no surprise that
America has never really done the history play as Shakespeare did. * Theatre
based on interview projects from Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight, Los Angeles, to
Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie
Project, to Erik Jensen and
Jessica Blank’s The Exonerated build
upon a vision of history grounded in social history and our post-modern
preoccupation with contradiction, the problematic nature of memory,
multiplicity of sources, and fragmentary nature of texts. Party People seemed to offer a new trajectory for the history play,
a transcendent one whose like I hope to see again.
2) Body of an
American
by Dan O’Brien
directed by Bill Rauch
at Portland Center Stage
My other favorite play of the year allows me to continue to
geek out over the subject of history play. Body
of an American recounts the relationship of Dan, a young writer, and Paul,
an older photographer and war reporter. Dan is based on the playwright, while
Paul is based on journalist Paul Watson, who snapped the infamous
Pulitzer-Prize winning photo of a dead American soldier being dragged through
the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia during the 1994 U.S. military operation. Two
actors share the roles of Dan and Paul, as well as a host of other people from
an Eskimo artist to a Somali cab driver to NPR’s Fresh Air host, Terry Gross. The program notes explained that
through the doubling and sharing of roles, the play hoped to deconstruct the traditional
one-man show and reveal something of the experience of post-traumatic stress
disorder. The success of the script dividing characters in this way depended in
large part upon the vocal virtuosity of the actors, who shifted roles swiftly
without the visual aid of costume changes. Luckily, the actors were extraordinary. The show felt like a
radical return to theater’s storytelling roots. Here was a show not afraid of
narration, not afraid to speak directly to the audience. Though there were many
scenes in which the actors relate to each other as separate distinct
characters, the passages in which they seem to jointly soliloquize drew me into
the story, as if bundling up before the proverbial campfires of an older time.
That the one-man show is to theater what memoir is to
literature may not be an original observation, but it is a useful one,
especially for this show. The Body of an
American is really Dan’s memoir as his sense of himself and the world,
expanded through his complicated relationship to the complicated Paul. The play
flashes back and forth between a miniature and a monumental scale; the day to
day and the geopolitical. What does it mean to bear witness? What is the price?
How do we cope with our own mortality, with loss, with love, with family? The Body of an American is simply a
remarkable play, and I hope that it will enjoy another production soon.
3) Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella
(M/M/C)
adapted and directed by Bill Rauch & Tracy Young
at Oregon Shakespeare Festival
My top three choices of 2012 all confirm my card-carrying
nerdom: a transcendent spoken word-dance-multimedia performance piece on the
systematic dissolution of the Black and Puerto Rican freedom movements, a
deconstruction of the one-man show that contemplates the savagery of
geopolitics and the psyche, and a parallel-fusion production of three classic tales
of ambition. Yeah, I like the heavy stuff.
The show was simply one of the most impressive spectacles I
have ever witnessed. The black monumental set shared the epic beauty and simple
grandeur of Adolphe Appia’s designs for Wagner’s operas. Tradition was on
display throughout this radical production: the Grecian robes and giant masks
deployed for Medea, the Highlander hair and kilts for Macbeth, and the happy pageantry of
pastels for Cinderella. Roger and
Hammerstein’s score took turns with the raucous energy of the music written for
Medea, a musical for which there is
no surviving score. This gesture toward classical cultural assumptions of what
each play looked like served to keep the stories familiar and separate. For the
first two thirds of the production, most of the joy of watching derived from
marveling at how amazingly on point every actor had to be to keep all the
wheels spinning. One of the greatest kernels of wisdom a professor ever shared
with me was this: some plays rely on the illusion that acting is easy, others
rely on our understanding that acting is hard. Medea at one point says “I am in
agony”; no one can think that the emotional heights an actor must scale to
deliver a line like that convincingly are easy (and Miriam Laube was phenomenal
in M/M/C as Medea). In the final
third of the production, the actors appeared in character but out of ‘costume,’
wearing all blacks, wigs removed, beards shed.
The stripping down of spectacle in these final movements
hinted at the truth in all three plays’ observations of ambition, how it drives
us, and its potential price to our humanity. I found the appearance of the
actor after this change especially striking in the case of Lady Macbeth and
Cinderella. Chris Moore played Lady Macbeth. His original costume made him look
like a living copy of the iconic John Singer Sargent painting, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. (For OSF
regulars, the costume may have hearkened back to another male performer’s turn
as Lady M, that of Greg Linington in Equivocation.)
When Chris came out, sans wig, to do the “out, out, damn spot” scene wearing
jeans and a t-shirt, it was not anything so simple as “surprise, a guy.” I
would wager most of the audience, even those who did not read their program,
already knew that. The costuming had not so much hidden that Chris was a man as
emphasized that Lady Macbeth is a woman. Asking the audience to accept or
remember (since men originally played all the parts in Shakespeare) a male Lady
Macbeth at this late stage in the play was a brave choice, made all the braver
by the tenderness of this woman trying to wash away the imagined blood of an
old man. The other difference that really hit me is seemingly much more
trivial. Laura Griffith wore a blonde wig as Cinderella--a really good wig,
which totally deceived this patron. The actress was actually a brunette, or at
least she was when I saw the show. I am still puzzling over why this unmasking
seemed so poignant; my guess is that it has something to do with the reminder
that theater is a business and just like television and film there is a
hyper-policing of type, particularly type as it relates to “classic” characters
like Cinderella.
I would have happily seen Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella three times over.
4) Philaster, or Love
Lies a Bleeding
by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
part of the Actor’s Renaissance Season
at the American Shakespeare Center
While we are on the subject of the body, how about a very
visibly pregnant actress playing a boy, who is actually a girl disguised as a
boy, a fact hidden from the audience until the fifth act? Bet only a couple
hundred of you have seen that before, and I bet nearly all of you saw the same
production I did. Miriam Donald Burrows gave one of the most winning
performances I have ever seen as Bellario or Eufrasia, the courtier’s daughter
who disguises herself as a page boy to serve the heroic (and ridiculous)
Philaster. The play is an adult fairytale, and the ASC navigated its strange
tonal shifts, poetic demands, and serious silliness with pizzazz.
5) A Midsummer
Night’s Dream
by William Shakespeare
directed by Penny Metropolis
at Portland Center Stage
Kate Power’s direction of the American Shakespeare Center’s
touring troupe production of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream appeared on last year’s list. I doubted that I would see a
version of Midsummer Night’s Dream anywhere
close to its parallel for years. And then I saw this one. Despite the common
text, comparing Kate and Penny’s plays would be a bit of an apples to oranges
comparison, since their contexts and styles were so radically different. I
treasure my memories of both. I have probably seen at least one production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream every year for
the past ten years. In high school, I acted in Midsummer; in college, I stage managed Midsummer; and in grad school, I directed one high
school production and co-directed one camp production with elementary and
middle-schoolers. I could easily be sick of Midsummer
by now, but I’m not and I doubt I ever will be.
So what made this one such a delight? Well, take twelve
stellar actors, add a fanciful set and the most amazing costumes – EVER – and
you would have this production. The costumes worked both as costumes (doing
things like signifying status, grouping characters, and hinting at
personality), and as fashion. I wanted to snap out my cell phone and text
pictures of the clothes to one of my most fashionable friends throughout the
production. Oberon’s cape looked like a top of gorgeous swamp grasses.
Titania’s gown was a waterfall of bunched fabric that Rodin would have happily
sculpted. The fairies had plants sprouting from their hair. Puck had a sculpted
mane and the changeling boy an Afro, both serving as bases for fanciful
plumage. Hippolyta wore the best dresses. Hermia wore capris! (Actresses in
Shakespeare productions always wearing dresses or skirts is one seemingly
innocuous theatrical convention that gets under my feminist skin.) When the
lovers including Theseus and Hippolyta appeared on their wedding day, their
tuxes and wedding gowns matched without being identical and the flower corsages
in their hair recalled the fanciful ‘fros of the fairies.
I had a few bones to pick with this production. They changed
Bottom’s profession from a weaver to a gardener, which strikes me as far less
poetic an occupation, at least in a play of interwoven plots. They had a
talented child actor onstage to frame the play as the dream of the changeling
child who belongs as much to Hippolyta as Titania. (The play followed the
common doubling maneuver of mechanicals as fairies, Hippolyta as Titania, and
Theseus as Oberon.) The elitist Shakespeare scholar in me wanted to scream that
the child had no business on that stage! Beyond the lack of textual support for
the Indian boy being onstage, I reflexively dislike the easy sentimentality of
adding a cute child to anything in order to make it more whimsical, meaningful,
romantic, etc. (Later, while listening to Emma Smith’s excellent podcast Approaching Shakespeare, I learned that
Adrian Noble’s 1996 film version of Midsummer
used the pajama clad boy in much the same way, so I gather my feelings on
children onstage/onscreen are a minority opinion. Sigh.) I have to admit,
though, that the boy was really good and his weird hair-do made his presence
more tolerable.
*I sadly did not get to see Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way, also at OSF and
consequently do not know where Schenkkan’s treatment of LBJ lies in terms of
historical theory sympathies.
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