Ashland 2019: Five Plays in Three Days
Sep. 14th, 2019 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleMy mom and I went to Ashland to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival a couple of weekends ago, where we saw five plays in three days and ate a lot of delicious vegan food.
Between Two Knees
Between Two Knees is a new play written by the 1491s, a Native American comedy group. The play begins with the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 and ends with the occupation of and stand-off in Wounded Knee in 1973. This sounds very serious, because that covers a lot of really oppressive and depressing Native history, but don't be fooled: the show is biting and hilarious. Hilarious. Or, at least, my mom and I thought so. The Thursday afternoon audience was full of staid, older white people who didn't laugh very much, and the people in front of and next to us left at intermission. There's a joke as you return from intermission where one of the cast members, dressed as George Washington and mentioning the fact that Washington owned slaves and harmed Native Americans, says that the people who left at intermission are now at home listening to the Hamilton soundtrack. We went to a post-play discussion with the actor who does that bit where someone asked him about that line. He said it was in the script from day one, and that sometimes the house manager will tell him the number of people who left and he'll mention that specifically.
My absolute favorite comedic bit, which had my mom and I laughing so hard we almost fell out of our chairs, is in the first act. Isaiah and Irma, our throughline characters, decide to get married, so, the narrator tells us, they looked in the classifieds for an Indian wedding ceremony officiant. Then the one white actor in the show comes out on stage and does an entire appropriative white woman bit. She has attendants who set up Tibetan prayer flags behind her. They have Zen meditation cushions for Isaiah and Irma to kneel on. There's a dreamcatcher. Her speech about her path to this place in her life includes a line where she says, "my yoni blossomed," at which point she gives a pointed look at one of the attendants to remind him he's supposed to scatter flower petals now. I promise you it's funnier than it sounds. We noticed as we wandered around Ashland how much of that kind of thing there is in the town, which made it an even sharper critique.
For all that I laughed (and I laughed a lot), this show also made me cry. The structure is that we follow a couple: Isaiah, who was born just before the Wounded Knee Massacre, and Irma, a woman who refuses to yield to colonialism. They meet in a residential school headed by a sexually abusive priest, break out, and go around burning down other residential schools and rescuing Indian children. They get married and have a son they raise to be a warrior. He joins the military after Pearl Harbor, and dies in combat. The scene where they find out he's dead is absolutely devastating. It's followed, just before intermission so you're not left crying all through the break, by someone leaving a baby on their doorstep with a note that his name is Eddie and he's their grandson. Act II starts when Eddie's 18, follows him to Vietnam, and then covers the American Indian Movement (AIM) and their takeover of Wounded Knee.
One of my other favorite bits is in the ending scene where Irma, Isaiah, and their family are in a tense standoff with a trio of FBI agents. It's a standoff, so all the dialogue is yelled. They talk about how they can't mortgage the house because it's technically in trust to the US Government. One of the two FBI agents they've been yelling with yells, "I did not know that!" Then the third FBI agent, who has yet to have any lines, yells, "I am also in this scene!"
We were unsure about the post-play discussion, but my mom wanted to go, so we went and sat at the back in case we needed to escape from it. During the wait for the actor to get out of costume, the staff person introducing the talk told us that he's an HR generalist, "which means I keep everyone in healthcare," and then read out the recently announced slate of plays for next season. This was where you could tell that it was the very engaged audience members who'd come to the talk: there were cheers and applause for some of the upcoming plays.
James Ryen, who did the Q&A is one of the two non-native actors in the play. There's a joke early in the play where Larry, the character who does the opening narration, says something like, "There are so few Indian actors that we had to have a Chinese guy in it," and James, in the row of ensemble members behind him leans forward and says, "I'm Korean." The questions were not cringy! My mom said she wanted to hear more about theater as a way to drive change, but it was still interesting. Someone asked about the process of the play because the 1491s are a geographically dispersed collective. James said that when they started rehearsals, they only had the script for Act I. The guy from the festival chimed in and said, "In case you didn't get what he just said, we sold you a ticket for only half a play." James said, "As Larry said [at the end of Act I], that was basically three plays in one, so really you got three and a half." Near the end of it, an older white woman said, "This is more of a comment," and my mom and I braced ourselves. She then went on to say that he was very funny in the play and very funny doing this, and then, "You're not funny when we see you at the gym."
As You Like It
This was the only Shakespeare play we saw. I would have said I wasn't familiar with it at all, but it turns out that I did recognize a few quotes, most notably the "All the world's a stage" speech.
The play begins in the court of the new duke, where everyone wears dark colors and moves in very formalized ways; at one point we see a group in Victorian-ish clothes walking paths with lots of straight lines and sharp angles around the stage, the women with their hands together in an almost Handmaid's Tale sort of way.
One of the things that happens in the court is a wrestling match between Charles, the duke's champion and Orlando. Charles is played by James Ryen. In the Q&A we went to with him, someone said they'd seen it in May when there were a whole bunch of high school girls in the last two rows, who all cheered when he took his shirt off. It was funny to see the show after hearing that and notice that there was an appreciative murmur that went through an older crowd at the same moment.
We then switch to the forest of Arden. The director, Rosa Joshi, is interested in creating more roles for women in Shakespeare plays, so she genderswapped some of the male characters, including the duke in exile. She's played by Rachel Crowl, who was really interesting to watch. In Arden, everyone wears light colors, mostly white shirts/dresses with some tan pants/skirts, and they move fluidly around the stage. There's music there, too, with a number of the exiled ensemble playing instruments and singing. At one point, there are giant chimes, like the individual pieces of windchimes, hanging at the back of the stage, and people hit them to make them chime.
The stage set in the first half has a ladder going straight up from the floor to the top of the set. At the beginning of the second half, the ladder is pulled out at an angle, and you could hear a sigh of relief from the audience when someone finally climbed it.
The play is a lot of fun. It's one of the crossdressing comedies, where Rosalind, once exiled, disguises herself as Ganymede, a man, and gets the object of her affections, Orlando, to court Ganymede as if he were Rosalind so that she can reject him and therefore cure him of his love. It's ridiculous, but also funny on stage. One of the great things about seeing Shakespeare on a stage is that the actors use movement to emphasize the dick jokes.
There is one female character who gets genderswapped: Audrey becomes Aubrey. The program lists Aubrey as "a country person," so I think they're meant to be non-binary, but in the moment, I read them as male with an old-timey gay aesthetic. Aubrey is the love interest of Touchstone, the court jester who goes into exile with Rosalind and Celia. Touchstone wears a dark blue checked suit. Aubrey has flowy hair, tan pants, and a flowy white shirt. There is one bit where Touchstone has a joke about how marrying badly means you can leave the marriage, but otherwise it's a really lovely, gentle relationship. There's a bit where Touchstone is lounging against the wide steps that make up part of the stage and Aubrey lies down with their head on Touchstone's shins. There's another bit where Aubrey is sitting on a crate wearing Touchstone's jacket, and Touchstone sits behind them cuddling them. I was surprised by the strength of my reaction to it. I seek out so much queer fiction that you'd think I'd be used to it by now, but there was something about seeing such an obviously visibly queer relationship that was so gentle and tender in something as mainstream as a Shakespeare play that was incredibly moving.
Mother Road
Mother Road is one of the main reasons we went to Ashland. My parents traveled through the southwest, and along the border, a couple of times this year. My mom got very interested in literature of the border and wanted to go see Mother Road. The program says that Octavio Solis, the playwright, is the Festival's most produced living author. I'd never heard of him, which could be because art by people of color is still very difficult to find or because my knowledge of theater largely stems from things I read in school.
The plot of the play is that William Joad, the last of the Joads from The Grapes of Wrath still on the family farm in Oklahoma, goes looking for any surviving Joads. His lawyer finds MartÃn "Tino" Jodes, who explains that there was a paperwork mixup at the border that led to the last name change. Tom Joad, he says, went to Mexico, and Tino's mother, who was one of his descendants, came back over the border to the US.
As you might guess, William is looking for other Joad descendents because he's dying, and he needs someone in the family to leave the farm to. Tino says he'll go with him, but he doesn't do planes, so they'll take his truck. The staging for this is gorgeous. There are truck pieces - a bench seat with steering wheel, a pickup bed - that get wheeled on and off the stage depending on what part of the truck they need for the scene. They use the screen on the back wall to project images of the terrain they're passing through or the signs they pass. When the other characters aren't talking, the ensemble acts as a chorus, singing or chanting things like, "dale gas," and the names of roadside motel chains. One member of the ensemble says, "Mile marker," at faster or slower intervals while they're driving.
Things are contentious, of course, largely because William is a racist old white guy and Tino is a younger Mexican-American, but also because Tino has inherited Tom Joad's anger. I'll note here that I have never read The Grapes of Wrath and everything I know about the Joads comes from the play. Along the way, of course, they start to get to know each other. They tell each other their stories, which we see in flashback with the members of the chorus playing various parts.
One of the people they pick up along the way is Mo, who is Tino's "cuz." Tino tells William that she's going to be his foreman and turn the farm organic. Mo is queer and butch - there's a fun and funny bit where she flirts with a police officer - and she tells William that her family threw her out when she came out, and Tino took her in, and that's how she became his cuz.
This was probably the best of the plays we saw. It was intense and absorbing and it had a really interesting use of the chorus and the stage. The performances were good, and the costuming was excellent. You could hear most of the audience crying at the end.
How to Catch Creation
How to Catch Creation has six interconnected characters, four in the present day and two in the past, plus one character who only briefly appears in the past. All of the characters are Black. The theater in the round stage is split into four quadrants, with a middle space that sometimes divides them, sometimes becomes part of one of them, and sometimes raises up to become its own space. Three of the quadrants remain stable through most of the show: Griffin's kitchen table, Stokes and Riley's living room, and Gina and Natalie's space. The fourth becomes a variety of places: Tami's office, a bench at the park, Tami's living room, the hallway of a retirement home.
We start with Griffin, who spent twenty-five years in jail for a crime he didn't commit, telling Tami, his best friend, "I think I want to have a kid." Then we switch to Stokes and Riley's living room, where Stokes, hauling in a box of books that comprises nearly the entirety of G.K. Marche's work that he found on the street, receives his fourteenth art school rejection. Riley goes to Tami's office to ask why Stokes was rejected. From there, the story spirals out. Riley and Tami have an affair, and Tami starts painting again for the first time in years. Tami asks Riley about her creative pursuits, and Riley starts making beats again. Stokes takes to obsessively reading G.K. Marche; he meets Griffin on a park bench while reading, and decides he wants to be a writer. We also see Gina, aka G.K. Marche, and her partner Natalie in the past.
Griffin frets about calling a lawyer's office to try to start the adoption process, and worries about having to interact with the judicial system that imprisoned him. There's one hysterical bit where after he's been rehearsing and writing down what he wants to say, he blurts it all out on the phone, only to be met with hold music. Riley gets pregnant by Stokes during her affair with Tami. Stokes and Griffin become friends, and Stokes asks Griffin to go with him to visit G.K. Marche who is in a retirement home nearby.
Mixed in with all of this, we get the past: Gina focusing on her writing while Natalie keeps house. Gina writing while Natalie's friend from work Thom drives her to a place that wants to buy some of the clothing Natalie makes. We get one brief scene of Natalie and Thom having sex, and then Natalie tells Gina she's pregnant. Gina leaves, then comes back, then leaves again, this time taking her typewriter with her. Natalie turns the space into a sewing room and nursery. If you haven't figured it out yet, the other connection is that Natalie is Griffin's mother.
The play ends, like it begins, with Tami and Griffin at Griffin's kitchen table. Tami draws pictures for him of a baby. "I think I want to have a kid," she says.
I enjoyed this play while I was watching it. The stagecraft is cool, the acting was good - Christiana Clark as Tami was particularly good, with excellent comedic timing - and the theme of creation was interesting. I have to say, though, that it hasn't stuck with me. I'm not sure if that's because it was the evening play on the day I was most tired, or if it's something about the play. I can remember it, but it's more of an intellectual remembering than an emotional one.
This play had one of the most interesting audiences. Like everything else we saw, the audience was very white, but this one skewed younger, and there were a lot of visibly queer women in the audience, and, I assume, even more who, like me, don't have a look that's immediately identifiable as queer.
Indecent
Indecent opens with the screen above the stage reading, "Lemml introduces the company." Lemml (the character) is the stage manager, and he introduces us to the other characters: an older man and woman, who will be playing all of the older character parts, the middle man and woman, who will be playing all of the settled character parts, and "our ingenues," a young man and woman, who will, obviously, be playing the ingenue parts. He also introduces us to the band, three woman on accordion, violin, and clarinet. Lemml says that he's been telling this story every night, and for some reason he can never remember how it ends.
We then follow the story of Sholem Asch's Yiddish play God of Vengeance, beginning in 1906 in Warsaw. He gives it to his partner to read, and she tells him it's wonderful. He takes it to a group of other Jewish men to read, and this is where he meets Lemml. Lemml is visiting from the country and one of the other men brings him along. There's some really cool staging where they read a bit of the play aloud, and then the lights dim and the screen says, "A blink in time," and then they move around and go to a later bit of the play. The play takes place in a brothel, involves a lesbian romance, and ends with the brothel owner lifting up a Torah to throw it. As the group of men read it, they drop out as they're offended by it, and Lemml keeps picking up other parts until it ends with him and Sholem doing all the reading. Lemml is entranced, and becomes, to begin with, the assistant stage manager for the show.
At one point in the early days of the show, they go to Germany to perform. Everyone on the stage keeps speaking English, and the screen above the stage tells us what language they're meant to be speaking. When Lemml speaks Yiddish, his English is fluent. When he speaks German, it isn't. It's such a great use of language and the screen, and they use it again and again in the course of the play.
There's a whole sequence where we see the very end of the very last scene of the play over and over again with the screen telling us the year and the place. This was such a great bit! It was fun to see the same thing staged slightly differently over and over again, and it was funny.
They then take the play to America. One of the pieces of scenery is a rolling ladder with a platform that becomes various items throughout the course of the play. For this part, the cast crowds onto it and sways side to side to show the movement of the ship as they sail. They then line up single file across the stage, and the screen reads, "An impossibly long line."
The plot of God of Vengeance is that a brothel owner tries to become respectable by commissioning a Torah scroll and marrying his daughter to a respectable man. The daughter, Rifkele, falls in love with Manke, one of the women in the brothel, and their pivotal moment is in what the characters all refer to as "the rain scene."
In New York, the actresses playing Rifkele and Manke are also a couple. The play is translated into English, and this is where the problems begin. The English translation has cut the rain scene, leaving, the characters say, only sex, without the purity of the love scene. Moreover, the actress playing Rifkele can't manage the English - there's a hilarious bit where she tries to learn to pronounce "hair" correctly - and is replaced, which also causes a break in her relationship with the actress playing Manke. Then we get a sermon by a Rabbi denouncing the play, and saying that he was the one who made a complaint about the play. This speech is fascinating, because it's a respectability politics speech. His primary objection is that we shouldn't be showing Jews in disreputable circumstances such as a brothel.
In 1923, the English translation opens on Broadway, where it has the first same-sex kiss on Broadway. We watch the backstage of the performance while a police officer wanders around keeping an eye on things. As the play ends, the cops arrest everyone on obscenity charges. There is an absolutely gorgeous scene as they're released on bail where the actress originally playing Rifkele arrives to bring the actress playing Manke home. The Manke actress says she has bedbugs from the jail and asks, "Do you still want me in your bed?" The Rifkele actress paints her a picture of the two of them disrobing outside the door and going into the bath together. They curl together on a bench on stage as if they are nestled together in a bathtub. The actress playing Manke speaks in Yiddish, and the titles on the screen translate it for us: "At home, only Yiddish."
Sholem Asch is, at this point, living in the suburbs, consumed with concern regarding the state of Jews in Europe after a visit there, and does not come to the trial to defend the play. Lemml goes to see him after the trial and express how unhappy he is that Sholem didn't come. Sholem tells him that he never read the English translation because he doesn't read English very well. Lemml tells him that he was the one who showed Lemml what the theater would be, and that he's going back to Europe where the play was well received.
We join the play again in a Polish ghetto under Nazi occupation. They have proscribed things they have to do six days a week, and on the seventh they gather to provide their own entertainment by choice. Lemml tells the audience that tonight they will be showing Act II of God of Vengeance here in this attic. He reviews the plot of Act I, which they performed in someone's living room last week, and says that they hope to still be here next week to perform Act III. He also says that if they have any food they can give, it would be appreciated. Backstage, he tells the actors that they will not be wetting the shawls for the rain scene to avoid anyone getting chilled. The stage has almost all the same actors and props as the rest of the play, and yet this was incredibly effective at showing us the dismal nature of the situation.
Then, after talking around it for the whole play, they do the rain scene, in English so we can understand it. It is genuinely beautiful and moving. Manke has enticed Rifkele outside at night. There is so much joy in them, and in their enjoyment of the rain and each other. At one point, they kneel together with one shawl over the two of them, like a tallit in a wedding ceremony, and speak of Rifkele becoming Manke's wife.
Then there is shouting from offstage and flashlights shining into the attic of the performance. The performers move downstage into a single file row. There's light coming from a door to the right. The screen above them says, "An impossibly long line." I thought, "Oh, God," and then my mother whispered, "Oh, God." I cried, and I thought, "We really don't have stories that aren't about the Holocaust." Lemml says that if he closes his eyes, he can see Rifkele and Manke escaping. The rest of the cast is in dark colors; Rifkele and Manke are still in their white nightgowns from the rain scene. They step out of the line, help each other off the stage, and scurry up the aisle and out a door. I can't remember if someone says it or if it appears on the screen: "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." The cast still on the stage drop handfuls of ashes from their sleeves before they exit. I thought about Lemml saying he can't remember how it ends, and genuinely thought it was going to be a circular play that ends here.
We switch, instead, to Sholem Asch's house in the suburbs in 1952. He is an old man now, and the younger man who played him earlier in the play has come to his house to talk to him about the play, which he wants to put on. The man says that his parents are Yiddish speakers who came to America, but they wanted him to be American so never taught it to him. My mother leaned over and said, "That's my story." The man then says he went to Yale. My mother leaned over and said, "That's not my story." Sholem says, "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a Jew to get into Yale." My mom later said that that was an interesting time marker; one of her stepbrothers, who is Jewish, was born around 1952, and he did go to Yale.
In the course of their conversation, Sholem says that he too has lost audience members, "six million of them." He's on his way out of the country; he's been summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee and he and his wife are leaving to go live with one of their children in London.
At the very end of the play, we see the rain scene again. This time it's in un-subtitled Yiddish, and with water falling to the stage so it can be performed in a the rain. It's again wonderful and joyful.
I really loved the structure of Indecent, with the way it worked around and around the play within the play and kept coming back to it in pieces and talking about it. It was also more fun than I've made it seem here, partly because there are several songs, some of which are just joyful and some of which are jokes ("In America, everyone looks like a goy"). Looking back on the weekend, I think this was actually my favorite of all five plays. That is at least partly partisanship; I'm a Jewish lesbian, and the play had Jewish lesbians who got to have lovely, romantic scenes together.
The OSF Experience
Seeing five plays in three days gave us a solid chance to experience the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as a whole. Some interesting things:
I was surprised by how much singing and movement, if not outright dancing, there was in all of the pieces we saw. I think this is an effect of having most of my theater knowledge come from things I read in school and musicals as two separate categories; it's also possible that the Festival specifically gravitates toward plays with those elements.
Every play we saw had the vast majority of the props and sets moved on and off the stage by the actors, excluding the ones that had machinery (like a piece of stage that raises up and down). I found this absolutely fascinating. I don't know if this is a trend in theater around how theater works, or if it's so they don't have to hire as many stage hands. As an audience member, I thought it was really interesting to see as a way of making the theater magic visible, and also to show - or at least give the illusion - that theater can be done with a small number of people. Most of the plays we saw had very few actors.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is something of a repertory company. They aren't the traditional repertory company where everyone is in all the plays, but many of the actors are in multiple shows. They also have multiple shows happening in the same theaters at different times with different setups. As You Like It, Mother Road, and Indecent were all in the Angus Bowmer, which is a fairly traditional stage in front of the audience theater, but all three shows had differences in the setup of levels on the stage and entrances to the wings. Between Two Knees and How to Catch Creation were both in the Thomas, which is a black box theater. Between Two Knees was set up as a thrust stage; How to Catch Creation was done as theater in the round, and it was so different that we had no concept of where we'd been sitting for the first play when we went to the second. They must have some amazing scheduling software and/or people.
The Festival is really committed to accessibility in a way that's noticeable in person and even more so when you read their accessibility information, which is in the playbill, on the website, and on brochures I saw around town. Every theater has wheelchair accessible seating and seating you can get to without stairs. They have the ability to set up screens for subtitles and a few sign-interpreted performances. They have audio descriptions and audio and Braille playbills.
They're also very committed to diversity and inclusion. You may have noticed that most of the plays we saw focused on a specific ethnic group. Nearly everyone who has a bio in the playbill lists their pronouns. Festival maps all note not only men's and women's restrooms, but also all-gender restrooms. My mom mentioned that they've been doing colorblind casting before that was even a thing. I think where they fall down on this is that tickets are expensive (we could go to so many plays in part because my mom hadn't been in many years, so they kept sending her "come back and get discounted tickets" emails), and although I did read something in some of their materials about making the festival accessible to people who can't afford more expensive tickets, the audiences we saw plays with were largely people who have money, mostly older white people. The overwhelming whiteness of the audience was also interesting to me. It makes sense that a festival in southern Oregon would have a mostly white audience. I live in a very white area, so I was surprised by how surprised I was that the audience was so white, and then I realized that my usual travel to go to the theater experiences are trips to San Francisco, which is much less white.
Between Two Knees was the first play we saw. At the beginning, when they were doing the no recording type announcements, they did them in the style of the play. One of them was something like, "This is where we do the land acknowledgement and you tune it out, so we've provided you with information instead." The ushers handed out a half-sheet of paper as we came in that has a map of Oregon showing the Native American tribes who used to live in the various areas of the state. Because that was the first play we saw, I figured the land acknowledgment was specific to that play; however, it turned out that they do a land acknowledgment at every play. It's something like, "We acknowledge that we are on Shasta and Tacoma land, and we honor the traditional caretakers of this land."
I took a picture of the sign that hangs in the bathroom stalls (after a performance, not during intermission where I would have been holding up the line):
If you can't read it, the top says, "Powerful theatre can move, challenge, distress, delight... and sometimes doesn't end when you leave. We recognize that challenging content can disturb as well as enlighten. Please use these resources to empower yourself." That's followed by local and national resources. There are also content warnings on the walls before you enter the theater for things like presence of guns and the sound of a gunshot. I thought this was a great way to be inclusive and helpful.
Between Two Knees
Between Two Knees is a new play written by the 1491s, a Native American comedy group. The play begins with the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 and ends with the occupation of and stand-off in Wounded Knee in 1973. This sounds very serious, because that covers a lot of really oppressive and depressing Native history, but don't be fooled: the show is biting and hilarious. Hilarious. Or, at least, my mom and I thought so. The Thursday afternoon audience was full of staid, older white people who didn't laugh very much, and the people in front of and next to us left at intermission. There's a joke as you return from intermission where one of the cast members, dressed as George Washington and mentioning the fact that Washington owned slaves and harmed Native Americans, says that the people who left at intermission are now at home listening to the Hamilton soundtrack. We went to a post-play discussion with the actor who does that bit where someone asked him about that line. He said it was in the script from day one, and that sometimes the house manager will tell him the number of people who left and he'll mention that specifically.
My absolute favorite comedic bit, which had my mom and I laughing so hard we almost fell out of our chairs, is in the first act. Isaiah and Irma, our throughline characters, decide to get married, so, the narrator tells us, they looked in the classifieds for an Indian wedding ceremony officiant. Then the one white actor in the show comes out on stage and does an entire appropriative white woman bit. She has attendants who set up Tibetan prayer flags behind her. They have Zen meditation cushions for Isaiah and Irma to kneel on. There's a dreamcatcher. Her speech about her path to this place in her life includes a line where she says, "my yoni blossomed," at which point she gives a pointed look at one of the attendants to remind him he's supposed to scatter flower petals now. I promise you it's funnier than it sounds. We noticed as we wandered around Ashland how much of that kind of thing there is in the town, which made it an even sharper critique.
For all that I laughed (and I laughed a lot), this show also made me cry. The structure is that we follow a couple: Isaiah, who was born just before the Wounded Knee Massacre, and Irma, a woman who refuses to yield to colonialism. They meet in a residential school headed by a sexually abusive priest, break out, and go around burning down other residential schools and rescuing Indian children. They get married and have a son they raise to be a warrior. He joins the military after Pearl Harbor, and dies in combat. The scene where they find out he's dead is absolutely devastating. It's followed, just before intermission so you're not left crying all through the break, by someone leaving a baby on their doorstep with a note that his name is Eddie and he's their grandson. Act II starts when Eddie's 18, follows him to Vietnam, and then covers the American Indian Movement (AIM) and their takeover of Wounded Knee.
One of my other favorite bits is in the ending scene where Irma, Isaiah, and their family are in a tense standoff with a trio of FBI agents. It's a standoff, so all the dialogue is yelled. They talk about how they can't mortgage the house because it's technically in trust to the US Government. One of the two FBI agents they've been yelling with yells, "I did not know that!" Then the third FBI agent, who has yet to have any lines, yells, "I am also in this scene!"
We were unsure about the post-play discussion, but my mom wanted to go, so we went and sat at the back in case we needed to escape from it. During the wait for the actor to get out of costume, the staff person introducing the talk told us that he's an HR generalist, "which means I keep everyone in healthcare," and then read out the recently announced slate of plays for next season. This was where you could tell that it was the very engaged audience members who'd come to the talk: there were cheers and applause for some of the upcoming plays.
James Ryen, who did the Q&A is one of the two non-native actors in the play. There's a joke early in the play where Larry, the character who does the opening narration, says something like, "There are so few Indian actors that we had to have a Chinese guy in it," and James, in the row of ensemble members behind him leans forward and says, "I'm Korean." The questions were not cringy! My mom said she wanted to hear more about theater as a way to drive change, but it was still interesting. Someone asked about the process of the play because the 1491s are a geographically dispersed collective. James said that when they started rehearsals, they only had the script for Act I. The guy from the festival chimed in and said, "In case you didn't get what he just said, we sold you a ticket for only half a play." James said, "As Larry said [at the end of Act I], that was basically three plays in one, so really you got three and a half." Near the end of it, an older white woman said, "This is more of a comment," and my mom and I braced ourselves. She then went on to say that he was very funny in the play and very funny doing this, and then, "You're not funny when we see you at the gym."
As You Like It
This was the only Shakespeare play we saw. I would have said I wasn't familiar with it at all, but it turns out that I did recognize a few quotes, most notably the "All the world's a stage" speech.
The play begins in the court of the new duke, where everyone wears dark colors and moves in very formalized ways; at one point we see a group in Victorian-ish clothes walking paths with lots of straight lines and sharp angles around the stage, the women with their hands together in an almost Handmaid's Tale sort of way.
One of the things that happens in the court is a wrestling match between Charles, the duke's champion and Orlando. Charles is played by James Ryen. In the Q&A we went to with him, someone said they'd seen it in May when there were a whole bunch of high school girls in the last two rows, who all cheered when he took his shirt off. It was funny to see the show after hearing that and notice that there was an appreciative murmur that went through an older crowd at the same moment.
We then switch to the forest of Arden. The director, Rosa Joshi, is interested in creating more roles for women in Shakespeare plays, so she genderswapped some of the male characters, including the duke in exile. She's played by Rachel Crowl, who was really interesting to watch. In Arden, everyone wears light colors, mostly white shirts/dresses with some tan pants/skirts, and they move fluidly around the stage. There's music there, too, with a number of the exiled ensemble playing instruments and singing. At one point, there are giant chimes, like the individual pieces of windchimes, hanging at the back of the stage, and people hit them to make them chime.
The stage set in the first half has a ladder going straight up from the floor to the top of the set. At the beginning of the second half, the ladder is pulled out at an angle, and you could hear a sigh of relief from the audience when someone finally climbed it.
The play is a lot of fun. It's one of the crossdressing comedies, where Rosalind, once exiled, disguises herself as Ganymede, a man, and gets the object of her affections, Orlando, to court Ganymede as if he were Rosalind so that she can reject him and therefore cure him of his love. It's ridiculous, but also funny on stage. One of the great things about seeing Shakespeare on a stage is that the actors use movement to emphasize the dick jokes.
There is one female character who gets genderswapped: Audrey becomes Aubrey. The program lists Aubrey as "a country person," so I think they're meant to be non-binary, but in the moment, I read them as male with an old-timey gay aesthetic. Aubrey is the love interest of Touchstone, the court jester who goes into exile with Rosalind and Celia. Touchstone wears a dark blue checked suit. Aubrey has flowy hair, tan pants, and a flowy white shirt. There is one bit where Touchstone has a joke about how marrying badly means you can leave the marriage, but otherwise it's a really lovely, gentle relationship. There's a bit where Touchstone is lounging against the wide steps that make up part of the stage and Aubrey lies down with their head on Touchstone's shins. There's another bit where Aubrey is sitting on a crate wearing Touchstone's jacket, and Touchstone sits behind them cuddling them. I was surprised by the strength of my reaction to it. I seek out so much queer fiction that you'd think I'd be used to it by now, but there was something about seeing such an obviously visibly queer relationship that was so gentle and tender in something as mainstream as a Shakespeare play that was incredibly moving.
Mother Road
Mother Road is one of the main reasons we went to Ashland. My parents traveled through the southwest, and along the border, a couple of times this year. My mom got very interested in literature of the border and wanted to go see Mother Road. The program says that Octavio Solis, the playwright, is the Festival's most produced living author. I'd never heard of him, which could be because art by people of color is still very difficult to find or because my knowledge of theater largely stems from things I read in school.
The plot of the play is that William Joad, the last of the Joads from The Grapes of Wrath still on the family farm in Oklahoma, goes looking for any surviving Joads. His lawyer finds MartÃn "Tino" Jodes, who explains that there was a paperwork mixup at the border that led to the last name change. Tom Joad, he says, went to Mexico, and Tino's mother, who was one of his descendants, came back over the border to the US.
As you might guess, William is looking for other Joad descendents because he's dying, and he needs someone in the family to leave the farm to. Tino says he'll go with him, but he doesn't do planes, so they'll take his truck. The staging for this is gorgeous. There are truck pieces - a bench seat with steering wheel, a pickup bed - that get wheeled on and off the stage depending on what part of the truck they need for the scene. They use the screen on the back wall to project images of the terrain they're passing through or the signs they pass. When the other characters aren't talking, the ensemble acts as a chorus, singing or chanting things like, "dale gas," and the names of roadside motel chains. One member of the ensemble says, "Mile marker," at faster or slower intervals while they're driving.
Things are contentious, of course, largely because William is a racist old white guy and Tino is a younger Mexican-American, but also because Tino has inherited Tom Joad's anger. I'll note here that I have never read The Grapes of Wrath and everything I know about the Joads comes from the play. Along the way, of course, they start to get to know each other. They tell each other their stories, which we see in flashback with the members of the chorus playing various parts.
One of the people they pick up along the way is Mo, who is Tino's "cuz." Tino tells William that she's going to be his foreman and turn the farm organic. Mo is queer and butch - there's a fun and funny bit where she flirts with a police officer - and she tells William that her family threw her out when she came out, and Tino took her in, and that's how she became his cuz.
This was probably the best of the plays we saw. It was intense and absorbing and it had a really interesting use of the chorus and the stage. The performances were good, and the costuming was excellent. You could hear most of the audience crying at the end.
How to Catch Creation
How to Catch Creation has six interconnected characters, four in the present day and two in the past, plus one character who only briefly appears in the past. All of the characters are Black. The theater in the round stage is split into four quadrants, with a middle space that sometimes divides them, sometimes becomes part of one of them, and sometimes raises up to become its own space. Three of the quadrants remain stable through most of the show: Griffin's kitchen table, Stokes and Riley's living room, and Gina and Natalie's space. The fourth becomes a variety of places: Tami's office, a bench at the park, Tami's living room, the hallway of a retirement home.
We start with Griffin, who spent twenty-five years in jail for a crime he didn't commit, telling Tami, his best friend, "I think I want to have a kid." Then we switch to Stokes and Riley's living room, where Stokes, hauling in a box of books that comprises nearly the entirety of G.K. Marche's work that he found on the street, receives his fourteenth art school rejection. Riley goes to Tami's office to ask why Stokes was rejected. From there, the story spirals out. Riley and Tami have an affair, and Tami starts painting again for the first time in years. Tami asks Riley about her creative pursuits, and Riley starts making beats again. Stokes takes to obsessively reading G.K. Marche; he meets Griffin on a park bench while reading, and decides he wants to be a writer. We also see Gina, aka G.K. Marche, and her partner Natalie in the past.
Griffin frets about calling a lawyer's office to try to start the adoption process, and worries about having to interact with the judicial system that imprisoned him. There's one hysterical bit where after he's been rehearsing and writing down what he wants to say, he blurts it all out on the phone, only to be met with hold music. Riley gets pregnant by Stokes during her affair with Tami. Stokes and Griffin become friends, and Stokes asks Griffin to go with him to visit G.K. Marche who is in a retirement home nearby.
Mixed in with all of this, we get the past: Gina focusing on her writing while Natalie keeps house. Gina writing while Natalie's friend from work Thom drives her to a place that wants to buy some of the clothing Natalie makes. We get one brief scene of Natalie and Thom having sex, and then Natalie tells Gina she's pregnant. Gina leaves, then comes back, then leaves again, this time taking her typewriter with her. Natalie turns the space into a sewing room and nursery. If you haven't figured it out yet, the other connection is that Natalie is Griffin's mother.
The play ends, like it begins, with Tami and Griffin at Griffin's kitchen table. Tami draws pictures for him of a baby. "I think I want to have a kid," she says.
I enjoyed this play while I was watching it. The stagecraft is cool, the acting was good - Christiana Clark as Tami was particularly good, with excellent comedic timing - and the theme of creation was interesting. I have to say, though, that it hasn't stuck with me. I'm not sure if that's because it was the evening play on the day I was most tired, or if it's something about the play. I can remember it, but it's more of an intellectual remembering than an emotional one.
This play had one of the most interesting audiences. Like everything else we saw, the audience was very white, but this one skewed younger, and there were a lot of visibly queer women in the audience, and, I assume, even more who, like me, don't have a look that's immediately identifiable as queer.
Indecent
Indecent opens with the screen above the stage reading, "Lemml introduces the company." Lemml (the character) is the stage manager, and he introduces us to the other characters: an older man and woman, who will be playing all of the older character parts, the middle man and woman, who will be playing all of the settled character parts, and "our ingenues," a young man and woman, who will, obviously, be playing the ingenue parts. He also introduces us to the band, three woman on accordion, violin, and clarinet. Lemml says that he's been telling this story every night, and for some reason he can never remember how it ends.
We then follow the story of Sholem Asch's Yiddish play God of Vengeance, beginning in 1906 in Warsaw. He gives it to his partner to read, and she tells him it's wonderful. He takes it to a group of other Jewish men to read, and this is where he meets Lemml. Lemml is visiting from the country and one of the other men brings him along. There's some really cool staging where they read a bit of the play aloud, and then the lights dim and the screen says, "A blink in time," and then they move around and go to a later bit of the play. The play takes place in a brothel, involves a lesbian romance, and ends with the brothel owner lifting up a Torah to throw it. As the group of men read it, they drop out as they're offended by it, and Lemml keeps picking up other parts until it ends with him and Sholem doing all the reading. Lemml is entranced, and becomes, to begin with, the assistant stage manager for the show.
At one point in the early days of the show, they go to Germany to perform. Everyone on the stage keeps speaking English, and the screen above the stage tells us what language they're meant to be speaking. When Lemml speaks Yiddish, his English is fluent. When he speaks German, it isn't. It's such a great use of language and the screen, and they use it again and again in the course of the play.
There's a whole sequence where we see the very end of the very last scene of the play over and over again with the screen telling us the year and the place. This was such a great bit! It was fun to see the same thing staged slightly differently over and over again, and it was funny.
They then take the play to America. One of the pieces of scenery is a rolling ladder with a platform that becomes various items throughout the course of the play. For this part, the cast crowds onto it and sways side to side to show the movement of the ship as they sail. They then line up single file across the stage, and the screen reads, "An impossibly long line."
The plot of God of Vengeance is that a brothel owner tries to become respectable by commissioning a Torah scroll and marrying his daughter to a respectable man. The daughter, Rifkele, falls in love with Manke, one of the women in the brothel, and their pivotal moment is in what the characters all refer to as "the rain scene."
In New York, the actresses playing Rifkele and Manke are also a couple. The play is translated into English, and this is where the problems begin. The English translation has cut the rain scene, leaving, the characters say, only sex, without the purity of the love scene. Moreover, the actress playing Rifkele can't manage the English - there's a hilarious bit where she tries to learn to pronounce "hair" correctly - and is replaced, which also causes a break in her relationship with the actress playing Manke. Then we get a sermon by a Rabbi denouncing the play, and saying that he was the one who made a complaint about the play. This speech is fascinating, because it's a respectability politics speech. His primary objection is that we shouldn't be showing Jews in disreputable circumstances such as a brothel.
In 1923, the English translation opens on Broadway, where it has the first same-sex kiss on Broadway. We watch the backstage of the performance while a police officer wanders around keeping an eye on things. As the play ends, the cops arrest everyone on obscenity charges. There is an absolutely gorgeous scene as they're released on bail where the actress originally playing Rifkele arrives to bring the actress playing Manke home. The Manke actress says she has bedbugs from the jail and asks, "Do you still want me in your bed?" The Rifkele actress paints her a picture of the two of them disrobing outside the door and going into the bath together. They curl together on a bench on stage as if they are nestled together in a bathtub. The actress playing Manke speaks in Yiddish, and the titles on the screen translate it for us: "At home, only Yiddish."
Sholem Asch is, at this point, living in the suburbs, consumed with concern regarding the state of Jews in Europe after a visit there, and does not come to the trial to defend the play. Lemml goes to see him after the trial and express how unhappy he is that Sholem didn't come. Sholem tells him that he never read the English translation because he doesn't read English very well. Lemml tells him that he was the one who showed Lemml what the theater would be, and that he's going back to Europe where the play was well received.
We join the play again in a Polish ghetto under Nazi occupation. They have proscribed things they have to do six days a week, and on the seventh they gather to provide their own entertainment by choice. Lemml tells the audience that tonight they will be showing Act II of God of Vengeance here in this attic. He reviews the plot of Act I, which they performed in someone's living room last week, and says that they hope to still be here next week to perform Act III. He also says that if they have any food they can give, it would be appreciated. Backstage, he tells the actors that they will not be wetting the shawls for the rain scene to avoid anyone getting chilled. The stage has almost all the same actors and props as the rest of the play, and yet this was incredibly effective at showing us the dismal nature of the situation.
Then, after talking around it for the whole play, they do the rain scene, in English so we can understand it. It is genuinely beautiful and moving. Manke has enticed Rifkele outside at night. There is so much joy in them, and in their enjoyment of the rain and each other. At one point, they kneel together with one shawl over the two of them, like a tallit in a wedding ceremony, and speak of Rifkele becoming Manke's wife.
Then there is shouting from offstage and flashlights shining into the attic of the performance. The performers move downstage into a single file row. There's light coming from a door to the right. The screen above them says, "An impossibly long line." I thought, "Oh, God," and then my mother whispered, "Oh, God." I cried, and I thought, "We really don't have stories that aren't about the Holocaust." Lemml says that if he closes his eyes, he can see Rifkele and Manke escaping. The rest of the cast is in dark colors; Rifkele and Manke are still in their white nightgowns from the rain scene. They step out of the line, help each other off the stage, and scurry up the aisle and out a door. I can't remember if someone says it or if it appears on the screen: "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." The cast still on the stage drop handfuls of ashes from their sleeves before they exit. I thought about Lemml saying he can't remember how it ends, and genuinely thought it was going to be a circular play that ends here.
We switch, instead, to Sholem Asch's house in the suburbs in 1952. He is an old man now, and the younger man who played him earlier in the play has come to his house to talk to him about the play, which he wants to put on. The man says that his parents are Yiddish speakers who came to America, but they wanted him to be American so never taught it to him. My mother leaned over and said, "That's my story." The man then says he went to Yale. My mother leaned over and said, "That's not my story." Sholem says, "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a Jew to get into Yale." My mom later said that that was an interesting time marker; one of her stepbrothers, who is Jewish, was born around 1952, and he did go to Yale.
In the course of their conversation, Sholem says that he too has lost audience members, "six million of them." He's on his way out of the country; he's been summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee and he and his wife are leaving to go live with one of their children in London.
At the very end of the play, we see the rain scene again. This time it's in un-subtitled Yiddish, and with water falling to the stage so it can be performed in a the rain. It's again wonderful and joyful.
I really loved the structure of Indecent, with the way it worked around and around the play within the play and kept coming back to it in pieces and talking about it. It was also more fun than I've made it seem here, partly because there are several songs, some of which are just joyful and some of which are jokes ("In America, everyone looks like a goy"). Looking back on the weekend, I think this was actually my favorite of all five plays. That is at least partly partisanship; I'm a Jewish lesbian, and the play had Jewish lesbians who got to have lovely, romantic scenes together.
The OSF Experience
Seeing five plays in three days gave us a solid chance to experience the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as a whole. Some interesting things:
I was surprised by how much singing and movement, if not outright dancing, there was in all of the pieces we saw. I think this is an effect of having most of my theater knowledge come from things I read in school and musicals as two separate categories; it's also possible that the Festival specifically gravitates toward plays with those elements.
Every play we saw had the vast majority of the props and sets moved on and off the stage by the actors, excluding the ones that had machinery (like a piece of stage that raises up and down). I found this absolutely fascinating. I don't know if this is a trend in theater around how theater works, or if it's so they don't have to hire as many stage hands. As an audience member, I thought it was really interesting to see as a way of making the theater magic visible, and also to show - or at least give the illusion - that theater can be done with a small number of people. Most of the plays we saw had very few actors.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is something of a repertory company. They aren't the traditional repertory company where everyone is in all the plays, but many of the actors are in multiple shows. They also have multiple shows happening in the same theaters at different times with different setups. As You Like It, Mother Road, and Indecent were all in the Angus Bowmer, which is a fairly traditional stage in front of the audience theater, but all three shows had differences in the setup of levels on the stage and entrances to the wings. Between Two Knees and How to Catch Creation were both in the Thomas, which is a black box theater. Between Two Knees was set up as a thrust stage; How to Catch Creation was done as theater in the round, and it was so different that we had no concept of where we'd been sitting for the first play when we went to the second. They must have some amazing scheduling software and/or people.
The Festival is really committed to accessibility in a way that's noticeable in person and even more so when you read their accessibility information, which is in the playbill, on the website, and on brochures I saw around town. Every theater has wheelchair accessible seating and seating you can get to without stairs. They have the ability to set up screens for subtitles and a few sign-interpreted performances. They have audio descriptions and audio and Braille playbills.
They're also very committed to diversity and inclusion. You may have noticed that most of the plays we saw focused on a specific ethnic group. Nearly everyone who has a bio in the playbill lists their pronouns. Festival maps all note not only men's and women's restrooms, but also all-gender restrooms. My mom mentioned that they've been doing colorblind casting before that was even a thing. I think where they fall down on this is that tickets are expensive (we could go to so many plays in part because my mom hadn't been in many years, so they kept sending her "come back and get discounted tickets" emails), and although I did read something in some of their materials about making the festival accessible to people who can't afford more expensive tickets, the audiences we saw plays with were largely people who have money, mostly older white people. The overwhelming whiteness of the audience was also interesting to me. It makes sense that a festival in southern Oregon would have a mostly white audience. I live in a very white area, so I was surprised by how surprised I was that the audience was so white, and then I realized that my usual travel to go to the theater experiences are trips to San Francisco, which is much less white.
Between Two Knees was the first play we saw. At the beginning, when they were doing the no recording type announcements, they did them in the style of the play. One of them was something like, "This is where we do the land acknowledgement and you tune it out, so we've provided you with information instead." The ushers handed out a half-sheet of paper as we came in that has a map of Oregon showing the Native American tribes who used to live in the various areas of the state. Because that was the first play we saw, I figured the land acknowledgment was specific to that play; however, it turned out that they do a land acknowledgment at every play. It's something like, "We acknowledge that we are on Shasta and Tacoma land, and we honor the traditional caretakers of this land."
I took a picture of the sign that hangs in the bathroom stalls (after a performance, not during intermission where I would have been holding up the line):
If you can't read it, the top says, "Powerful theatre can move, challenge, distress, delight... and sometimes doesn't end when you leave. We recognize that challenging content can disturb as well as enlighten. Please use these resources to empower yourself." That's followed by local and national resources. There are also content warnings on the walls before you enter the theater for things like presence of guns and the sound of a gunshot. I thought this was a great way to be inclusive and helpful.