Our American Friend, Jeff Burdick, continues his take on this year's Ashland Festival. This week he looks at the three very different plays he saw in the Bowmer Theater.
Bowmer
theater is a conventional proscenium stage with a
thrust. It seats 600 and no one is more than 55 feet from the stage according
to their web page. It looks a bit more to me, but they probably are right. Very comfortable, by the way. Beautiful
facilities, comfortable seating, perfect acoustics.
Secret
Love in Peach Blossom Land is touted as the most
popular play in the Chinese speaking world. It wasn’t the most popular play in
my world. It is a collision of two plays (quite literally). Two theater troops
have booked the Bowmer theater for the same night (the play was translated for
Ashland, so many references, some of them sly, some of them I probably missed since
I’m not a native, are local), and Bill Rauch, the beloved Artistic Director of
the festival, is blamed for the confusion. Great laughter came after that – he
isn’t known for goofing.
One play is a slight but touching drama:
two young people fall in love before the civil war in China has destroyed the
country. The young man’s family flees to Taiwan. The young woman vanishes. He goes on to live a life:
marriage for 40 years, children, etc. But he never forgets his first love. China has reabsorbed Taiwan and it is
possible to visit. In the final scene, he has advertised on the front page of
prominent papers that are distributed everywhere to find her because he is
dying and wants to see her one last time. In fact, they have been living in the
same city for 40 years, both thinking the other one was far away in China. She
shows up, and they have a conversation that is full of lost opportunities. She
too had a family, grandchildren. She too thought of him every day.
The acting is superb, especially Cristofer
Jean, who is completely believable as a young man in love and completely
believable as a man on his deathbed full of regrets. His first love was played
by Kate Hurster.
And so this play is in dress rehearsal and
we gets bits and pieces, often interrupted. It is a testament to the power of
this simple play and its actors that we are immediately inside the emotion when
it is on stage.
The other play intervenes, sometimes
between scenes, sometimes simultaneously with both plays occurring at the same
time on the same stage, lines sometimes crossing from one dialogue to the
other, sometimes one on top of the other. The play is a Chinese opera, which is
sort of the Three Stooges kind of acting. Stupid, silly, vulgar. Frequently
stylized gestures that one might borrow from Kabuki – but slapstick. I find
slapstick funny for about 3 minutes and then I just want it to go away. We got
two hours of it, and I was restless and bored through much of it.
The story is of a cuckolded fisherman who
goes upstream to find big fish and finds the “peach blossom land” which is a
utopia. Everyone dresses in white and speaks softly and captures injured
butterflies to nurse them back to health. The man’s wife in the real world (a
harridan) is transformed into perfect peace in this utopia; the man’s wife’s
lover (a bawd) becomes the husband’s mentor in this utopia.
I was glad when it was over.
There was one fun moment that confronted
the race-blind casting that is common here. The play, all Chinese in content,
was performed by a multi-racial cast. The director (a character who mirrors the
actual director and writer of the play) complains that non-Asians simply can’t
get the play the way Asians can. Some hilarity ensures and the audience loved
it – probably the first time that race-blind casting was a central issue in a
play. The good humor slides on the top of something that I suspect many
audience members (many of whom are elderly) struggle with: love stories that
aren’t typical. I sometimes think I hear
a squirm in the audience when a couple is mixed race. (Note: in the next play,
Fingersmith, the squirming wasn’t very hidden. The lesbian theme made many
people visibly upset – they didn’t know what they were getting into, I guess.
Beatrice and Benedict are also a mixed couple: black and white. This looks like
the 21st century, folks, so get used to it).
There was one other bright point. An on-stage
assistant director for the Chinese opera was a young, gangly man on a
skateboard. He periodically skated through the plays, delivering props, picking
up things, cleaning up problems – all with the bewildered delight of being
there so that he stole every moment he was on stage. He threw himself into the
silliness with all the abandon of someone throwing himself off a cliff to see
what was on the other side. Great fun, and a reminder that there are no small
parts.
Fingersmith. This is based on a highly touted novel by Sarah Waters, and I’m
tempted to read it just so I can figure out what I just saw. It was fun. The
set was absolutely gorgeous and huge – far bigger than the stage would seem to
allow. There was an inset roundabout in the floor, stairways to a bridge across
the stage, multiple doorways into various buildings that doubled as asylum,
homes, baby farmer facilities, etc.
One must pause for a moment on that last
one because I had never heard the term, but it is basically what we frequently
do with children now: they are born, spend a week at home with mom who is eager
to get back to work and someone somewhere takes care of the children – those
are baby farmers. It went further in the Victorian period when people could
surrender their babies to a farmer for a fee and never see the kids again. Or,
it might be a short term solution (one thinks of Les Miz).
This is a tale of two girls in the
Victorian era who started off life with a baby farmer; one was adopted by her
uncle to become a secretary and oral reader of his pornography collection to
at-home evenings with his buds, a pornography collection that is extensive; one
was left to the streets to become known as “Fingersmith” – a pickpocket in
other words. There are confusions about which girl is which as they grow up, an
inheritance is involved, a shady fellow is out to fleece everyone and proceeds
to fleece one girl, with the help of the other girl who is fleeced by the same
girl with the help of the shady fellow – and all are fleeced by the baby farmer
who, apparently is the mother of one of them. Hidden in all this is a touching
(sometimes) lesbian affair as the two girls (not related) find one another and
awaken love in one another.
Oh, is it confusing. At one point, one of
the narrators (the girls narrate different parts of the story: two sections
are nearly identical except by changing the narrator and finding out what is
really going on, we see the same scene rashomon–wise. Well, I lost my sentence
there: at one point, one of the narrators actually suggests that the audience
get out pencils and record the steps so they can understand. It was good
advice, though I had no pencil. A scorecard would have been helpful. This is
the only time so far this year when there was talking in the audience (Ashland
audiences really are good), and the talking all seemed to be, “What was that?
Who is she? Why did . . . “ So, what’s
wrong with the direction and the play if the audience can’t follow?
Really, if they know this is so confusing,
why not add something to clarify?
I really wanted to like this play, and the
energy and the good humor of it all was infectious. But finally, my failing: I
simply got lost in the rapid changes and didn’t understand what was going on. I’m
trying to remember if that has ever happened to me before, and nothing comes to
mind.
Much
Ado About Nothing. This is my favorite comedy. I’ve
seen way too many productions to count, including some fun movie versions, but
I’ve never seen one this good. The play depends on Benedict and Beatrice, and
these were the two best I’ve seen. Absolutely hilarious. As always, describing
comedy is impossible without making the whole thing sound ridiculous, and
finally this was ridiculously funny. At one point, Benedict, overhearing the
praises of Beatrice, crawled under the feet of audience members, slid down a
stairway, crawled until the lip of the stage, and then got a can of beer
“accidentally” tossed onto him by his buddies; When it was Beatrice’s turn, she
did almost the same and had a champagne bucket’s ice dumped onto her. Only
Claudio was weak; everyone else played beautifully.
But what was truly amazing to me was that
the best Benedict I’ve ever seen was also the Edmund from Long Day’s Journey,
Danforth Comins.. Two roles that are extremely difficult and requiring vastly
different ranges – both excellent. Beatrice was also amazing, Christiana Clark.
(photos below).
Near the end of the play, perhaps 15
minutes or so before the end, the house lights flickered and came on, the stage
went to some sort of general rehearsal lighting. Apparently the air
conditioner, over taxed (it was exactly eleventy-hundred degrees Farenheit –my
converter doesn’t cover this in centigrade –outside), blew the circuits and we
were on some sort of auxiliary power.
Benedict (Comins) effortlessly (sprezzatura comes to mind) worked the
fact of the broken air conditioner into his next speech and the play went on
without a single hitch. Oh, but there were no lights, no music and the play was
to end in a dance – so it did. Again, Comins invited the audience to clap, and
the dance went on as planned to clapping instead of music. I’m not even sure
much of the audience realized that it was all improvised on the fly. (They had
to cancel the performance for last night in that theater; I’m hoping it is
fixed in the next few hours because I’m scheduled there this afternoon). (Later
note: it was!)
Guys
and Dolls is a popular musical, and here it was
done very well: good acting, good staging and all the rest. But two years ago,
this festival set the bar high by reinventing My Fair Lady entirely, and this
production of Guys and Dolls could have been done by any regional theater in
the nation. Good, fun and entertaining, and certainly a fun way to spend an
afternoon. But it is hard to get too enthused by something we’ve seen before.
The highlight of my afternoon was a chatty lady (before, during the interval,
and after – not during) who graduated from Stanford in 1958 and was there with
a dozen of her classmates, something they do every single year. Great fun, full
of life. She mentioned that they’d lost two of their group this year, “Two
moved on this year.” And that was that.
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