Samuel Becket’s 1953 masterpiece, Waiting for Godot is always one of the first titles that come to mind whenever someone asks me to name my favorite plays. I’ve read it or listened to audio recording of it many times. This was the fourth time I’ve seen it performed onstage. It never fails to mesmerize me.
The set was brilliant. Staged on the long, narrow thrust of the Tom Patterson Theater, the stage floor was covered with what appears to be black vinyl. It looked wet and reflected some light onto the performance area.
All the action of the play takes place on a narrow white path; imagine a piece of white ribbon lying casually on an ebony surface. It is curved and varies in height. It is a section of road, neither straight nor flat, that does not appear to come from, nor lead to, anywhere. There was a medium-sized rock at about the mid-point and a metal sculpture at one end suggesting a tree.
The plot of the play is heartbreaking simple. Two men, Estragon and Vladimir, are in desperate circumstances and they struggle to hold onto the hope that their circumstances will be improved with the arrival of Godot who, we’re told, has promised to meet them there.
This is the second time I’ve seen Stephen Ouimet, one of my favorite actors at Stratford, in the role of Estragon. He played the same role in Stratford’s 1998 production. This time he plays opposite Tom Rooney, who is rapidly becoming a favorite, as Vladimir. Beckett described this play as a “tragicomedy”. Together, Ouimet & Rooney generated a great deal of laughter; some humorous, some nervous.
Brian Dennehy did well in the role of Pozzo. I’d worried that, due to Mr. Dennehy’s stature as an actor, the balance among the characters might be disrupted. It wasn’t. Mr D. demonstrated his skill in interpreting Beckett a few seasons ago when he appeared in the single-character play; Krapp’s Last Tape.
I’m honestly not sure why I am so drawn to this play but I always find it moving. I’d been looking forward to this performance for almost a year. I was not disappointed.
One of the aspects of attending the Stratford Festival I enjoy most is the opportunity to see new, or at least unfamiliar, plays. It’s great to see classics and well established modern plays but the chance to see something new, done well, is not to be missed. For this year’s visit that was John Murrell’s Taking Shakespeare.
We started our 2013 visit to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival with their production of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit.
The play is set in an affluent English home occupied by a writer, his wife and an eager new maid. With the possible assistance of the quirky neighborhood psychic, the ghost of the man’s deceased first wife shows up quite uninvited. Hijinks ensue. I always enjoy this play. It was a treat for Harper’s Other Dad who knows the play well from repeatedly hearing the audio recording but he had never seen it on the stage before.
Directed by Stratford veteran Brian Bedford, the production is well paced and sharply executed. The set is absolutely beautiful; it drew applause when the curtain went up, and has all the necessary, ‘old-school’ special effects the plot requires.
Landscape gardening, puberty, chaos theory, infidelity, academic competitiveness, Lord Byron, intellectual parochialism, the solving of a centuries-old mystery, classicism, romanticism, and the second law of thermodynamics; these are the stuff of Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia. What fun! It was a great way to end this year’s visit to the Shaw Festival!
I’d seen the play before so I knew it was sharp and witty. This play is smarter than I am. It challenges me to understand it. Enjoying Arcadia is not a passive experience. I like that. In that sense, it reminds me of Michael Frayn’s wonderful play Copenhagen. The plot involves science of which I have only the vaguest understanding but my lack of knowledge doesn’t interfere with the theatrical enjoyment. Arcadia is like Copenhagen; but funny!
Tom Stoppard is a prolific writer of plays for the stage and the screen; both large and small. I first become aware of him from his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for which he won his first Tony Award for Best Play, in 1968. He won his fifth Tony Award 40 years later in 2007 for The Coast of Utopia. I recall seeing a television production of On The Razzle, his play adapted from the same source material that gave Thornton Wilder The Merchant of Yonkers and The Matchmaker…and gave Jerry Herman Hello Dolly. Along the way there were The Real Thing, Travesties, The Real Inspector Hound and many more. His screenplays cover a spectrum from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil to the 2012 re-make of Anna Karenina. He won an Oscar for his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love.
The title character is a young woman from a privileged background who has dedicated her life to helping those less fortunate by working with the Salvation Army. Her principles are challenged when her organization is confronted with the choice of reducing its efforts to help those in need or accepting donations from those who, to Barbara’s mind, are complicit, if not responsible, for the plight of the people she wants to help. One of these ethically inconvenient donors is her father, a munitions manufacturer. The play is funny. It is peopled with an assortment of interesting characters who provide opportunities for comedy and who also act as platforms from which Barbara and her father can launch their opposing viewpoints. And, being Shaw, it is articulate.
For me, attending a Shaw play is like attending the opera. I usually enjoy the experience of seeing a performance. I appreciate the talent and artistry involved in doing it well. On an intellectual level, I like the ideas conveyed. But I rarely find it emotionally engaging. When it does happen, such as the Festival’s 2007 production of Saint Joan, it becomes a treasured memory. More often, it is a pleasant evening at the theater that goes on a little longer than I consider ideal. Such was the case with this year’s Major Barbara. The set, costumes and performances were wonderful. I can’t think of anything about it that could have been better. I last saw the play when the Festival produced it in 1998. I liked it then too. I’m sure I will see it next time they do it; hopefully not before about 2020. I always like it but it will never be my favorite play.
Irish playwright Brian Friel is probably best known, at least to American audiences, as the author of Dancing at Lughnasa. I first became aware of him when I stage-managed a production of his translation of Turgenev’s A Month In the Country. It was those experiences, and the synopsis in the Shaw Festival’s season brochure, that prompted me to choose this play. I am so glad I did.
Friel’s play, which premiered in 1979, is a three-character drama. In individual monologs Frank, a Faith Healer; Grace, a woman who shared his life, and Teddy, their former manager, describe their memories of their shared experiences. The play is structurally unusual in that the characters never appear on-stage together. There is no physical action, just four monologs (the title character has the first and last) describing memories that are common to all but not really shared. In Rashomon-like fashion, the memories vary with the perspective of the character telling them.
There is an essay in the program by Ann Saddlemyer in which she quotes the playwright recalling a day spent fishing with his father which; “is a fiction. Have I imagined the scene then? Or is it a composite of two or three different episodes? The point is – I don’t think it matters. What matters is that for some reason…. this vivid memory is there in the storehouse of the mind. For some reason the mind has shuffled the pieces of verifiable truth and composed a truth of its own. For me it is a truth.”
Glaspell’s Trifles is, fundamentally, a murder mystery with a strong feminist message. To contemporary ears the feminism sounds a bit heavy-handed but, considering the play was written almost 100 years ago, the concepts must have sounded very revolutionary indeed. Quilting, an activity that would have been seen, at the time, as unique to women, is a key metaphor; not least because, in the end, it is the women who ‘piece together’ what really happened while the male authorities as unaware and, it appears, likely to remain so.
The second of the two plays, the one by a playwright with whose work i am familiar, was A Wife For A Life by Eugene O’Neill. Written in 1913, it was O’Neill’s first play. It tells the story of two miners prospecting in a remote area who have a shared history about which only one of them is aware. The play is not very good. The length makes it impossible to develop the plot with any subtlety, so it is transparent, and much of the language is ‘stagey’ and ‘preachy’. It feels like blasphemy to write such a thing. O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama four times as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature. He would be on anyone’s ‘shortlist’ of greatest playwrights of the 20th century. At the same time, I am in good company in my opinion. O’Neill himself referred to it as “vaudeville written to make money” and destroyed it. It was rediscovered in 1950. Obviously this invites the question; why produce it at all?
I think the reason lies in pairing the two plays together. There is a historical connection between Glaspell and O’Neill. They were founding member of the Provincetown Playhouse in 1915 and earned their early reputations as playwrights there. The plays also have similarities. Both are set in lonely, unwelcoming homes where people have things to hide. The core relationship in both plays is an unhappy marriage and the action in both is driven by a good, but victimized, wife who is not seen onstage.
The first play on our 2013 Shaw Festival agenda is Our Betters. The playwright, W. Somerset Maugham, is better known as a novelist and short-story writer. I now find that a surprising having learned he wrote 30 plays. This one is very good. On one level Our Betters is an ideal candidate for production at a festival. The play is dated. The subject matter sets it in a very specific place at a very specific time and I am not sure it would work in any other context. Also, the play is written in three acts. That form seems out of fashion to contemporary audiences.
There are elements of the play that feel derivative but I don’t think they are. The play is simply not as well-known. For example, I am hard pressed to differentiate between the character of Minnie, the Duchesse de Surennes in Our Betters and the character of the Countess De Lage in Clare Boothe Luce’s play The Women. It is important to remember that, while The Women is better known to American audiences, it was written 20 years later.
Last night I attended the opening-night performance of the world premier of Oscar; an opera based on the life of Irish writer, aesthete and wit, Oscar Wilde. It was an evening to remember.
The opera opens with Wilde suffering the effects of having been publicly labeled a sodomite. Act I ends with his conviction. Act II is set mostly in prison and ends just after his release. The composer is quoted as saying he wanted to depict Wilde, not as a victim, but as a heroic figure who showed courage in the face of oppression. I think he succeeds as much as historical events allow. The two are not mutually exclusive. If Wilde’s story proves anything it is that one can be a victim and still show courage in the face of oppression.
Dramatically, the production is modern and edgy. Wilde’s trial is depicted as a farcical meeting of toys; the judge cast as a jack-in-the-box. Lord Douglas, Wilde’s “Bosie”, does not have a singing role in the opera but is portrayed by a dancer in various incarnations throughout; at one point appearing as himself, the young and beautiful object of Wilde’s affection in Wilde’s prison fantasy; later appearing as ‘Death” in a highly stylized modern dance sequence leading to an execution by hanging. After his release, Wilde wrote about this execution in his poem; “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”.
Harper's Valley 