Dachs Thoughts

I started the day with a nice breakfast and walk along the Pearl Street Mall, then tonight I saw the second play of this season’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and the first Shakespeare play, Much Ado About Nothing. It was a wonderful production, focusing on the comedic aspects of the play. This one was in the outdoor Mary Rippon Theater, and the weather nicely cooperated for a very nice evening.

The acting was sharp and the play was well staged. The set was beautiful, blending in nicely to the stonework of the surrounding buildings. And much to my pleasure, the constable/Dogberry scenes were humorous, but not too long.

I took along two friends who were new to this kind of Shakespeare, and they enjoyed it very much. One stated it was the best play she’d ever seen. Thus ends this round of plays in Colorado, but my plans indicate more to come. 118

I made my way back to Colorado to see some plays, some mountains, and some friends. After a morning flight, a brief nap, and a dinner at The Sink, I went to my first Colorado Shakespeare Festival play of the season, Wittenberg. It was a terrific play, and a great start to this vacation.

The play deals with the contrast of religious thinking and rational philosophy, with some tweaks at the academic world. The premise has Hamlet a student at Wittenberg University, and two professors, Martin Luther and Dr. Faustus. It was very humorous, but also treated the religious arguments as respectfully as the rationalist arguments. There were only 4 performers, but it was extremely engaging and entertaining. Hamlet was played by the same actor who had major roles in last years’ plays, and Luther was played by Howard Swain, who I’ve seen previously at CalShakes. It was nice to get back to Boulder, and to see a new and very interesting play.

Tonight I attended the first CalShakes play of the season, which was Twelfth Night. We had a full house as Nathan B, and Kyoko and Ben, joined Bill, Andy and me. We lucked out as the night was very pleasant considering how cold it had been at home the previous night.

Overall, I enjoyed the play. The set was very basic with a background wall, and a coffin in the middle of the stage that evolved from coffin at the beginning as the reason for Olivia’s grieving, to bench, to prison cell. There were a couple of aspects that didn’t really enhance the play for me, although in the end they weren’t annoying enough to impact my enjoyment. The first was that it was a very small cast with a couple of actors playing multiple parts. As the play revolves around mistaken identity, this additional source of confusion didn’t add to the production. The second was that most of the primary may roles were played by women. In fact there was only one male cast member, and he played a bunch of secondary roles. He was ok, and he sang quite pleasantly in a number of songs that were in the production. The women playing men weren’t terrible, it just wasn’t great, or necessary, and came off a bit gimmicky to me. As the play already revolves around a woman disguising herself as a man, this additional gender-bending wasn’t necessary.

Overall glad to be restarting the Shakespeare engine again for this year; it’s been too long. 117

I guess I wasn’t quite done with Shakespeare for the year. Bob and I went over to San Francisco to see a production of The Tempest by the African-American Shakespeare Company. While this represented my 3rd production of The Tempest for the year, I was interested from the both the aspect of keeping the Shakespeare flow going, and also to see a play by a company I’d heard about, but never seen a play from.

While I have to say it was the least exciting of the three productions I’ve seen this year, it had some interesting aspects. The theater is fairly small, and the stage was sparsely decorated. It had modern elements, such as Prospero’s magic was controlled through a smartphone, and he talked to Ariel through a headset. The acting was ok, with a couple of noteworthy performances by the actor playing Caliban, who was a dancer with great physicality in his movements, and the actor playing the comedic Trinculo, who was also physically very funny. I’m glad I was able to see it, but I don’t think I’ll put this company on my must-see list for the future.

It was nice to get over to the city and see the hustle and bustle of a Saturday night. We prefaced the play with a nice dinner. I’ll have to look into other activities over there.

I’m ending up the summer of theater frenzy (even though it’s technically not summer any more) with a 4-day series of performances by monologist Mike Daisey at CalShakes, covering four different Shakespeare tragedies. I previously saw him perform The Agony the and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at Woolly Mammoth in DC a few years ago.

Luckily, the weather is unusually warm for this time of year, so the evening performances are very pleasant. The staging is very basic, the stage being empty except for a single wooden desk with a microphone on it from which Mike Daisey delivers his performance. It was quite beautiful before the play with the nearly bare stage, and the trees behind the stage illuminated, and the hills lit by the last rays of the setting sun. The theater itself had been decorated a bit, with some of the upper seats removed and decorations placed there. Our usual section and seating area had pieces of some armor in it and a skull. It provided an interesting ambiance for the theater.

Romeo and Juliet

Spring and Fire. The first night’s performance was built around The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. The monologue started with some general humorous comments about folks coming to the theater, and northern California/Bay Area, to some general observations about theater and tragedy. Much like the previous performance, it started out generally humorous, then began to weave poignant personal details into the story. He used Romeo and Juliet as a springboard into talking about love, and crazy young love in particular, which led him into discussions of his early young love life and his life a a student in the theater and writing poetry. He talked about how he performed in a production of R&J, interleaved with his discussion of his first serious love, which ended up emotionally covering having an unexpected child. The poignancy is blunted somewhat for me due to the controversy following his “Jobs” performance where it later came out that some of the emotional elements never actually happened to him. Nonetheless, it was a very engaging performance; very interesting, and making me glad I came and looking forward to the next three nights.

Hamlet

Summer and Air. The second night’s performance was built around Hamlet. Without much preamble, he jumped right into discussing the play, and Shakespeare, and The Theater, and acting. His point was that Hamlet was basically a revenge tragedy, but what makes it unique is that all characters deviate from what they should do in a straight forward revenge story. So much of the play is dominated by the person of Hamlet himself, and Daisey made the point that the character is basically a suicidal personality throughout the play who at times acts like a crazy person. Then as he talked about himself, and acting and training in Hamlet, he brought up his own struggles with depression and some suicide attempts. An unusual punctuation to the evening, during a poignant moment while he was talking in the dark (largely about himself), a couple of people got up and left yelling at him. Apparently they felt he was diminishing Hamlet, which they thought was important. Pretty unusual. Another interesting, if not mind-blowing, evening at the theater.

Macbeth

Autumn and Water. The third night’s performance was built around The Scottish Play. He jumped right into it again, and talked a lot about how this play is perceived of as cursed, and how it is the shortest of all the plays, very linear, based on a play book, which may be missing some of the longer character developments. He said the play was about evil. He led around to going to Tajikistan and developing some story telling with locals about what went on during the violence after the Soviet collapse. He talked about his early life with his wife, and how they both left traditional jobs, she being very supportive, and then he contrasted that with Lady Macbeth. Finally he discussed what led him to do what he did in the controversial The Agony the and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (without ever mentioning it by name), and how he consciously did something he knew was wrong as he was trying to do something that effected things beyond the theater. He knew it was wrong, and hid it from his director/wife. While Macbeth would never change, he said he hoped he move past that destiny. As Macbeth isn’t my favorite play, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this evening with great expectations, but it turned out to be the best of the three so far, from my perspective.

King Lear

Winter and Earth. The final night in this quartet of monologues was built around King Lear. Some additional drama surrounded the evening as the power was out in the theater, and they ended up going forward with no amplification, and a single battery powered light on his desk to illuminate his face. Luckily the moon was nearly full, so as it rose it gave some light to the theater. The discussion focused a lot around the tragedy of end-of-life, and what sometimes accompanies it, the loss of one’s mental faculties. He also tied this into discussions of the existential health of The Theater, and how in many ways it seems to be dying. After 3+ performances where he seemed to be fairly critical of aspects of Shakespeare and The Theater, he ended with how much he really loves Shakespeare, and why it and The Theater matter.

It was an interesting four days, no one of which moved me quite like the first piece I saw him do, but nonetheless I’m glad I saw it all. It was a good way to end this summer of theater.