A day after coming back from my Ashland vacation, I also completed another vacation of the mind. I finished reading The Lord of the Rings again for the umpteenth time. I had almost forgotten how good it is. Since I first read this in high school, I read it again every 3 or 4 years and it was like going on a holiday. The story is so rich. When the movies came out a decade ago, I couldn’t read it for a while. While the movies were good (although not as good as the books) the imagery and characters in the movies was so strong, I couldn’t get it out of my mind to have a pure experience with the books for quite some time. But finally I did it, this time using my larger hardback copies, and it was great again. Now maybe I’ll try to watch the movies again.
This production was set in 1920s Harlem, and the dialog was reworked a bit to make Harlem and Louisiana correspond to the two cities of the original play. The comedy was slapstick as usual, but the performance of the servant Dromio was outstanding, both in acting and physicality. The rest of the cast was good as well. In the tiny theater, sets changed by having the backing set rotate around for inside and outside, and elements rose up through the middle of the floor as needed. A very enjoyable performance.
This was a great way to end the week. I still don’t think I got my socks blown off like with two of the plays I saw last year, but my fear earlier in the week that all the plays would be just-ok turned out to be unfounded. With The Tempest and The Comedy of Errors, my week of relaxation and theater ended very well.
In the evening, I attended a production of The Tempest. I went in with a low expectation, based on the universal negative comments from the B&B crowd, but it turns out I liked it a lot. It was visually very interesting using a very sparse set, and a number of the actors were really excellent in their roles; particularly interestingly well played were the parts of Ariel and Calaban. The actress who played Ariel also played the mother in A Wrinkle in Time, and one of the queens in Richard III. There were also some “dancers” who represented the spirits carrying out Prospero’s commands. What made all the other folks dislike it was the performance of Prospero. It was much lower key and less commanding that it is usually played, but even though I didn’t love the performance, I could see it as a different interpretation. One thing I really enjoyed in the beginning was how they did the sinking of the ship. The set was very spare, just covered by a grey sheet, and when the ship (which you never saw) sank, all people and the sheet covering the entire stage went down an opening in the stage like water going down a drain. A very enjoyable evening at the theater.
Another relaxing lazy day, recharging my batteries. I did a lot of reading (and some snoozing). In the evening, I headed over to the 
After breakfast, I spent most of the day lazily relaxing. I guess I was more exhausted than I thought, but it was a good rest. I did a little reading, and was mostly a slug. This evening I went to my first Shakespeare play of this season up here, Richard III, performed in the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre. It was a very good production, and the lead actor, Dan Donahue, was outstanding. The supporting cast was very good as well, which included some familiar faces from last year, and from my first play this year. A very solid start to my first Shakespeare up in Oregon this summer.
They don’t do any plays at OSF on Monday, so I decided to take a little trip up and see 
The only downside was from a photographic perspective. It was pretty overcast most of the day (which may have been a mixture of smoke and clouds), and the light was never great. But I did take a bunch of pictures. And before I got all the way around, I saw a forest fire off in the distance to the north. There must be a lot of those in Oregon, because the air is hazy and you could even smell the smoke in Ashland last night.
The first play I saw from this visit was, A Wrinkle in Time, based on a very popular children’s book. It took me quite a while to get into it, as they used a device of reading a lot of exposition from the book in the play. The play itself seemed to be very tied into people’s experience reading the book. Since I’ve never read it, that was somewhat hard to get my arms around. It didn’t help that I was tired from the drive up. But as the story progressed to the different worlds, which were handled visually quite interestingly, it got me more engaged. Overall I enjoyed it, but probably not as much as someone who was a big fan of the book. As always with OSF, the acting was very sharp, and the staging was interesting.
Tonight I saw the last play in 
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