the other half Shakespeare

When B. and I visited the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in June, we saw all the plays on my want-list except one, because it hadn't opened yet: a production of Coriolanus put on by the lower-cased upstart crow collective, a troupe of women and non-binary folk who were responsible for a fabulous King John last year. King John is a little-known standout among Shakespeare's plays, and so is Coriolanus, so I was expecting great things from this. For that reason I made another trip up this last weekend - the last weekend of the performance season, in hopes that summer weather would finally have calmed down by then, which in the nick of time it did.

Coriolanus had its excellences, and the bottom line is that I was very happy to have seen it, but it also had its difficulties. The main one is that, unlike other Shakespeare plays, it has a very large cast of characters. Having them all portrayed by only eight players didn't always work. One had to keep an eye on whether they had their coats buttoned or not, for instance: that indicated different characters. Some of the actors, notably Betsy Schwartz, were good at conveying in speech and action that they were playing different people; others not so much.

Jessika D. Williams portrayed Coriolanus as stolid, brusque, and lacking in emotion, to the point where his capitulation to his mother's entreaties felt weirdly out of character. It was very different from the sly and sardonic Philip the Bastard who Williams played in King John. It was also very different from the greatest previous Coriolanus I've seen, here at Ashland many years ago. Denis Arndt played him as a man convinced that everything he says is sweet reasonableness itself, and is surprised, hurt, and indignant that it isn't taken that way.

As long as I was there, I saw the closing or near-closing performances of two plays I'd seen much earlier in their runs. This production of Macbeth featured the eeriest, creepiest, strangest Weird Sisters ever seen, and I had to admire them again. One of them, Amy Lizardo, was at the post-performance talk, and I got to tell her how good they all were. Macbeth himself seemed to be acted better than he had been, and even Macduff was slightly less than inert.

Much Ado About Nothing was also somewhat better-acted, even though a comparison was difficult because both Benedick and Claudio were being played by different people than before. The play seemed less the glorious romp than it had been, though the outright funny parts were probably funnier. Rex Young as Dogberry in particular seemed to have caught a groove he was missing before.

I stayed at a maze-like hotel which had not caught on that it would be a good idea to add the lobby as an entry to the directional signs in the corridors. The first time I tried heading there from my room I had to stop at the housekeeping break room and ask them.

I took along The Last Dangerous Visions on this trip, and made some progress reading it.