Events
Ashland Shakespeare Festival
While the Bay Area is no slacker with the festival Shakespearean, sometimes you have to get out of Dodge to enjoy a bit of the bard.
Ashland’s winter season couldn’t have been a better antidote to the early spring itch. The flowers were in bloom, the cherry trees in blossom, the hills alive with the green of a California spring. And ah yes, the Shakespeare.
Karen and I saw two plays: Room Service and Richard III.
Room Service, based on the 1930s movie, was a farce of the best kind. Filled with frenetic energy, the actors burst in and out of the one room stage bearing bananas, trunks, clothes, and mayhem. The best moment was one character accidentally walked into a closet. What was funny wasn’t the action, but the other characters reaction. They stared at that closed door and stared and stared. Every moment, you thought, soon this won’t be funny. Soon, not yet. My belly hurt with laughter as the moment stretched into ridiculous glee.
Richard III couldn’t have been more opposite. A delightfully gleeful villain on a bare gray stage. Richard was rendered a particularly powerful force of nature by the choice to have him walk with crutches. Walk. No, he glided across the stage. Over people and obstacles like a spider monkey whirl wind.
If Queen Margaret is present in ever scene that even mentions her, a ghostly banchee of doom, Richard is the demon that she herself summoned.
The play opens with women shrouded in grey weeping that they had fathers, sons, husbands and brothers before a Richard slew them.
The play ended with one of the most problematic and troubled ends that I’ve seen done with a Shakespeare play. All is triumph as the Tudors seize…there is this wonderful hesitation in the victors voice. Oh, he is all victorious, but the after thought of Elizabeth, his bride, puts an interesting emphasis on the women of the play.
The play ends with women weeping that they had a Richard until a Henry slew him.
The play ends at the beginning. The war of the roses is over. The demon weed it grew lies sleeping, but the new world is somewhat grizzly for having such victors in it.
Very interesting.
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