Oregon Shakespeare Festival

This weekend, Suzi, freelancer Anna Grace and I escaped Eugene to review new plays opening at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. A quick scorecard should appear on the blog soon, but I thought I'd share a pic I snapped that epitomizes Ashland today.

This tiny, tiny wetland is going to be literally surrounded on all sides by development. So long as the tiny, tiny wetland is preserved, any and all development is A-OK in Ashland. And I don't mean this in a snarky way. I lived for five years in Ashland. This is the way things are done there.

Big box stores = not OK. Strip malls = A-OK.

Fast food restaurants = not OK. Banks = A-OK.

Public transportation = not OK. Everyone Drives a Prius = A-OK.

Exhausted, Jenny Sutter (Gwendolyn Mulamba) falls asleep on the ground at Slab City. Photo by Jenny Graham.

If you aren't in the habit of scanning the Christian Science Monitor for info, you probably missed this superb article about one of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's new plays, Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter.

When freelance theater critic Anna Grace and I saw the play, we disagreed about its quality and impact. (Those reviews are here, and you can read our disagreement in the review itself.) Then I wrote about Jenny Sutter and the UO student veterans' play Telling (about which I wrote in February) for a national arts blog — you can read that post here.

I think the CSM article has several strengths, one of which is that it shows playwright Julie Marie Myatt's and the OSF's commitment to getting it right. In their writing of Telling, playwrights Max Rayneard and Jonathan Wei, along with director John Schmor, also did a lot of work in order to get it right. The difference was that in the latter case, they had more than one consultant from the Iraq War; the words themselves came from veterans who also did the acting and gave a lot of feedback throughout the entire process. That certainly had advantages!

But it was super to read what the OSF actors did to learn more and how much care the OSF took with area veterans.

I keep writing about this because I'm interested in the ways that my experience of Jenny Sutter was changed by watching Telling first, but also because the CSM article brings up issues about theater and catharsis, theater and healing, etc. — issues that the playwrights and actors of Telling were explicitly trying to address with the entire project (and that they hope will be exported to other campuses and other veterans' groups as well).

Last year's theater season in Eugene had The Trojan Women and Mother Courage for war allegories/tales. I wonder what next season will bring and how we will deal with — expect? hope for? dislike? — more war stories.