Dramatic Listening
Copyright © 2000 by Dave Badtke
The weekend before last my wife and I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (www.orshakes.org) with my mother, who’s visiting from Michigan, and my wife’s mother, who lives in Rossmoor. We went for the theater and stayed in a bed and breakfast, underrated at three stars, that served the most creatively wonderful breakfast I’ve ever had (www.willowsinn.com).
At 320 miles, which will take you about five hours to drive, notwithstanding stops to eat, shop and attend to nature’s unsolicited demands, the lengthy trip to Ashland is a commitment warily entertained but well rewarded by outstanding productions and wonderful acting. While you may not always see your favorite plays, what you see will be performed at the highest level.
We saw George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 60-year-old play, "The Man Who came to Dinner", in which a disparaging, self-centered, internationally celebrated writer and radio commentator convalesces with an Ohio family after slipping on the ice in front of their home. The resemblance in temperament and girth between protagonist Sheridan Whiteside and Rush Limbaugh was striking, and while I’m not a fan of puerile, ad hominem humor, which is celebrated in the play and which is at the malicious heart of Limbaugh’s offensive radio program, the characters were at times outlandishly funny and the audience reaction was as much fun as the play.
Tennessee William’s "Night of the Iguana" deconstructs several characters who, like the eponymous iguana tethered under the veranda, are at the end of their respective ropes. While the play is frequently morose, it is also peculiarly optimistic. Plays about self-obsessed drunks, like the protagonist in this play, a fallen Texas minister leading bus tours in Acapulco, can become tiresome, but the Ashland performance touched my soul and continues to haunt my imagination.
And finally, I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of Shakespeare’s histories, yet we saw a wonderful performance of "Henry V", which dramatizes King Henry’s successful pursuit of the French throne in 1415 after crushing the French at Agincourt. 5000 French were killed, including many nobles and 1,500 knights, but only 450 English died, a testament as much to Henry’s masterful strategy as to Charles I d’Albret’s profound incompetence. (Shakespeare claimed 29 English and 10,000 French killed at Agincourt, but one so good at English should be excused a failure or two at math.)
Before driving back on Sunday, the four of us took a backstage tour led by a Festival Stage Manager, the person in charge of coordinating all the complicated aspects of staging a performance. (If you go to Ashland, take the tour. It’s very informative.)
Students composed more than half our group. Most were probably in high school, though a few might have been in college. I assumed that they were voluntarily along on the tour, yet few asked questions and many seemed bored. Since the tour started at 10:00 in the morning, I presumed they were up late the night before.
After a discussion of the critical role played by the audience in a successful performance, our guide lamented the inability of many of the MTV generation, like the students in our group, to listen, a deficiency that now required her to station attendants in the auditorium who would eject those who disrupted the performance. She reminded us that even though most members of Shakespeare’s audience were not educated and could not read, they were excellent listeners. After all, she said, consider the origin of the word auditorium.
Technological advancement can be beneficial – it has contributed significantly to the staging of plays – but it can be onerous when it erodes timeless achievements of perfection: a concert, a poem, a story, a play. To be appreciated, each requires a level of concentration that is being attacked by technological innovations that leave little room for the quiet mind that admits imagination.
So please, go to Ashland with your children. See as many plays as you can, but leave at home the laptop, the electronic games, the Walkman. Take along a book or two, and during the 10-hour trip there and back, turn off your car radio and read aloud to one another. When you arrive, rent a room at a B&B where there is no TV.
In the evening, after you’ve seen the plays, stop at a restaurant for dessert or go back to your room. Discuss your experience. Most importantly, though, listen very carefully to what each of you has to say.
- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.
Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com