High Society

I bemoaned in an earlier post that I was upset with myself for letting this blog lie dormant for a few Ashland seasons. Never was that more relevant than today when I realized that I had failed to record my impressions of the stunning world premiere of Robert Schenkkan's "All the Way" two years ago. I may re-read that play - which has since won two Tony awards - and sit down to log my thoughts one day, but for now I will have to settle for lauding the equally impressive sequel to that memorable show, which I had the privilege of seeing this afternoon.

"The Great Society" is the conclusion of Schenkkan's brilliant examination of the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson.  It covers the years 1965 to '68 following LBJ's landslide re-election and focusing primarily on his efforts to pass a slate of ground-breaking social programs. However, the slippery slope of an escalating crisis in Vietnam which he inherited from the late President John F. Kennedy is slowly but surely consuming more and more precious funding and media "oxygen" from his efforts on the domestic front: fighting poverty, establishing Medicare, and passing a Voting Rights Act.

The delicate balances he struck with his political acumen in his first term begin to fall apart under the economic and political pressures of this new storm front. His tenuous alliance with Martin Luther King begins to crumble as LBJ tries to keep his federal programs alive in Congress; King can't wait for Johnson at the cost of the lives being lost daily in protest marches in the Deep South. And enemies in Washington and beyond the beltway begin to sharpen their knives as they sense a chance to gain ground in midterm elections and unwind the president's beloved Great Society.

The weight of all this falls squarely on the shoulders of Jack Willis, who masterfully brings Johnson's larger-than-life presence to the Bowmer stage.  When he walked in at the top of the show and started telling a prescient tale about bull riders and the short window of joy they experience before they inevitably get bucked off (and stomped on), it was like seeing an old friend. Willis simply owns this role. It fits him like an old glove, and the two-year interval between "All the Way" and now just melted away when he started jawing.  Willis has the brass, the wit, the warmth - and the fear - of this giant of a man nailed. And this play is not the chronicle of an inspiring rise to power, as in the first part of this saga; it is a tale which descends into tragedy and loss. At a post-show discussion, the great actor Richard Elmore (who plays FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to a T) said what we were all thinking while watching this drama -- namely that it is truly Shakespearean.  It has a king in decline, plotting advisers, ghosts ... all the elements that make a Bard-ian tragedy. My astute friends Rick Williams and Judy Epstein - who saw the show with me - both observed that the LBJ saga has essentially taken the mantle of the Shakespeare history play this season.

Bill Rauch's direction was impressive, mixing projected media from the era with a set that slowly becomes deconstructed and chaotic as the country comes apart socially.  Particularly jarring was an excerpt from Walter Cronkeit's seminal takedown of the government's efforts in Vietnam on the CBS Evening News, prompting LBJ to say "Well, if I've lost Cronkite I've lost the country." Also bringing emotions to the fore were moving depictions of civil rights violence from Selma, to Chicago, to Los Angeles - and a running tally of dead and wounded in Southeast Asia. The task for Rauch was to infuse what could have been a sterile historical pageant with drama, character, wit and compassion. In this he succeeded.

Also notable in the cast were Kenajuan Bently as a vulnerable MLK; Peter Frechette as a compelling Vice President Hubert Humphrey; Richard Elmore as the Iago-like J. Edgar Hoover; Jonathan Haugen as the villain of the piece, George Wallace (and in a Daily Double of sorts, an oily Richard Nixon later in the play); Mark Murphey as the ultimately flawed strategist Robert MacNamara; Terri McMahon as a warm but firm Lady Bird Johnson; and Danforth Comins as the contentious Sen. Robert Kennedy.  There was not a false note in any of these and many other performances.

In the final analysis, this is a worthy successor to "All the Way" and a thrilling entry in Ashland's ever-growing stable of compelling world premieres. LBJ's story is now over, but his legacy as evinced in this pair of supremely worthy plays will indeed continue.

The Kids Are Alright

It saddens me to open this blog and note from the posting dates that I failed to post reviews from the past few seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Bad Jonathan, bad!

But then I thought for a moment and realized that for two of those years I was head writer for Lamplighters Music Theater Company's Gala Committee and had been writing the book for a full-length musical on deadline during my Ashland vacations.

OK ... not so bad, Jonathan, not so bad! So let's get started (again).

The first play of the 2014 Season was a romp through space and time involving mysterious alien creatures, a planet ruled by a totalitarian super-intelligence, three intrepid children, and a mysterious doctor. But before you pull out your sonic screwdriver and start looking for the TARDIS, this was not a staged adventure of "Doctor Who." Rather it was an adaptation of the 1962 children's novel "A Wrinkle in Time," by Madeleine L'Engle.

I must confess that I tried to read this book when I was in school, but it never grabbed me. I had friends who recommended it as a must-read, and teachers/librarians who lauded it as great summer fare. I recall the story as being too frank about the life of a pre-teen for my tastes; and the religious elements may have been a turn-off at that age. All I know is the emotions were too raw for me, so I put it down and never finished it. I really didn't break out into rabid reading mode until I discovered fantasy novels like "The Book of Three" and "The Lord of the Rings" a few grades later.  So I basically missed the "Wrinkle" experience. But I knew it was out there.

The challenges of mounting a theatrical version of this novel must have been daunting to the creative team that brought it to the stage of the Angus Bowmer Theater. And frankly, it was the way in which they solved those challenges that charmed me the most.

I have always had a soft spot for so-called "story theater." I love the "meta" element in meta-theatrical productions: Divvy up the narration among all the players; use an ordinary looking prop to represent an extraordinary thing; mix and match the actors so that one minute she's your mother, and the next she's a kid at school; and most of all, the set should become many places through the course of the play ... from the family kitchen, to a haunted house, to an alien world.

It was this choice by director Tracy Young and her team of designers that set the bar high enough to overcome the somewhat simplistic nature of this essential children's story and draw this adult into the tale. The set was dominated by a large facade upon which projections were splashed of everything from a storm-tossed tree covering an eerily close full moon to planetary systems unseen by man ... but surely pictured vividly by a generation of children. The use of onstage cameras to project the viewpoint of given characters was also very effective, especially when our middle-school-aged heroine, Meg Murry, lies immobilized on the ground while her father and friend look down on her helplessly.

This is not to say that the actors didn't contribute to the wonder of the evening. On the contrary, the performances of the three children -- pre-teen Meg (played amazingly by twenty-something actress Alejandra Escalante); her younger savant brother, Charles Wallace (a very convincing Sara Bruner); and new friend Calvin (Joe Wegner) -- were crucial to the success of the play. Their missing father (the always amazing Dan Donohue) was particularly well crafted, as was Ashland favorite Judith-Marie Bergen's larger-than-life take on the odd Mrs. Whatsit. Her fellow time-traveling companions - Michele Mais and Kate Mulligan - were a mixed bag. Mais was hard to hear, but seemed to have a grasp on the Shakespeare-quoting Mrs. Who, though she was limited by her technique; Mulligan fared much better providing the disembodied voice of Mrs. Which, as well as a loopy character known as "The Happy Medium."

Frankly, it was at this point that my mind wandered because of undeniable similarities to a children's novel that *did* catch my fancy at that age (or a little younger): "The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster .. with its "whiches" (as opposed to "witches") and its Watchdog (who had an actual watch in his body). The literalist in me was probably born way back then. But I digress ...

The work of the Ensemble was key to the show, particularly in creating an array of elaborate creatures with ordinary props, from bedsheets to mink coats to umbrellas. Take the bedsheets for example; they were used at various times to represent the walls of an elevator, the wings of a miraculous moth-like creature, and the chambers of a gigantic beating heart. Of particular note was the excellent puppetry provided by the versatile Mark Bedard, who operated an eerie ventriloquist dummy that (SPOILER ALERT) ends up playing a key part in the action. And I cannot forget the ever-malleable U. Jonathan Toppo, whose turn as the aptly named (for a Shakespeare festival) family dog, Fortinbras, was a high point - right down to his wagging tail ... which I still can't figure out technically.

At a brisk hour and a half, with no intermission, this was a breezy tour de force evening about love, hope, and the ultimate power of a child's faith and intelligence. I did feel strangely distant from the emotional content - which is a bit odd, as the relationship between a lost father and a found daughter is traditionally right up my alley - but I'm not going to complain about that because the structure and conceptual elegance of the project were well worth the price of admission.

Indeed, I felt like I took a quick jaunt around the universe in 90 minutes via "tesseract" -- L'Engle's wormhole-like method of traveling immense stellar distances -- and was back in my seat in no time.

Rather exhilarating, really.

Now where did I park that blue box ...