Ducks @ Oregon - University of Oregon

Ashland: More than just Shakespeare

Katie D.

May 10, 2009 - 8:00 PM

I finally had the chance to attend the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland! For any of you who don't know, the Ashland Shakespeare Festival is world-class theater, with a fabulous acting company, three performance halls, and a yearly offering of multiple works of Shakespeare and others. The Festival is an annual summer event thtat brings people from all over the world.

And finally, finally I had the chance to go.

I went on a trip sponsored by the Clark Honors College Student Association (CHCSA). We spent Saturday night at a hostel in Ashland and saw two plays. The first night was Macbeth, and Sunday we saw a matinée performance of Dead Man's Cellphone. CHCSA does this trip every spring, and finally I participated. The twenty-five or so students who attended were provided with tickets to the show and only had to pay $20 each for housing. What an incredible deal.

Both shows were phenomenal. Their rendering of Macbeth was simply amazing. The set and costumes were incredible, the cast fabulous, and the gory parts were appropriately gory. Macbeth is not my favorite Shakespeare play, but it does have some fabulous moments, particularly in the study of human insanity.

I don't know how to describe the play without going into exhaustive detail. But it was definitely the best performance of Shakespeare I have ever attended.

This afternoon we saw Dead Man's Cellphone, written by Sarah Ruhl. Although I had heard wonderful reports on the play, I really didn't know what to expect. The brief synopsis left something to be desired in the way of actual description of the play, although it did have a good deal to say about our society's alienation and dependence on cellphones.

The play was hilarious.

It was performed in the New Theater, which is a truly unique venue with the ability to actually reconfigure the audience's seats and to raise and lower each part of the stage. For this play, the audience was seated around three sides of a rectangular stage set below us. The New Theater is also small, making the experience very intimate.

The play begins with a ditzy woman in a cafe being disturbed by a man's incessantly ringing cell phone. After asking him repeatedly to answer it, she marches over and answers it herself. When he still does not respond, she takes a message for him on a napkin. Only then does she take a hard look at the man, and discoveres that he has died halfway through a bowl of lentil soup. She then continues to answer his cellphone and does her best to reconcile this man with his family and friends, who are quite the amusing bunch.

The humor would be difficult to really write for you. But I will say that, in addition to being extremely funny, it was also a very intelligent play. The author addresses some of the issues and ethics of this age in which we live constantly plugged into networks of long-distance communication that often leave us distanced from those who should be closest to us. The audience is asked "if a man is talking to someone in Tokyo and dies, does he die here, on the subway, or does he die in Tokyo?" (or something similar to this)

What impressed me most about this play was the interaction between actors and the audience. With seats on three sides of the stage, there really wasn't a "front" of the stage. Conversations, therefore, happened at a variety of angles and distances that are actually far more realistic than the normal theater format. It also meant that the set was creatively minimal, so as to not block any view of the action.

I don't remember the last time a work of theater made me laugh so hard.

The whole weekend trip was really wonderful. The plays were great, and the time spent in Ashland was wonderful. One of my best friends' sister dances with a professional company in Ashland, so we met her and her parents for breakfast and had the chance to re-connect with them and see Ashland from a "local's" perspective. It is a beautiful town, and manages to maintain its character despite the tourist focus. The Shakespeare Festival is the obvious focus of the whole city, which means that peripheral businesses are all geared toward the arts and artsy culture. We spent a good amount of time in Lithia Park, which was beautiful and full of kids celebrating Mother's Day. We also sampled some famous "Lyithia Water." If you've been there, you know what I'm talking about. Basically it's mineral water, I guess, but after a taste we collectively decided on the descriptor "fart water." I guess every city has its quirks.

I plan to go back to Ashland at least once this summer, but hopefully more. I hope to have several members of my family and friends come to visit, and I would like to take them all on trips to Ashland. And I'll certainly be going on the CHCSA trip again next spring. What a deal. What a trip!