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Shakespeare in the Park
By Milt Abel | August 7, 2011
| August 7, 2011Shakespeare in the Park
Lake Oswego, Oregon is a short, twenty-minute drive from my house. It’s an upper middle-class bedroom community that has lost its bedroom-ness due to the encroachment, engulfment, and further on wanderings of Portland’s urban sprawl. As I’ve traveled throughout the world I’ve heard the city named, despite it’s significantly smaller size, as often as I’ve heard Portland’s. I suspect it’s a community of travel agents and diplomats, sending kin to wherever a cruise ship comedian might be encountered.
Saturday, my wife and theater-prone daughter, and myself, went to see Shakespeare in the Park in Lake Oswego. The city has a few upper-middle class parks, and George Roberts Park is as nice a retreat from the cloyingly well-maintained, capacious, and multi-ported garaged homes, as you’d expect. The weather was nice too, though cloying in the direct sun after an hour.
The low ’80’s is warm for Oregon. We’re just not used to it. This year has been particularly wet and in May, when we had one of our first warm and sunny days, a significant portion of Oregonians got sunburned because they ignorantly wandered out like 1950’s Nevadans to stare at the bright light.
This Sunday morning I was reading an article about hundreds of high-temperature records across the US were set in the past week, more than have ever been recorded. Of course my thoughts trot to Al Gore. I lament the introduction of his message about global warming and its consequences, because it pulls the rug out from underneath a pleasant conversation staple: the weather. People were comfortable to talk about the weather because it was a subject that excluded everyone present from any culpability. No one to blame; complain as much as you please. Now that’s changed. Bring up the weather in a conversation circle and a coal manufacturer might hunch his shoulders and start pulling his head into his turtleneck sweater.
The play yesterday afternoon was Twelfe(sic) Night. It was not my favorite production from the troupe. I’ve gone to their shows three years running; every summer they throw Shakespeare onto a lawn for free and do it off the cuff. The acting ensemble’s name is Original Production Shakespeare (OSP) and their mission statement is to present Shakespeare as he, according to some historians, presented the plays; with very little rehearsal, even less memorization, and the actors literally reading their roles while performing.
Throughout these productions the actors carry their roles -a scroll of their lines, with only a few words of others as a cue. It makes for good fun, to sense the actors struggling, not over intent, but over words that, even upon hearing them as audience members struggle over as well. It’s all meant to be fun and spontaneous, while still presenting the play itself. An introduction before the play begins explains that due the difficulty of making copies at that time, and no restriction on plagiarism, actors where given only the minimum of text to perform their ‘role.’
Another bit of fun is the stage manager who sits just to the side of the performance, with a complete script, to prompt next lines, and actors entrances and exits. OPS’s productions have them wear a striped referee shirt and carry a whistle. When a barking dog, of a low flying plane is loud enough to blanket performers’ speech, a whistle is blown and an improv is called out; sometimes relating to the offending noise, sometimes not. My favorite yesterday was when he blew his whistle and called out “Zombie Prom!” and the entire cast moaned and melee’d through the sitting audience as the walking undead.
It was fun. But the play was too long, maybe we were interrupted too much. Shakespeare didn’t have to bother with airplanes.
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