Murray Ross

Ovations for us

The Denver Post just gave us ten Ovations nominations for excellence in theatre in 2008.  The nominations were chosen from 155 productions the Post reviewed last year--an impressive total which testifies both to the continued vitality of theatre along the front range, and to the Post's John Moore and Bob Bows, the paper's theatre critics, who have been really on the job.  The Post was able to review only two of our six productions this season (As You Like It and The Grapes of Wrath) before announcing its nominations, but we're very glad they made the long run down the interstate to the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater.  We're well outside their city limits and their usual beat.  But the Post obviously liked what they saw, and these nominations help establish us as a leading professional theatre in the entire state.  Just think if the Post had been able to review our other four locally originated productions (Blithe Spirit, Dar-al-Harb, Venus & Adonis and The Lying Kind), and liked them just as much as the other two.  Then we would have had 30 nominations, more even than the record setting Arvada Center!  This is shameless boosterism---John Moore reminds me he did see Blithe Spirit, just a little too late for a review.  So 30 nominations might be a stretch.  But we'll gladly take our ten.  Ten is not bad for an out of town club. Ten is plenty to write home about.  We're thrilled and delighted.  Our nominations are:

BEST DRAMA  The Grapes of Wrath

  BEST COMEDY  As You Like It

 BEST YEAR BY A DIRECTOR  Murray Ross (Dar al-Harb, As You Like It, Venus & Adonis, The Lying Kind)

BEST ACTOR IN A DRAMA  Josh Clayton,  The Grapes of Wrath

BEST ACTRESS IN A COMIC ROLE  Jane Noseworthy , As You Like It

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, DRAMATIC ROLE  Sean Tarrant, The Grapes of Wrath

 BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, DRAMATIC ROLE   Leslie O’Carroll, The Grapes of Wrath

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, COMEDIC ROLE  Kaitlyn Riordan,  As You Like It

 BEST ENSEMBLE  The Grapes of Wrath

BEST SOUND DESIGN  Will Boschelli,  The Grapes of Wrath

The winners, chosen by the critics, will be announced at the end of the year.  But there's a popular vote too, so if you want to put in your plug for us, please do. There's no need to fill out the entire ballot.

http://www.denverpost.com/theater/ci_11226990

Cheers, everyone---and especially to our terrific actors, designers, staff, crew, and audiences--all the great people that make THEATREWORKS work!

The Tree in the Forest . . .

What happens to the set when the play is over and done? Mysterious things.  In the normal course of events, a set is immediately discarded or broken into pieces and recycled.  But occasionally we will save large unique set pieces and put them away, ostensibly because we think we might use them again, but even more because we just love them and can't bear to chuck them out.  Wandering around our warehouse is like working through the strata of THEATREWORKS history.  There's an ornate baroque ottoman, thousands of bottles, a zillion chairs, some very large oil paintings, huge Bauhaus sculptural costumes, and lots of strange weaponry.  But there are gaps in the fossil record.  Once upon a time there was a truck. It was lovingly built by the actors playing Pa and Tom Joad from parts gathered from salvage yards, and used in our first production of Grapes of Wrath  back in 1993. That truck was a beautiful thing, and of course we saved it, but it's gone now, and no one knows why, when or where. We've moved our stuff many times, from one place to another, and each time is an occasion to purge the inventory.  But you don't just toss a truck, or if you do you'd think you'd remember it.  Also AWOL is a thirty foot pool liner we used to make the swimming pool in the student production of The Metamorphoses. Again, no one seems to have a clue (and our tech people are not habitually absent minded, like artistic directors). Perhaps someone sensibly thought we'd never need to fill our stage with water again, or that we'd never ever restage that that epic Steinbeck play. Perhaps late one night some desperate latter day Tom Joad broke into the warehouse, loaded the liner in the truck, and drove off to Arizona to start a carp pond business. He wouldn't have got far: the truck had no engine.  Of course a little thing like that wouldn't stop a Joad.

Fortunately, no such mysterious fate immediately awaits the tree which recently stood in our forest of Arden. It was a large and beautiful thing, a steel and mesh sculpture designed by Michael Stansbery and built by Roy Ballard.It might have gone straight to oblivion had not a school in Monument asked if they could buy it from us for their own production of As You Like It. And, for $150, the deal was done. Our tree will soon plant its roots in another Colorado Arden.  After that, who knows?  A friend of ours, Gavin Cameron-Webb, who directed in Boulder this summer, saw our show and said our tree reminded him of this picture.  Arden has moved to the beach, and grows shells from its branches.  It has suffered "a sea change/ Into something rich and strange," becoming now a set for another Shakespeare play: The Tempest. That's the mysterious way things come and go in the life of the theatre.

 

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"And these things finish . . ."

Our long summer of love in the woods is finally over, concluding with a final performance of As You Like It on Sunday afternoon.  I went to the show expecting an "end of term" atmosphere with maybe a few liberties taken--but there was only one: William the Clown took a curtain call in full belly, without a shirt.  He has a thing about his belly, as some men with bellies do. Auden,speaking of Sir John Falstaff, writes about this, and of how a big belly is a source of pride for its possessor--he has grown it all himself--and how it returns its bearer to a state of both pregnancy and infancy.  A big belly is not a thing to laugh to scorn.  Otherwise the show was as it has been, varying as much because of the audience as the actors.  On this final afternoon my favorite moment came towards the end, in the little scene where the inebriated hunters are returning with the deer they have bagged (the deer was an inflatable decoy), and are met by Jaques who demands to know "which is he that killed the deer?"  Knowing of Jaques sympathies for the native citizens of the forest, there is a silence on stage; no one is ready to fess up. The pause was broken in this production when a small boy, about 7, sitting next to me, piped up and said, "It was the guy with the arrows!"  And he was right, of course.  So the production ended on this little high note--though the play itself has lots of problems ending.

As You Like It is ready to end, as it should, with the long promised weddings of the four couples, and it is all set to do so when the god, Hymen, appears with Celia and Rosalind in their wedding gowns. He gives away all the brides, and then calls for a song to send the show:

Whiles a wedlock hymn we sing

Feed Yourselves with questioning

That reason wonder may diminish

How thus we met, and these things finish

Perfect, no?  The speaks in rhymed couplets which close the door firmly on the action. Now we'll have a concluding song as the characters exit speaking of the marvels of Ganymede, the magician, who has suddenly become the bride, Rosalind (a reasoned explanation will soon diminish this wonder). This is the way Shakespeare plays often end.  And indeed we get this promised song, but as soon as it's over yet another character we have never seen before enters the woods.  He is Jaques de Boys, the second son and middle brother of Orlando and Oliver.  He has a startling tale to tell of how old Duke Frederick had mustered an army to seize his brother, but who, marching into the magic woods, met an "old religious man" and was converted from his evil purposes.  The duke is going to live a religious life, and has returned lands and titles to the exiled lords. OK. It's a fairy tale--but so on some level--is the whole play.  All loose ends have been wrapped up. NOW we can end, right?  Yes--and so says Duke Senior, who invites us all now "to forget this new-fll'n dignity/And fall into our rustic revelry./Play, music! And you brides and bridegrooms all,/With measure heaped in joy to the measures fall."  Another strong concluding couplet, and the play will end with a dance, as Elizabethan comedies so often do.

But wait! Just as the dance is about to begin, the other Jaques, the French philosopher, steps forward to announce he is not for dancing measures. He's going off to see the old religious man too.  He stops the dance at the last possible moment, just as we are ready for it to begin, and then takes a long time to leave with a round of farewells. As usual, Jaques is always worth watching and hearing,so we can really really ready to end with the promised dance, as the Duke again announces in yet another  concluding couplet:

Proceed, proceed! We'll begin these rites

As we do trust they'll end, in true delights.

And with a dance, these things do, at last, finish. Well, not quite. Because at the end of the dance, when the wedding party leaves the stage and the last strains of the music fade, there is still someone coming back on stage---Rosalind.  And guess what?  She has more to say, appearing as epilogue, asking favor and taking her own extended farewell. And  now, for the fourth and last time, the play actually ends.

Don't ask me to explain this, or tell you what it means. I don't know why  Shakespeare created three false endings for his play.  But having watched the show many times this summer, and watched the audience watching the show, I would say that As You Like It is oddly constructed.  It's first act is all plot and exposition.  Who is who, and who is doing what to whom (assassinating, banishing, falling in love, etc.). Oddly enough, it is the intensely plot driven first part of the play that is most tedious; almost dull, in spite of love, treachery,  great wrestling and cruel banishment.  Once the play gets into the woods, the plot stops. There's nothing much to do but meet, talk, love, and sit down and sing. But it's here in the woods, free from the tyranny of plot, that the play sets sail.  There is indeed "no clock in the forest." Very little happens, but the play never seems slow. And plot has been so much discarded that when it finally does come time for an ending it's difficult to manage.  The play doesn't want to end.  It wants to go on and on and on--and it does.  And that's the way we like it.

 

 

As You Like It #4: Miss Nebraska

Any decent director will tell you that casting is at least 80% of the job, and in some plays casting your lead is most of the casting.  You'd be crazy to do Hamlet, without  knowing in advance who's your Prince of Denmark, or Richard III without a clue about who's going to be your guy with the hump. The same is true for casting Rosalind in As You Like It.  The play is not hers alone, but it's certainly more hers than anyone's.  She has more lines than any woman character in Shakespeare. And they are good lines too. She's Shakespeare's most gifted comic heroine, and, as Harold Bloom says, "as remarkable in her mode as Falstaff and Hamlet are in theirs."  In other words, it's a pretty good role.  But as recently as two months ago I had no idea who our Rosalind might be.

As You Like It #2-- Clowning Around

Hamlet famously advises the players he is directing to control their funny men.  "Let those that play your clowns speak more than is set down form them," he says, "for there be of them that will them selves laught toset on some quantity of barren spectators to laught too, though in the the mean timessome necessary question of the play be then to be considered.  That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it." Clowns, he says, are loose cannons on stage.  And boy, is Hamlet right.