Egypt and China

Yesterday, July 2, was a theater day.  We attended two performances, both of them superb in very different ways.   The two plays were Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and a production written by a major modern Chinese playwright, Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land.

Antony and Cleopatra was grand!   The production, outside in the huge Allen Elizabethan Theater took no liberties with the script, followed along with what you would expect of a major Shakespeare play and was perhaps the best version we have ever seen.   The acting was magnificent, the set inventive, and the costuming completely fitting to the tragedy.   It’s a must.  We are not generally given to standing ovations but this play got one.   

The other play, by Stan Lai, having its US premiere, is a strange combination of two plays into one:  One is a 4th Century AD Chinese play, the other a play set in modern Taiwan as Mainland China opened in the 1980s for a dying man who was in love with a woman in 1948 in Shanghai, and separated by the Maoist Revolution.  In this play, the two plays are scheduled for rehearsals in the same theater on one night and interact with each other, at one point with both rehearsals being played out at the same time.   While the production is confusing in the beginning, the way it works out with the two plays actually completing their scripts separately at the end of the evening is comedic and tragic at the same time.  The after-play discussion featured Leah Anderson who played Blossom.  Ms. Anderson is the daughter of an Asian father and a Caucasian mother who grew up with her mother in Los Angeles and went to Yale to study political science.  After considering law school, she decided to follow her passion and went to Brown for an MFA in drama.  The discussion included a good bit about race which, of course is on everybody’s mind these days. Apparently, race played a major role in the workshop discussions as well as the translation of this play.  Ms Anderson, given her mixed-race status was seminal in these discussions.  Apparently she is also a playwright.  She plays Hero in Much Ado About Nothing which we will see this afternoon.      

We had dinner at Larks Hotel restaurant in the center of Ashland, with a lovely Umpqua Valley Abacela albariño white (very dry) to go with Ben’s lingcod (a Pacific Ocean fish) on kale and lentils and John’s meat loaf.  It’s an “American” restaurant, aiming to do down-home cooking.  Other members of the group had Southern fried chicken.  Ben started with sautéed brussels sprouts with bacon and nuts, while John had an arugula salad with pickled radishes and toasted cashews.  While Ben really enjoyed his cod, John thinks his own meat loaf is better.