Theater and friends

Ashland, Oregon, July 6, 2018--Yesterday began our theater days.   We enjoyed our normal filling breakfast at the Winchester Inn, the first class hotel about 300 yards from the Shakespeare Theater, and then headed off early in the afternoon to the first of the two plays we saw at the Shakespeare Festival.  Manahatta.  

This play is about the Lenape Indians, home, high finance and Indian sorrow.   The plot, set in two times--Dutch colonization of Manhattan and the 2008 meltdown of Lehman Brothers.  We felt it was an absorbing high class soap opera.  The acting of course was superb but the play itself needs some rework to become as important as the Cherokee author, Mary Kathryn Nagl would like it to be. 

We enjoyed a lovely dinner at the Alchemy Restaurant here in the hotel:  John had exquiste breast of duck with a starter of asparagus and pancetta. Ben enjoyed halibut with a cantaloup soup starter.  The wine was a local Weisinger Winery from Ashland...a Cabernet Sauvignon.

The second play was one of the Shakespeare's comedies, Love's Labour's Lost.  (Note the possessives--important).  We had never seen LLL before.  It's very funny in the Elizabethan sense, but the comedic lines are difficult for 21st century playgoers to understand.  To cope with this the director, Amanda Dehnert, decided to set the play with rock music, body painting, color intervals and water hoses.  The body of the play is difficult to follow because there are so many interacting Elizabethan plots combined, but if you go with the flow, it's a lot of fun.  The last ten minutes are the heart of the play, where love's labor is lost when the play turns deadly serious over death and perjury, as the Elilzabethans called the breaking of oaths.