Oregon

We are back on the road, this time with our son Jeff.  Our trip took a sad turn, not personally but tourist-wise.  The first stage our of our trip was a few days in Ashland, mostly to enjoy the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (you have read about that several times before).  Also, this trip always includes a shopping spree at the Butte Mill in Eagle Point and the Rogue Creamery in Central Point.  After we parked the RV and unhooked the car, we headed to the mill but this is what we found.

The mill burnt last Christmas morning and we also learned the owner lost his wife to cancer last September.  We feel great sympathy for the owner and his family.

Then we went to get wonderful cheese and learned the cheesemaker's son had just drowned.  Such sad news.

While we do feel sympathy for both these families, we did enjoy our stay.  When Jeff hiked up Roxy Ann Peak Trail, Jerry and Anna Lee did a volkswalk through Central Point, admiring the murals,

statues

and mosaics.

But the plays the thing we most came for.  We saw three excellent plays and will each provide a review from each of us.

Richard II by Anna Lee. 

Presented in more recent times, the play was timely for its political bent.  What we lacked was the background to appreciate greater what we were watching.  Certainly, the tale of a weak king usurped by a man who tried to serve him and was banished, has some pertinence for our time but the story lacked the power of some of the other histories of the British monarchy.

Vietgone by Jeff:

My parents are forcing me to do this, which has taught me that you can never get away from Junior High School.

The play is a romance set against the backdrop of the end of the Viet Nam war. This unlikely combination is a far cry from the many presentations of that conflict and yet tells a much more personal take on the meaning of the US involvement. Likewise, the story is told with a significant amount of comic elements interwoven with poignant discussions of the characters’ losses, both spiritual and physical. The romance itself is between a married man with children and an ‘old’ 30 year old woman. It developed from mutual need and ultimately a recognition that the home they had left was no longer available to them. A recurring theme was that, as opposed to public opinion at home, the South Vietnamese looked at the American soldiers with hope and an admiration of the sacrifices they made to save Vietnamese lives.

As for the staging, I will admit the playwright included a number of elements that I would normally not find interesting, including judicious use of swear words and frequent use of rap in the musical elements. Despite my misgivings about this style, I found myself enjoying the presentation immensely, though, I still find the experience of Asian characters rapping as strange as it was when I lived in Korea ten years ago. The only slight difficulty I had with the play was the frequent change in time-lines, occasionally making it difficult to determine what had already happened and what happened in the future.   

Roe by Jerry:

Roe was an excellent history of the case of Roe v. Wade and what happened to the participants years after the decision was issued.  Roe, the plaintiff, thought that, if she went to court, she would be able to obtain a legal abortion in Texas.  Whether it was explained to her that, even if she won, she was too far along in her pregnancy to abort was one of the issues that was addressed.  After she won her case through the landmark Supreme Court decision, she converted to become a Christian and, ultimately a Roman Catholic, and anti abortion spokesperson. She was used and abused by everyone she came into contact with.  A very sad story from her perspective.

The young female attorney who argued the case for Roe was a recent law school graduate who was handling her first contested case all the way to the Supreme Court.  With over 40 years experience, I would not like to go up there and I can’t imagine how she must have felt.  Other characters in the play were the people who supported and used Roe (Norma McCorvey was her real name) including her abusive mother, lesbian girl friend, the preacher who turned her on to religion, and the reporters and personalities who gave her 15 minutes of fame.

The important message of the play was that Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land and should remain so.  This was driven home a few weeks ago when the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that virtually eliminated the right to abortion for no reason other than the fact that they did not want the right to be available.  Justice Stephen Breyer, brother of my high school classmate wrote the opinion and was joined by Justice Kennedy making this a 5-3 vote.   Roe will be showing in Berkeley in March of next year and, if you can, it is well worth the trip there to see it.