Plays and More

Off the Rails reinterprets Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure as a tale of life for Native Americans in the early West.  Set in a brothel in a town with a school for Native American children, the play presents the conflicts that were a way of life in the development and settling of the West.  A puritanical and immoral  mayor sentences an Indian to death for being married to a white woman.  In his view, the Pawnee marriage was invalid and the young man was guilty of rape.  White and Indian characters show the conflicts in both a serious, comic and musical way.  The play is excellent and tells a story about which we know too little.

We wisely attended a talk on the Odyssey where we learned of the various interpretations of Homer’s story.  Playwright/director Mary Zimmerman’s style of creating is to give the cast an outline, let them work the dialog out, and then put it all together into an excellent play.  This long (three plus hours) production was outstanding.  The actors, costumes, and presentation gripped our attention as we learned of Odysseus’ travails following the Trojan War and of the struggles of his faithful wife and distraught son.  Of the three wonderful plays, this one won our prize for the being the best.

 Unison (by Jeff): A play/musical (maybe) about the life of August Wilson. The opening of the performance was intriguing and does draw you into the potential of the play. Unfortunately, I found the seven Terrors to be fairly mundane, typical of many lives and doing nothing to inspire me to learn more about such a significant poet. In the performance itself, many of the songs had repeated lines where the same lyric would be sung multiple times. In one or two songs, that would be okay. When it is a part of nearly all the songs and some of the dialog, I found it extremely distracting and started to ‘tune out’. Overall, I was disappointed in the stage direction and/or script. However, I will say that it was well acted and staged. The performers themselves did an excellent job and there were moments in the play that were quite gripping, eg scenes with his daughter and his mother.


The next morning we made our mandatory pilgrimage to Rouge River Creamery to stock up on the luscious cheeses.  Then we drove up to Le Pine State Park.  We sit amidst a forest of lodgepole pine and a few yards from the Deschutes River.  During the evening a trio of strangers (one couple and one single) played their accordion/violin/guitar renditions of familiar songs.  It was a pleasant background as we sat in the mild air reading


When we arrived at Le Pine we decided to take a walk through the forest and by the river.