Eugene weekly., May 29, 2003, Page 22, Image 22

BY ARIA SELIGMANN
Jennifer Coombs and Sharon Sless
in Lord Leebrick’s How I Learned
to Drive opening June 4.
ship with him. Instead of falling into the vic-
tim/perpetrator dichotomy, Vogel says she
set out to explore “how we can receive great
love from the people who harm us.”
Just as Shock and Awe is constructed to
revisit 1960s idealism, Vogel also sets Drive
in the ’60s, when the sexual revolution was
just beginning. The audience is taken on a
journey of how Li’l Bit, the young woman,
finds her path of peace during a series of
driving lessons.
How I Learned to Drive opens June 4 at
Lord Leebrick.
CLIFF COLES
V
Playing Politics
Heavy-hitting drama and the new boy in town .
U
O Philosophy Professor and play-
wright Cheyney Ryan calls his
newest play, Shock and Awe, “a
sophisticated political satire that will drive
George Bush into retirement.”
Confidence is good.
The play’s action occurs on the eve of the
American invasion of Iraq. A group of
friends, all former radicals who went to Yale
in 1968, have reunited. “It turns out to be
kind of a mystery — you find out quickly
there’s a reason they’re all there,” says Ryan.
“It’s a Big Chill sort of thing.”
But many in the group have left behind
their activist past and are now either going
along with or are actually part of the Bush
administration. The play raises moral issues
about how people change their political
whims, for expediency or for their jobs.
“How do we feel about those people
who’ve changed horses in midstream? This
play presents the audience with the opportu-
nity to think about those issues,” says Hans
Christofferson, who directs the public read-
ing of Shock and Awe at 8 pm May 30 and 31
at Tsunami Books.
Christofferson has directed both readings
and performances of four of Ryan’s other
plays, which have all been produced out of
town. Ryan has already made arrangements
to have Shock and Awe produced in New
York, but is doing the reading here as a work-
shop that will give him a chance to hear the
dialogue and get feedback from the audi-
ence.
“While the play tends to be cerebral at
times,” says Christofferson, “it has comedy.”
For Ryan, a former comedy writer, the
balance is “finding the right amount of
humor,” he says. “You can ruin things by
making them too funny. You can ruin your
point.”
Although the play is a satire, Ryan says
the themes regard “very serious issues about
what the hell is going on in the country and
what we need to do about it.” He believes
doing this reading is a step toward getting
performers more motivated. “We’re trying to
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encourage people to do more political theater
and other types of performing arts as well.
Some of us are now starting to talk about
how to make this happen,” he says, adding,
“We need to get more of a cultural response
to what’s going on.”
M
eanwhile, Lord Leebrick Theatre
Company, which co-sponsors the
Shock and Awe reading, continues
to offer socially and politically relevant the-
ater. Like Ryan, LLTC Managing Artistic
Director Corey Pearlstein says “I am attract-
ed to voices that use comedy as a weapon to
effect social consciousness.” Pearlstein
directs the upcoming production of How I
Learned to Drive, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
play by Paula Vogel that deals with the issue
of sexual abuse.
A young woman is abused by her uncle
but must find a way to continue a relation-
ogel’s Drive will be the last show
for Pearlstein, who will make his
Eugene exit in late July, almost
three years to the day after he made his
entrance. Pearlstein’s replacement, Craig
Willis, takes on his new MAD role in early
July.
Willis has just wrapped up his PhD in
theater from the UO and also earned his
MFA there. Although he was a student here,
he was pretty busy earning those degrees and
his life remained in Seattle, where he
returned most weekends. Now, he says, he
looks forward to “finally living in Eugene.”
But Willis is no stranger to the Lord
Leebrick. He was originally slotted to direct
A Winter’s Tale for LLTC’s second
Shakespeare show, but was unable to do it at
the last minute. “One of the advantages I
have coming in is knowing at least the names
of many people, and some I actually know,”
he says.
Willis’s background is in directing, teach-
ing and in children’s theater.
His directing credits for the UO are
impressive. In 1994, he directed a well-
received production of Moliére’s The
Learnèd Ladies. He returned as a guest artist
to direct Noel Coward’s Design for Living in
1997. And, more recently, he directed
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?
In addition, he’s worked for Seattle
Children’s Theatre, California Theatre
Center, Sunnyvale Summer Repertory, and
as tour manager for the Dayton Ballet. He
has also directed for fringe theater compa-
nies and community theaters in Washington,
California, and Ohio. His production of
Terrence McNally’s Noon was honored as a
“hot ticket” feature, garnering an encore in
the Best Of the Seattle Fringe Festival in
1995.
“We need to get more of a cultural
response to what’s going on.”
–Cheyney Ryan
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