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September 13, 2017
Awakening a Sense of What You’ve Been Missing
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by
Plays worth the journey to
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
To my mind, the best the-
ater experiences awaken a sense
of what you have been missing
-- by telling a story you had not
thought to wonder about -- or one
neglected in the theater world, or
by speaking in a theatrical or mu-
sical language whose potential is
yet untapped. Several shows are
still playing at the Oregon Shake-
speare Festival that offer just such
opportunities to experience the-
ater in fresh ways.
UniSon: The great August
Wilson well deserves the recog-
nition he has received from the
dominant culture, but likely would
not be pleased to find that some of
the theaters which now produce
his plays from time to time pro-
duce few or no other playwrights
of color. I adore Wilson’s work,
but feel certain that such tokenism
would have roiled him; he was all
about honoring the distinctness of
neglected voices. I experienced
“UniSon” as a canny rejoinder to
that trend; this new play is August
Wilson as we have never seen
him. Its creators have used access
to Wilson’s unpublished poetry
to mount something distinct: a
highly intuitive exorcism of the
demons and depths of one African
American man, and a meditation
on living and dying.
In many ways, I feel unquali-
fied to describe what is happening
here; this production so clearly
springs from African American
experience, and speaks in a the-
atrical language outside the dom-
inant one we are used to seeing
on stage. I felt it calling forth
different faculties, urging me to
let go of diagnosing what was
Photo by J enny g raham , o regon s hakesPeare F estivaL
Kevin Kenerly (left) and Steven Sapp are a boxer and poet with a shared past in “UniSon,” derived
from the great African American Playwright August Wilson, now playing at the Oregon Shakespeare
Festival in Ashland.
happening and just let the music
and poetry wash over me. I found
myself asking why I wanted to
know which words came from
Wilson and which didn’t, which
experiences were based on “fact”
and which weren’t. I also found
myself questioning my attachment
to conventional storytelling. This
work feels somehow less angular,
more fluid.
Its creators, the theatrical group
Universes, have a track record of
working from a place of clarity.
Their work includes “Party Peo-
ple,” a rousing tribute to the Black
Panthers and the Young Lords
which was created for OSF and
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eventually moved to the Public
Theater in New York last fall. As
with that work, “UniSon” revels
in music and movement, and lives
inside a world in which all words
feel like song lyrics, whether or
not they are sung. Here the ac-
tion revolves around a successful
writer who bequeaths his posses-
sions to a young protégée with in-
structions not to open a particular
trunk; she cannot resist, and then
finds herself on a journey through
unknown dark reaches of her men-
tor’s psyche. I recommend enter-
ing this world ready to feel the
music and poetry in your body.
Keep it visceral; these artists are
showing the way.
Off the Rails: For the first time
ever (and long overdue), OSF is
producing the work of a Native
American playwright. This world
premiere of Randy Reinholz’s play
loosely but recognizably adapts
Shakespeare’s “Measure for Mea-
sure” to tell the story of Pawnee
tribal members’ experience of
19th century life in and around
the Indian schools which were so
instrumental to the genocide of
Native cultures. At times the fit
with Shakespeare feels uncannily
apt, particularly in terms of Mo-
maday and Isabel, the siblings at
the heart of the play. Momaday’s
death sentence for impregnating
his Irish sweetheart (whom he
has married in the Pawnee way)
feels suitably arbitrary; at the time
depicted, Irish were outcasts and
mostly not recognized as white,
so this enlistment of the justifi-
cation of white supremacy feels
appropriately sinister. And Isa-
bel’s location at a cross-section
of conversion to Christianity and
pride in her Pawnee heritage feels
C ontinued on P age 15