@WillametteWeek
GARY NORMAN
REVIEW
@WillametteWeek
@wweek
WRITING ON THE WALL: Jessica Tidd.
Life During Wartime
THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE IS A SPRAWLING MIX
OF POLITICS AND COMEDY.
T
he Caucasian Chalk Circle is a dense play. There are mul-
tiple story lines. There’s a play within a play, and another
play within that play. It’s three hours long.
Set during World War II, Bertolt Brecht’s modernist epic tells
the story of a town near the Caucasus Mountains. The town’s
governor gets beheaded by the militant Ironshirts. In the chaos
of fl eeing the rebellion, the governor’s wife (Clara Hillier) leaves
behind her infant son. Grusha (Samie Pfeifer), a maid in the gov-
ernor’s house, rises out of the swirling mass of characters as the
closest thing to the play’s protagonist when she reluctantly takes
the abandoned baby on a journey across the mountains.
It’s a sprawling, complicated plot. So it’s a relief to fi nd that the
set for Shaking the Tree’s production is so bare. The stage is cre-
ated by a single ring of audience chairs surrounded by chalkboard
walls. The ensemble cast of 12 play a countless rotation of charac-
ters, often as campy caricatures—Jessica Tidd plays an animalistic
Ironshirt with wide eyes and bared teeth, and in his brief role as the
governor, Heath Koerschgen does a Donald Trump impersonation.
Using bamboo sticks, the cast create the scenery, too. They hold
sticks vertically above their heads to make a forest, and into the
form of a triangle for a house. Clifton Holznagel and Briana Ratter-
man Trevithick serve as our narrators, introducing scenes with
hammy smiles and folky songs played on guitar and accordion.
With weighty dialogue about political revolution, cheeky
humor and abstract staging, Chalk Circle is a lot to make sense
of. But it’s also lively and often hilarious, and there are moments
that are as imaginative as they are emotionally effective. On
Grusha’s journey, she has to cross a treacherous mountain pass.
In low, dramatic lighting, actors hold a net of interlocking strands
of cloth just above the ground. Grusha carefully steps from thin
cloth to cloth, weighing it to the ground as the net trembles in
sync with a tense violin played by ensemble actor Luisa Sermol.
Holding the attention of an audience over three hours is a
feat itself, as is balancing oddball humor with sincere drama.
Even with its evocative imagery, Shaking the Tree doesn’t
totally overcome those challenges. But the fact that they get
as close as they do is remarkable. SHANNON GORMLEY.
Wesley Johnson
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Each office is Independently Owned and Opertated
SEE IT: Shaking the Tree, 823 SE Grant St., shaking-the-tree.
com. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, through Nov.
4. $10-$30.
Willamette Week OCTOBER 11, 2017 wweek.com
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