ASHLAND, Ore. – In all the scrambling done this summer by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when a beam cracked in its largest indoor venue, one of the productions unaffected was a darkly intimate portrayal of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” The 400-year-old… Continue Reading
Amanda Dehnert’s Ashland production – by far the most powerful and original “Julius Caesar” I’ve seen – is like a jolt of black coffee: dark, strong, bitter, pungent. A nerve-jangling wake-up call; a bleak play for bleak times. To set… Continue Reading
What makes this world-premiere production so gripping is the same kind of prurient interest that might make us, in spite of ourselves, pick up a Murdoch tabloid: it “hacks” its way into an “inside” view of a “true” story, an under-the-skin peek at the turmoil of very well-known people in the throes of very public – and lurid – trauma.
In “Ghost Light,” the celebrity in question is noted theater guru Jonathan Moscone, artistic helmsman of the California Shakespeare Festival. And the lurid trauma is the 1978 murder of his father, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. But what elevates this major new play, ethically and aesthetically, above the level of Fox News sleaze is that here the hacking is introspective, delving beyond sensational superficialities to tap the deepest spiritual wellsprings of its characters. Continue Reading
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