The Year Not in Reviews

Because of my very part-time job doing press for HSU plays, I don’t write about those productions in my part-time piecework columns here. But I’m dismayed that HSU productions aren’t covered much elsewhere in the Journal either. So in this context let me speak up for the role of HSU theatre in the local ecosystem, particularly when the university is taking a hard look at its priorities, and from time to time there have been rumors of threats to HSU theatre’s existence.

Besides benefiting the university as a much-needed public interface with the community, HSU theatre brings particular strengths and important contributions in the kinds of plays it does and how it does them. Its recent commitment to doing new plays, often by North Coast playwrights, is pretty much unique here right now. In general, HSU provides training and people essential to North Coast stages, with participation both by students who enliven local theatre while here, and by faculty and former students who remain active in the community.

Lastly, this fall was unusual for offering three productions of Shakespeare. That this theatrical community was able to mount two large cast productions pretty much simultaneously (The Merry Wives of Windsor at NCRT and The Winter’s Tale at HSU), while overlapping with the large cast of Noises Off at Ferndale Rep, is astonishing.

Northcoast Prep doing King Lear got me thinking about Ronald Harwood’s play The Dresser (also a movie with Albert Finney), which was about a small Shakespeare company playing the English provinces during World War II, based loosely on Donald Wolfit, reputedly one of the great Lears of the century. He was a last exemplar of the “actor/manager” school, and the theatrical style emphasizing the star, declaiming the great Shakespeare parts.

That rejected style had its excesses, but as a general comment, today’s emphasis on concepts and creating “stage pictures” may have gone too far in other directions. Those old-style actors knew how to make sure they were seen and heard clearly. They created the stage equivalent of close-ups. It’s really not that Shakespeare’s language is so difficult; just that there’s a lot of it. Instead of devising distractions, I’m in favor of making it easier to see and hear the words spoken.

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