Darkest Suburbia...and Beyond!

Four plays down, one to go. None of the current set blew me away to the extent that Come From Away did this past spring (but then, that's a really high bar). OTOH, it's been a very pleasantly relaxing week, and there've been a couple of genuinely pleasant and unexpected surprises onstage.

( King Hedley II )

OTOH, I'm really not the target audience for this year's production of ( Taming of the Shrew )

The week's other Shakespeare was ( Henry IV, Part I )

By contrast, David Henry Hwang's ( Yellow Face )

Now it can be told...

The HQ of Darkest Suburbia has moved!

I'm now one suburb further out from Portland proper...but where I previously had one rather sparsely scheduled bus line a seven-minute walk from my front door, I now have a MAX station four minutes away by foot, not one but two frequent-service bus lines just slightly further away, and two community theater companies within a few minutes' stroll. There is a cheerfully busy preschool in the next quarter-block over (I can see the back door out the window of the new home-office space as I type this), and whereas I am still a lifestyle non-driver, I am now the proud possessor of that prize of all prizes, the Very Large Closet™ that most people refer to as a garage.

I have almost 50% more square footage in the new condo as I did in the old, including a (tiny, not yet furnished) third bedroom, two and a half baths (there is an Issue with the walk-in shower in the master, which requires a contractor's intervention and with luck will be finished by the time I get back from Worldcon (!)), an actual if rather small pantry, and an electric range that purports to be a Smart Thing capable of talking to my phone.

As you see, the books themselves are not yet unpacked (the photo shows one of two bookcase units that arrived last week and have just been professionally assembled and duly attached to the wall). Once things get just a bit less chaotic, I am strongly considering staging a book-shelving party wherein I invite everyone I know over and offer pizza and beverages in exchange for help unpacking and arranging the books (some of which will need to come upstairs to the shelves in the office and the master suite). I will spare you the photo of the garage Very Large Closet™ showing all the boxes of books....

Let me start with the wham line: I did stand up at the end for OSF's production of Come From Away. The book is just that good, and the ensemble cast is also just that good. (The production as a whole is not perfect, but we'll get to that in a minute.)

I should note here that this was my first proper encounter with Come From Away. I know I watched the Tony broadcast the year the show premiered, and was very broadly familiar with the real-world inspiration for its creation, but till today I'd never seen it staged. Nonetheless, I went in predisposed to be touched; just looking over the director's notes in the playbill was enough to make me tear up a bit while waiting for the house lights to dim, and I remained emotionally invested in the action onstage throughout.

If you're somehow not familiar with this musical, it's set in the very real Very Small Town of Gander in Newfoundland, which happens to have one of the world's largest airfields in its back yard, and which was therefore suddenly tasked to accept seven thousand abruptly diverted airline passengers being redirected away from NYC on September 11, 2001. By rights this should have been a recipe for disastrous levels of chaos and strife - but instead it laid the foundation for perhaps the all-time greatest and most successful act of community service in modern history.

Structurally speaking, it is also by many standards a very odd musical. For one thing, it's a genuine ensemble cast - at least half the players arguably qualify as co-leads, and there are almost no pure solo numbers in the whole show. It's also relatively short, at least here at OSF, with a brisk 100-minute run time.

But short or not, the book and lyrics are brilliantly written, the characters (virtually all of them based on real-life stranded passengers and local Gander residents) are all drawn with a thoughtful mix of humor and heart, and every cast member is up to the challenge of playing double or triple roles on both sides of the cultural divide.

I have only one significant criticism, but it's one that's been a recurring issue with OSF's stage musicals in recent years: the sound levels for the orchestra have been set one or two degrees stronger than those for the vocals . . . and that, for Comes From Away, as full of ensemble pieces as it is, often makes it very difficult for the singers' words to reach the audience as clearly as they should. Given that there's evidently no published edition of the script for viewers to consult in order to get the full benefit of the show's lyrics - or so I was told by the OSF gift shop, which routinely carries printed editions of most of the shows the Festival produces - this is a serious and frustrating problem.

But even accounting for that complaint, Come From Away comes in at a solid 9.8 out of 10 (and feels especially relevant just now in light of current real-world events). This one is worth coming from away to southern Oregon, all by itself.

////

I can't say the same for You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World!. Indeed, the kindest thing I can say is that this play - a nearly new show written and first produced in a much smaller venue just last year - and I are catastrophically incompatible.

First, I'm a very hard sell for embarrassment-driven comedy, and there's a great deal of it here. I'm an equally hard sell for comedy that treats seriously dysfunctional family environments with what feels like caricature as opposed to characterization - and too much of what I saw onstage felt to me like caricature, particularly of the play's most openly queer character. I'm also inherently wary of scripts that wade heavily into preaching their social agendas, and this script leans very hard on climate change issues throughout. Finally, one major plot line involves one of the leads being diagnosed with - and ultimately dying from - stage IV pancreatic cancer . . . which is, as it happens, precisely what took my father some years ago.

Ultimately, at least for me, You Are Cordially Invited... is trying to juggle far too many balls at once, and thereby failing to do justice to any of its characters and themes. It doesn't help that the play breaks the fourth wall right from the start, introduces a version of real-life climate activist Greta Thunberg as an onstage presence - "character" isn't quite the right word here - and makes an abrupt and tonally odd left turn into a more serious vein at the very end. [In particular, I would refer readers to Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" novels as a far better and more cohesive treatment of similar themes, and A Wizard's Dilemma in particular as an immensely more mature treatment of a parental cancer diagnosis.]

It's only fair to note that the Friday evening audience with whom I saw the show was, as a whole, a good deal more enthusiastic than I was (that being said, I will also note that a sizeable chunk of that audience, in the Festival's intimate Thomas Theater, was made up of a young student tour group, whose theatrical instincts were necessarily far less jaded than mine). And as virtually all of my objections are at the scripting level, I can't fault the actors for doing their best with the material they were given.

Fortunately for OSF audiences, Festival productions very rarely misfire as badly as I think this one did - and I don't doubt there are viewers who will disagree with my views of the show). But this is one case where I would recommend skipping the play entirely, and that's a call I don't make lightly.

A bit of back story before we dive into the next installment, as I'm not sure I've ever related the full history of how I became a theater geek in general and a Shakespeare geek in particular.

My first visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was in summer 1974, courtesy of a student tour organized by two of my junior high English teachers. In itself, that's not unusual, but our group was distinctive in a couple of ways. It was purely extracurricular, for one; you couldn't just sign up, you had to be approved. We had quite a lot of free time, were mostly on our own for meals, there was a dress code for the performances themselves, and while the adult chaperones stayed mostly in the background, they could and did step in where needed to derail any serious shenanigans (which were rare).

The tour schedule involved seeing four or five plays in three days, our first show that year was Twelfth Night...and it was one of those nights when the cast was "on", the audience was "on", and the actor playing Feste had the whole house in the palm of his hand. I was instantly hooked. The next day included a backstage tour far more intimate than those available nowadays, in which our guide was one of the actors and we were introduced to several non-standard ways of creating all the gore needed for a proper staging of Titus Andronicus.

I went on that trip for six years running (high school tour alumni could return as "junior chaperones"), as did my mother (as an actual chaperone). Once I was in college, we discovered that Whitman ran its own alumni tour, which became an annual pilgrimage for my parents and I, though Whitman finally discontinued it a few years ago. Nowadays I do my own booking, and have been doing so long enough that the owner of the airport shuttle service now recognizes my voice when I call.

Mind, OSF wasn't the only factor in play. Though I was never a theater geek in high school, I did participate in the speech-&-debate program - and in the process, made friends among the theater kids who branched out from drama classes into the dramatic-reading events that were part of the speech team's competitive schedule. I began writing play reviews for my high school and college papers, and made more friends among Whitman's drama majors (some of whom have gone on to successful acting careers). I have not seen nearly as much local theater as I'd like (a situation likely to change Real Soon Now, as there are now two community theaters within fifteen minutes' walk from my brand new front door), but I like to keep up with what my local schools are putting on.

And that's enough autobiography for now....

For such readers as are still following along despite my irregular blogging pace (and yes, I can hear you laughing on the other end of the fiber-optic lines), a Note:

This journal isn't going anywhere, but news is likely to be even more scattered in the next few weeks than usual. Your correspondent is moving - purely locally, mind you - to a different sector of Darkest Suburbia (indeed, somewhat closer to what might be counted as Downtown Darkest Suburbia, which is not quite the contradiction in terms that the coinage suggests).

You do not want to know how many boxes and how much packing and organizing this involves. Trust me on this.

At the other end of the move, however, there will be considerably more living space, an actual guest bedroom (which will require a guest bed to go with it), and (wonder of wonders) a slightly oversized one-car garage - or, as we lifestyle non-drivers like to refer to such things, a badly needed Very Large Closet™.

And possibly, once the dust settles, I'll actually manage to start posting more often....

Based on early reviews, I went in predisposed to like the new Superman movie, and for the most part, I was very much not disappointed. David Corenswet stands out as excellent in a uniformly excellent cast, the script does a lot of very smart things with most of its characters, and Gunn's direction gives us a movie that moves along briskly and doesn't feel as long as its run time.

( But.... )

...and newly outfitted with a minimally bionic eye, thanks to cataract surgery last week. (Nowadays, you don't just get the cataract(s) taken out, they put in a lens implant - I got the basic model, thus "minimally" bionic.) This was the right eye; there's another operation on the left to come, but the exact date isn't yet scheduled. The improvement in vision is already dramatic and likely to be better still by summer, once the left eye is finished with recovery and the opthalmologists can finally write me a prescription for new glasses. [As it turns out, I'm sufficiently astigmatic that glasses work better on that issue than the higher-end implants would have.]

I'm not even going to look right now to see how long it's been since I posted here; suffice to say that any readers still left are fully justified in wondering if this really is a Frankenstein-like synthetic version of me here at the keyboard.

No such luck (although I could in fact use one or two upgraded or otherwise rejuvenated body parts). It's still me, still living the quiet life in Darkest Suburbia™, still puttering away on various projects (and behind on entirely too many of them).

Now, though, it's time to see if I can, in fact, jumpstart this journal (and the Web site I've been haphazardly rebuilding since changing hosts a year or so back). One reason - my ebook publisher, Uncial Press, changed hands twice late last year (initially sold to a larger ebook house, which was then bought by a print publisher whose business model thus far seems...at best non-optimal for ebook authors).

I'll attempt to supply updates on a more regular basis going forward (and to keep that promise rather more successfully than the last two or three times I said that)....

In the meantime, there are dishes to wash, lunch to make, words to type, et cetera. Hi-yo Silver, away!!

[No, I don't really have a horse; that would be against HOA rules....]

It's Tuesday night; your narrator has just stepped out the door on the way to the bus stop, so as to catch the last bus to work for his usual overnight shift. The door, as it's been trained to do, swings shut behind him...

...and my hand slides into my right front pocket, where there is no key ring.

Uh-oh.

On the one hand, this is a serious problem for a one-person household in Oregon whose closest spare key is located in southern California. On the other hand, it's a five minute walk to the bus stop, the bus is due in thirteen minutes, and it is in fact the last bus of the night.

I walk to the bus stop, establishing as I wait for the bus that no, my brother will not be coming up from Los Angeles to let me in tomorrow morning. We discuss the feasibility of replacing the lock with a fancy keypad model...

...and meanwhile, the bus mysteriously fails to appear. I check the GPS-driven app on my phone, which shows that it should be along in one minute - but it's a scheduled one minute, because the bus's GPS is evidently offline.

One minute fails to produce a bus. Five minutes fail to produce a bus. I check the app in an attempt to discern whether the bus somehow slipped past me while I was texting my brother. The app reports that the bus should be somewhere between my stop and the stop where I get off. It becomes obvious, however, that wherever it went, the last bus has ended its run without picking me up.

Clearly, the universe is conspiring against me. I sigh and make two phone calls, one to work and one to Uber. Impressively, the Uber driver is reasonably prompt and I am only slightly late for work, although without my key ring I can't get into my locker, where some of my usual work gear lives. The universe is also out to get my immediate supervisor; another co-worker has called in sick, and we also discover we have about twice as much work as there was supposed to be for this particular shift. Nevertheless, we persist, and the work mostly gets done in timely fashion.

Now it's time to come home - but how to get in? I have a light-bulb moment; I've recently learned that our HOA has a garage in which various odds and ends are stored, including assorted tools and such. It occurs to me that given our recent hot weather, and given that my condo is a second-floor unit sadly lacking in air conditioning, I've been leaving the glass sliding door to my balcony open at night for better airflow. (The sliding screen door is not open; I'm not inclined to let in the neighborhood squirrels or the occasional visiting goose.)

Possibly, I think to myself, the HOA will have a ladder in the garage, whereby I can climb up, get onto the balcony, and let myself in.

My brother points out via text that I am gaining ground on Lewis Carroll's Father William, and that perhaps I ought not be scrambling around on rickety ladders at my age. (Neither of us mentions that I have had an explicit warning from my doctor not to scramble around on ladders, rickety or otherwise, while one of my current prescriptions is still running.)

This discussion takes long enough that it's no longer too stupidly early to knock on my next door neighbor's door, on the off chance that I actually did give him a spare key when I changed my locks a couple of years ago. We establish that no, I wasn't that bright. However, my neighbor knows exactly which of my other neighbors is (a) on the HOA board, and (b) has the key to the garage in which there may or may not be a ladder. And wonder of wonders, the other neighbor is home!

Better still, we establish that there is, in fact, a ladder of sufficient height in the garage to reach my second-floor balcony. My two neighbors and I are, shortly, standing next to the base of said ladder, which is neatly extended up to said balcony. We look at one another. "John," my next door neighbor asks, "are you sure you can make it up that ladder?"

On the one hand, advancing age notwithstanding, I announce that I feel perfectly capable of climbing the ladder. However, the board member and custodian of ladders eyes me critically, and inquires, "Would you like me to climb up there, get in, and open up the door?"

I contemplate the ladder for a moment, and consider what the doctor is likely to say should I happen to fail my saving throw versus landing on my head as I swing over the balcony railing. "That's probably a good idea," I reply.

The other two of us watch - with my neighbor helping to steady the ladder - as the board member scoots with ninja-like efficiency up to the balcony, swings with monkey-like deftness over the railing, and takes all of two and a half seconds to defeat the screen door. Another thirty seconds find me back around at the front of the building, greeting him with effusive thanks as he emerges from my front door. Clearly my neighbor and board member is a bona fide ninja, and I have been saved from having to call a locksmith. [Clearly I also need to do some serious baking, preferably before the next heat wave arrives in a week or so.]

For the moment, in any event, the universe's conspiracy against me has been defeated, and life in Darkest Suburbia is back to its usual state.