Field Trips 2026: Ashland in September

[djonn]

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 is not what you might expect from the title - it's a modern play from August Wilson, part of a cycle of plays highlighting flashpoints in our national history. In this case it's 1980s Chicago, where a nominal family of Black Americans is struggling with a variety of social, interpersonal, and economic issues. It's at once watchable as a soap opera, a sharp-eyed social commentary, and a gut-wrenching tragedy that goes from guardedly hopeful to full-on Shakespearean in the last ten minutes...with almost no dialogue in the last five. This is one of those shows I would often say that I'm not its target audience...but those last ten minutes, with stellar work both from the entire six-member cast and from OSF artistic director (and this production's director) Tim Bond, are theatrical genius in action, and are virtually guaranteed to bring even the most jaded viewer into a state of heightened empathy.

OTOH, I'm really not the target audience for this year's production of Taming of the Shrew, which strikes me as basically a Rocky Horror version of the play. (Others may disagree with me, and I should acknowledge here that my personal experience of/with The Rocky Horror Picture Show is relatively limited; it is possible, even likely, that others' mileage may vary on this point.) Like Rocky Horror, there is a great deal of queer-coding in this production of Shrew - but unfortunately, this production of Shrew takes a tone that leans heavily toward the strident rather than the zany, and that's a poor match with the show's visual style. I have seen many productions of Shrew in many venues over the years, and the ones that sparkle for me are the ones that play into the relationship between the leads. This iteration very much didn't lean that way, and it just did not work for me.

The week's other Shakespeare was Henry IV, Part I - in which the execution was much more serviceable than that of Shrew, and also mostly more traditional in appearance and staging (the set design added an interesting network of neon bars that shifted color and pattern from scene to scene, but the execution didn't intrude on the action). I find, though, that my enthusiasm for at least this set of the history plays is waning over time - there's only so much one can do on the live stage with a story that consists largely of ten-minute swordfights and the accompanying clang of stage weapons. And in this production, the set design did little to separate Falstaff's more comic turns from the battlefield action.

Which is to say, I can't really say there was anything wrong with this staging of Henry IV, Part I...but neither was there anything I found exceptional. It's a perfectly sound staging, and "perfectly sound" at OSF is nearly always in the upper tier of professional theater, but it simply doesn't rank on my memorability scale.

By contrast, David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face definitely does - and that's before the dead flat ingenious twist in the last ten minutes (which is in a completely different category than the finale of King Hedley). The playbill refers to this play as a "mockumentary" - its central character is a very lightly fictionalized version of playwright Hwang, and its subject matter is the long-standard Hollywood/Broadway practice of casting non-Asian actors as Asian characters in film, television, and onstage - an issue with which Hwang has real-world history, in connection with smash Broadway musical Miss Saigon.

Culture clash of this kind has, of course, spawned an enormous number of plays (and films, and novels) over the last several decades...but Hwang's approach, starting with writing himself into the play in beautifully realized fashion, is one of the very rare instances that - for me at least - genuinely confronts the ways in which these issues are far messier in everyday life - and on all "sides" of any given situation - than they are in the context of political policy-making. And that's equally true of the parts of the story that are drawn from personal experience and...

...no, there's no way I can say more about this than I already have without talking about those last ten minutes. If you have a reasonable chance of seeing any production anywhere of Yellow Face, DO NOT read anyone else's review beforehand and beware of spoilers in the individual production's program notes or publicity materials. (FWIW, it is safe to read the OSF playbill.) If a live staging isn't realistically accessible to you in the foreseeable future, DO get hold of a script, but again, DO NOT under any circumstances skip ahead to the end. Suffice to say that David Henry Hwang is a genius at his craft - and that the lessons the play teaches are integral not merely to Asian/American culture clashes in specific, but to pretty much any flavor of culture clash currently making modern headlines whether ethnic, religious, or any other category.

Tomorrow night's show is an adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma, which will wrap up the trip. (Specifically, the writer here is Kate Hamill, and the very quick glance into the script I saw at the gift shop earlier this week suggests that it's going to be capital-I Interesting. I know there are both Austen buffs and theater geeks in my reading orbit, whereas Austen represents rather a gap in my own reading history, so I am looking forward to writing that next post.)