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Well is not a play about the playwright and her mother. Well is "a multicharacter theatrical exploration of issues of health and illness both in the individual and in a community." Playwright Lisa Kron puts her chronically unwell mother on stage and hires four actors in order to revisit the desegregation of her childhood neighborhood and her own time spent in an Allergy Unit, but as the play begins to disintegrate around her she scrambles to pull together fragmented memories and repressed emotion in order to eke out meaningful themes on the issue of wellness. Performed at Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2010 season, Well is a performance of great intention and middling success. Split the play into approximate thirds, and it goes like this: a unique but initially ineffective concept, an unexpectedly successful evolution, and a hasty and disappointing conclusion. That middle third hides some wonderful gems, but the entire play is something of a disappointment.Well is as much about the constructs of a play as it is about issues of family, wellness, and race, and so it opens with play-acting running concurrent to the living room "real world" where Lisa's mother sits. Significant time and energy go into establishing the unusual premise, which makes for an intriguing but unsatisfying beginning. The play within a play is exaggerated—brightly colored, over the top, and farcical—and you could call it "stylistic suck" because these rowdy, unrealistic scenes often tread the line of aggravating (and on a personal note the farcical humor left me cold, making these scenes all the worse). But when the constructs of the play first begin to crumble, Well reaches a golden period: it slips back and forth between "real" and "play," breaking character, interweaving stories, and throwing the audience into a thoughtful, meaningful tumult of confusion and concept. This is when it realizes it finest moments—which sometimes come too hard, fast, and clearly delineated, but still ring with meaning and truth. These moments address issues which are close to my heart, and so I found Well to be at times personally meaningful; viewers without this connection may find these moments well-realized but perhaps not as moving. Regardless, it is this middle period that shines. It excuses the lackluster beginning, but suffers in the play's troubled conclusion.
For as it continues, Well's constricts continue to disintegrate and this golden period also crumbles. The fallacy of the play is destroyed one too many times, and the effect is ironically unbelievable. In part, this is because, while Well makes the laudable effort to avoid a simple, neat conclusion to its heavy, complex themes, it unfortunately settles on a trite, short conclusion which does its themes no service and undercuts the brilliant moments achieved in the play's middle period. As a whole, however, I expect that Well is different—and much better—when Lisa Kron stars as Lisa Kron (as was the case for many East Coast productions). In that case, when the play dissolves completely Lisa is there to stand—stripped to nothing but a woman in a bright light—as her authentic self. Such is not possible in this OSF production, so when the last foundations of the play crumble, no authenticity is revealed beneath: the protagonist remains an actor. Metatheatre is an unruly beast: it has great potential which it finds difficult to achieve, perhaps because—ironically—it gazes so hard at its own navel that even as it disregards the false trappings of theatre, it loses any sense of universality and timelessness. So it is with Well: Well takes on too much—play constructs, family issues, health, and race make for an overfull platter, and racial issues in particular go underaddressed; what is addressed sometimes displays a glimpse of something meaningful, but is often wrapped in a busy, messy, if well-intentioned setting which never quite convinces. I applaud it as a brave and complex effort, and appreciate some of its themes and messages, but I came away with troubles and a sour taste. Ultimately, Well is a failed effort, and I don't recommend it—but I will quote from it.
LISA: Hi, Kay.
KAY [an Allergy Unit patient]: Hello
LISA: Is your cousin coming to pick you up?
KAY: No. My sister.
LISA: That's good.
KAY: Yeah, I guess it's good.
LISA: No?
(Kay slams something down on the bed.)
LISA: Do you think you're having a reaction?
KAY: I don't know. Maybe. I guess.
LISA: Do you want me to go get you some alkali salts?
KAY: No. Lisa ... it's not fair. I don't want to be sick. My sister is cleaning my house for me, getting my safe room ready. She is good to me, but I can't help it. I don't want her going through my things. Oh, I don't know, I don't know. I'm not reacting. I'm angry. I'm so angry, Lisa. I know she thinks if she were me she'd be better, but do you know what the problem is with being sick? It's that you're sick. People who are healthy think they know how you could get better, because when they imagine what your life is like they imagine having your sickness on top of their health. They imagine that sick people have all the resources they do and they're just not trying hard enough. But we don't. I don't. I know my sister is only trying to help me, but I can't help it. I think, You suffer for one day the way I do. I want you to feel like this for just one day. Then you tell me how to get better.
(Photo: Lisa introduces her play in the "play" section of the stage; in the background, her mother sits in the "real" section. By Jenny Graham, copyright OSF.)
Georg Nowack and Amalia Balash, coworkers at a parfumerie, have a contentious work relationship—but they are also one another's secret pen pals who met through a lonely hearts newspaper ad. When the pen pals decide to meet, Georg discovers Amalia's identity and everything he thought he knew is thrown into turmoil. This familiar story is the fifth adaptation of Miklos Laszlo's play Parfumerie, and it's a musical. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2010 production of She Loves Me is, in a word, delightful. It's by no means flawless: The plot is slightly bloated by the romantic foibles of another parfumerie employee, whose quest for love is intended to function as a foil to the relationship between Georg and Amalia but instead feels underdeveloped and contributes the musical's worst numbers. The production, meanwhile, falters at the close of the first act, when the café meeting scene becomes a rancorous, physical comedy. She Loves Me is something of a subdued musical—not quiet precisely, but the characters are realistic and a little dorky, the romance is more private than grand, and so the loud comedy comes as a surprise and feels out of place in the otherwise understated production.
My family just spent two days visiting Ashland, Oregon to attend the 
The second play that we saw in this short trip to Ashland was one that I knew nothing about but the author before seeing it: The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler. The playwright, Jeff Whitty (Avenue Q), is a cousin of a family friend. In all else the play was foreign to me. OSF is only the second theatre to show this play, and it is largely undiscovered. We saw a matinée on a Friday with a much quieter crowd—and I loved it. The premise is meta-tastic and somewhat absurd: after committing suicide at the end of her play, heroine Hedda Gabler awakes to find herself trapped in the fictional character's afterlife, condemned to repeat the life of her play until her story dies, and she sets out find herself a new ending.
On our recent trip to Ashland, my mother, father, and I saw two plays. First, and an evening performance, was Midsummer Night's Dream. It was a Thursday night, and there were many visiting high schools (and some younger) come to see the performance. Of course Shakespeare is my true love, and so I was most excited to see this play. However, this was Midsummer with a twist: set not in Elizabethan England or Athens, the play takes place instead in the American 1950s-1970s.
