One Lap

Date: 9/29/2013

Day: 3

Location: Ashland, Oregon

Miles Today: 24

Total Miles: 393 

 

At OSF

On offer today at the indoor Angus Bowmer theater was The Tenth Muse by the Mexican playwright Tanya Saracho.  This play is set in a convent in New Spain in 1715.  The cast, all women, was brilliant.  The plot involved race and cast and power and the preservation of important literary material in this tiny insular world.  The energy driving the play is the body of work by Sister (Spanish Sor) Juana Ines de la Cruz, O. S. H.  (12 November 1651 -- 17 April 1695.)  Not at all known to the Colonel she was, according to Wikipedia, a self taught scholar and poet of the Baroque school.  She is considered today to be both a Mexican writer and a contributor to the Spanish Golden Age.  She is said to have been the first person to write a play in the Western Hemisphere and, according to Octavio Paz, the most important poet in the Americas before Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman. 

The following images are before and after her entry to the convent:

This person is worth some looking into and the Colonel will do so.

One further word about the outdoor "Elizabethan" theater and the use of projections.  The following picture shows this stage set up for tonight's performance of The Heart of Robin Hood.  (Which we missed, alas.)

At night OSF is able to project images (animated or still) on the white sections of the faux half timbered walls around and over the stage.  For Mid Summer Night's Dream it was giant trees and vines making the actors seem tiny fairies in scale.  Last night for Cymbeline it was the fire of war and the image of flying over water to accommodate change of scene from England to Italy.  Used with restraint, this is a powerful tool.  Not unlike CGI in movies, used to excess it diminishes the actors on the stage.  Fundamentally, the Colonel likes it.

The League of Nuevo Berkeley

Ashland is largely made of the same stuff as Berkeley.  It is smaller, cleaner, has far better theater and less (virtually no) graffiti.   But under the skin beats the same left wing heart.  It occurs to the Colonel that there must be other towns in America similarly afflicted.  Yellow Springs, Ohio, is one for sure.  Chapel Hill North Carolina is probably another.  This office welcomes submissions for entry into the League of Nuevo Berkeley.  Candidate cities must vote a straight Democratic ticket (unless an anarchist is running,) virtually everyone must listen to This American Life and be able to identify the birth names of both Click and Clack.  Announcement that a local theater group is going to produce an all female production of Two Gentlemen from Verona must be greeted with universal applause.  The city council must, from time to time, take feckless positions on foreign policy otherwise reserved for the Secretary of State.  Extra credit will be available if the city is home of an institute of higher learning which fields undistinguished sports teams.  Extra extra credit if it is surrounded, as is Ashland, by political troglodytes or even worse ... Republicans.

Tomorrow; On the road and how to post comments to this blog.

Wellington Boot, Col