Elizabethan Theater at OSF

Last night we met son Charlie for our annual get-together at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, if you can call two years in a row an “annual.”  Ashland, Oregon is more-or-less halfway between Oysterville and Los Angeles – an eight-hour drive for us; eleven for Charlie.  We foregathered (as my mother would have said) at an Italian restaurant for dinner – Charlie’s treat!

After catching up with one another about all those important items like our chickens and Charlie’s cats, the conversation turned to theater topics.  Although we did speak a bit about the plays we will be seeing here – Yeoman of the Guard, Twelfth Night, Great Expectations and Hamlet – the focus was on a play Charlie will soon be in: Proof.  In fact, the production is in rehearsal now and opens July 23^rd.  In deference to Charlie’s absence this week, the director had the cast block his scenes last week and they are working on other scenes as we speak.

Charlie, 2015 (at Bailey’s Bakery and Cafe

Charlie brought his ‘sides’ with him – those portions of the script containing his part – and betwixt and between our theater-going, I’ll be running lines with him.  He plays ‘Robert,’ a recently deceased mathematician praised for his groundbreaking work in his youth, but whose later years were plagued by delusional mental illness.  He appears in three major scenes — all in his daughter Catherine’s imagination and in flashbacks.

The play debuted in 2000 in New York and, the following year, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best play.  It is faintly reminiscent of the film, “A Beautiful Mind” about mathematician John Nash — presumably, also based on his life — and was, itself, made into a movie in 2005.  The movie starred Gwyneth Paltrow as Catherine, along with Anthony Hopkins as Robert.  Although the film added minor characters, the play has only four.

We ran lines for his first scene last night.  He’s pretty much letter perfect but says he needs more work on his second and third scenes.  Betwixt and between we’ll continue to run lines today and tomorrow. Seems fitting, somehow, that we’ll be doing so here at OSF.