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October 02, 2003

Trip Report: Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Finally finding a few minutes to write a quick report. I learned of this festival from my friends David and Melissa who, particularly David, have been going for many years and really enjoying it. The festival is in Ashland, Oregon (near the California border) and runs for 8 months of the year putting on 11 plays (about half of them Shakespeare) in 3 theatres.

We decided to combine the trip with a visit to Portland and K. and to visit my Unlce and his family near San Francisco. We thus flew to Portland and rented a car there on Saturday. On Sunday, we drove around the area and visited the beautiful Heirloom Rose Garden (with a very friendly resident cat) and store and then a wonderful crafts/art gallery at lunch (one of the nicest galleries I have ever been to). After lunch, we went into town and went to Powell's, one of the largest bookstores in the world.

On Monday, we all drove down the coast in two cars, stopping to see sights and for lunch and galleries on the way, arriving in Ashland in the evening and getting a nice dinner at a pub there, nearby the theatres. Tuesday our plays started and we would see two plays a day for three days. The plays on Tuesday were Ibsen's very heavy Hedda Gabler and Noel Coward's very light comedy Present Laughter. Both were excellent in their very different ways. On Wednesday, we went to Lorca in a Green Dress as the matinee, a new play on the life of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. The play was quite well done but the subject was not one I was familiar with or really to my taste so I enjoyed this one the least of all the performances we saw. The evening show was our first Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream and our first at the outdoor Elizabethan theatre. Outdoors in the wonderful Ashland weather and setting made for a wonderful stage for this play and I probably enjoyed it the most of all the performances, despite only basic effects which can be sometimes extravagant for this play. Finally, on Thursday we say Romeo and Juliet (in an interesting modern dress version) and finished off with Richard II (which I had never read or seen). The acting and productions were uniformly excellent and I really enjoyed all of the plays except for Lorca.

On Friday, we had a big breakfast and started to head down towards the San Francisco area to visit my Uncle and his family. Unfortunately, it turned out that I had caught a horrible stomach flu (which I thought was food poisoning from breakfast) and ended up getting sick in the car and making a total mess. We were forced to stop and find a motel where I continued to be horribly sick for 6 hours and had a hard night. I felt well enough in the morning, though, to continue down to the beach house where we had a nice time with my Uncle, Aunt, Cousin and her two very fun and cute young children (the younger of whom I had not met) at the wonderfully situated house and on the beach. Unfortunately, our time was very short and we had to leave after dinner to get back to the San Francisco airport and a hotel nearby (but a pain to find) to be ready for our 6AM flight.

I woke up at just after 3AM to find my mom, though, had caught my stomach flu and was in the middle of the worst of it. We decided I would go ahead and fly back anyway, extending her hotel stay, returning the car and switching her flight back a day as I left. I thus raced to get up and get all this done and make my flight. My flights were easy although baggage in Boston and traffic for the cab were really slow. I ended up not eating any real meals after Friday morning (which I completely threw up) till Monday lunch.

Posted by aarondf at October 2, 2003 01:02 PM

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