PERFORMANCE
BOOKS
Editor: Andi Prewitt | Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com O R E G O N S H A K E S P E A R E F E S T I VA L
Written by: Scout Brobst Contact: sbrobst@wweek.com
FIVE BOOKS TO HELP EASE YOU INTO THE APOCALYPSE For the Time Being, Annie Dillard Coming from the patron saint of existential musings, Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being keeps pace with our time 45 years after its publication. The book conveys an obsession with the way things come together and then fall apart, where God, philosophers, still images and statisticians are looked to for answers on the failed promise of good things. It is instinctive to call Dillard’s work “cosmic,” but what she writes about is the earth, how we bear the tumult of life and insist on existing amid floods, plagues and incurable disease.
Left Behind, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
SEEING GREEN: Recordings of the Green Show, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s free, outdoor performances, are now streaming online.
O! for Outstanding Here are the five coolest (free) things on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s streaming service. BY BE N N E T T C A M P B E LL FE RGUS O N
“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” Spoken by Claudius in Hamlet, those words sum up how fans of Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival are feeling. Most of the festival’s 2020 season was canceled due to COVID-19, including a proposal to open productions for a fall run. And like the rest of the state, Ashland has been impacted by wildfires—the Almeda Fire has decimated the nearby towns of Phoenix and Talent. Happily, OSF has something to tide Shakespeare-starved theatergoers over until its hoped-for 2021 return: O!, a streaming service with a plethora of goodies (Shakespearean and otherwise). Launched July 2, O! charges viewers for some of its content (productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Copper Children streamed this summer), but it also offers free classes, interviews, music videos, readings and short films. It’s a lot to take in. So here’s a guide to getting started—a list of the five coolest free things that O! has to offer. Compliments From Shakespeare’s Plays When it comes to compliments, the Bard doth teach words to burn bright. This online course, taught by Kirsten Giroux, OSF’s associate director of artistic engagement, plunges into the artistry behind Shakespeare’s compliments, analyzing alliteration, assonance, pacing and pitch. It’s an addictive vocal exercise (I geeked out trying to see how many different ways I could say, “And when I love thee not, chaos is come again”). And who knows? It might give you some ideas for post-pandemic dating. Danni Cassette Queer BIPOC independent artists are spotlighted in O!’s WOMB series, which pays special attention to Los Angeles musician and analog connoisseur Danni Cassette. WOMB curator Jaz Hall’s interview with Cassette is worth watching, but your best bet is Cassette’s epically delightful “Banana” music video, which features them singing while dressed in a banana costume.
Digistories This is a series of digital short films inspired by a single theme: legacy. The results are eye-opening, poignant, surreal and never anything less than transfixing. Digistories includes Joanne Feinberg’s Broken Fixed, a conversation about anti-Semitism and self-love between three generations of Jewish women; Nikkole Salter’s Couture, a beautifully animated ode to the joys of dressmaking and mentorship; and Miles Inada and Devyn McConachie’s Anthrocumulus, which plays out like an enjoyably twisted riff on Hayao Miyazaki’s films. Green Show: Embodiment Project—Michael Brown The Green Show—the free, outdoor performance series that precedes evening shows at OSF—is one of the festival’s most enduring and iconic traditions. O! has archived videos of several Green Show performances, including this agile and impassioned tribute to Michael Brown from the San Francisco dance troupe Embodiment Project, which combines hip-hop, documentary theater and choreo-poetry. The performance begins with a defiant monologue (“His name cannot be erased”), followed by a ballet of backflips, cartwheels and pushups punctuated by haunting images, like a man shaking as if being shot and then becoming as still as a corpse. We Are Story: Season 1 Another Kirsten Giroux special, this series of courses begins with the instructor analyzing Hamlet with surgical precision and contagious joie de vivre. Shakespeare devotees and novices alike will get a kick out of her breakdown of Claudius’ opening speech, which delves into the usurper’s delicious doubletalk and barbarous turns of phrase (you know a guy’s up to no good when he refers to his spouse as the “imperial jointress of this war-like state”). Also worthwhile is Giroux’s scrutinization of Ophelia’s first scene, which makes a compelling case that despite the character’s seeming descent into madness, she can be craftier than the scheming men who surround her. SEE IT: O! programming is available at osfashland.uscreen.io/catalog
Left Behind is the Jurassic Park of apocalyptic novels, or the Ghostbusters, or maybe the Gone With the Wind. The first one, that is—not the franchised series of 16 books or the hallucinatory Chad Michael Murray film adaptation. In 1995, the evangelist-author tag team of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins produced what is more or less Book of Revelation fanfiction that is at once wildly compelling and deeply uncomfortable, depending on your religious background. Here, the apocalypse is a game of winners and losers, and its entertainment value is unmatched.
Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala “End of days” happen most days if we stop getting distracted by the bigger picture—they happen in families and individuals, in countries and coasts. For Sonali Deraniyagala, who was not an author until this debut memoir, that end came with the Sri Lanka tsunami of 2004 and the loss of her sons, husband and parents. Wave is a sonnet of the aftermath. Deraniyagala writes about the way things flatten all at once, only to rebuild again, differently, in a sort of parallel life. It is an exquisite piece of writing, worth the read for anyone fascinated by the strange—and at times inexplicable—toughness of the human project.
We All Looked Up, Tommy Wallach Something of an apocalyptic Breakfast Club, Tommy Wallach’s debut novel tracks four Seattle high school students, each with their own timeworn reputation, in the two months they have to live before an asteroid is predicted to turn the world into crumbs. The characters are endearing, and Wallach’s writing, for all its grand ambition, is grounded and sweet. For some 200-plus pages, the reader is asked to believe that the world is possibly—probably—ending, and it is not a chore.
I Will Send Rain, Rae Meadows While fires skate the perimeter of our city and ask us all to plan escape routes, there was a different set of natural conditions a century ago that forced families indoors. I Will Send Rain is historical fiction that imagines the world stripped of moisture and covered in dust. In 1934, the earliest storms of the Dust Bowl are brought to Mulehead, Okla., and one family must wait for rain for any relief. Meadows writes through her young lead with optimism and warmth, somehow drawing light into barely habitable circumstances. Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 wweek.com
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