Why I Won't Ever Visit OSF Again

On Saturday, May 11, we attended the Rogue Theater's production of Richard III, directed by Cynthia Meier, with Joseph McGrath in the title role. It was a challenging play for a small community troupe to undertake, even one that performs one Shakespeare play on a yearly basis. Overall, the acting was good, although some of the cast members were not comfortable speaking in blank verse. McGrath handled the part well but did not bring out the psychopathic charm of the character as convincingly as he could have. That was especially obvious when he courted Lady Anne, my test for a great Richard. If the actor playing the role seems visibly to mesmerize Anne, so that her surrender becomes credible--perhaps because she is subconsciously attracted to him to begin with--I'll suspend my disbelief. That takes immense skill on the part of both actors; they actually have to get inside each other's heads. McGrath seemed to browbeat Anne rather than seduce her. On the other hand, his asides to the audience were delivered winningly enough to create rapport, so it was by no means an inelegant performance. Reviewers liked the cabbages. Every time Richard succeeded in offing another of his victims, he brought out a red cabbage, set it on the block of wood that served as the throne, and chopped it in half, smirking as he did so. By the end of the play the floor was strewn with shredded cabbage. In order to reduce the script to manageable length, Meier cut passages that didn't advance the action, such as the long dialogue between Clarence and the two murderers, so this device was a substitute for on-stage execution. To me it was gimmicky, but it was the sole element that didn't work. All in all, this production was much more gripping than anything I've seen at OSF in quite a while. It was performed in Elizabethan costume and the set design replicated an Elizabethan stage. At OSF the play would probably have been set--where? Maybe in the Nixon White House. At any rate, there would have been enough distracting modern parallels drawn to keep an audience from really perceiving nuances of characterization. The straightforwardness of the Rogue version allowed me to assess the conception of Richard even while the play was going on; in other words, the dramatic tensions were foregrounded, something not often done at OSF. I was so intrigued by the production that I reread the whole "Wars of the Roses" tetralogy over the past week, viewed the first half of the 1993 BBC offering on YouTube along with clips from the Olivier and Loncraine films, and skimmed critical studies available on JSTOR as well as the psychoanalytic reading advanced by Janet Adelman in Suffocating Mothers (1992). When a theatrical experience sends me on a mini-research project, it has hit home. From now on, then, I've decided to take more advantage of the local stage scene and forego these out-of-town excursions. The Rogue has enough of a serious following to offer Shakespeare without reaching out to teenagers and tourists.