Dawn Xiana Moon: Melodic folk pop infused with passion and honesty. From Chicago.

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Thursday, October 16, 2003

The Stratford Festival

I have postponed too long the writing of this entry--it seems these days my updates are becoming less frequent, although I intend the contrary. But a week and a half later, I'm finally composing the adventures of this year's trip to the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada. In summary: the plays varied in quality from wonderful to terrible but the trip itself was excellent for invigorating friendships. The details:

After battling Friday rush-hour traffic in leaving Ann Arbor, Patrick, Tait, Ryan, James, and I were hungry, but wanted to cross the border into Canada before stopping for food. Then we decided that nothing we passed in Windsor--namely the ubiquitous Tim Hortons (and they are ubiquitous; on a previous trip to Niagara Falls, we counted 21 or 22 between Detroit and the Falls)--sounded appetizing, so an hour out from Windsor, no longer able to contain our famishment, we left the freeway for what we hoped would be a town with food of the non-Tim Hortons variety. Alas, when we reached the town we found fast food and an odd-looking restaurant in a gas station. And I do mean in the gas station; instead of the usual Quick Mart, a family diner called Betty's (as in Betty Boop, who dominated all of the brown decor) overran 90% of the "store", with the other percentage devoted to the typical pop, snacks, and lottery games. But brushing our doubts aside, we entered the restaurant in hoping against all odds to have discovered a small-town treasure.

Things turned out better than expected. Our host, a robust, grandmotherly woman, greeted us when we walked in and extolled the virtues of every item on the menu. She actually spent quite an amount of time at our table--mind you, we also had a waitress--asking us where we were from, what we were studying, the usual questions. Patrick was pleased because smelt, a "quintessential Michigan food," was the night's special--and it was good. After dinner, James bought a lottery card and filled the car with shocked exclamations when he thought he'd won first $500, then $15,000. As it turned out, he was playing Battleship as one normally would instead of how the lottery would. He won $3 instead.

We arrived to the first play on Saturday late, continuing (with trepidation) a tradition started last year by myself, Tait, and Ryan; my friend Steve, who was to be the token Canadian for the trip, met us in the lobby and bought his ticket as the rest of us, disappointed with our arrival time, climbed the stairs to the balcony of the Festival Theatre. I soon remembered why the Taming of the Shrew is not one of my favorite Shakespearean plays. Performed carefully, one can lessen the potential misogyny of the script; although the Stratford production distanced itself from a truly chauvinistic reading, I still found myself hitting Patrick and Steve as they laughed through Katherine's closing monologue about duty to husbands and the weakness of women. "Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth, / Unapt to toil and trouble in the world, / But that our soft conditions and our hearts / Should well agree with our external parts?" Hmm.

The next performance of the weekend was Rogers and Hammerstein's The King and I, a musical I enjoy, a musical that was awful in production. The costumes were exquisite, as they are prone to be at Stratford, with incredible detail--many of the fabrics were imported from Thailand and represented Siam well. However, the production made two major mistakes. First, the actors performed on a thrust stage, an unusual choice for musical theatre, which relies a great deal on spectacle; normally musicals are best on prosceiums, where set pieces can be flown in easily for quick changes and an audience is distanced, forgetting the fact that people don't burst out into song constantly in real life. Thanks to the thrust and consquent staging, sight lines at points were terrible. In certain scenes, I could only see half of the actors; important when they were major players, not just the chorus. The second mistake was that the singers had no musical phrasing. And related to that, the sound system was inadequate, with volumes jumping, and the production used a recorded pit orchestra instead of live musicians. Urgh.

However, Sunday's performance of Pericles, a Shakespearean romance, proved delightful. The play combines elements of A Winter's Tale and The Tempest; you have the queen who dies and comes back to life, magic, and the sea, all combined with an Odyessian quest. The production incoporated elements from cultures as diverse as Japan, Greece, and Persia, shifting the setting farther east than Shakespeare's original. Probably the most innovative decision was infusing the narrator with facets of butoh; he was painted entirely white and, wearing a piece of fabric resembling a melange of shorts and a loincloth, moved with steady grace. He was, by far, the most compelling piece of the production. The sets, though simple, were also intriguing--to close the play, a luminous sheet of silk was spread over the entire stage, which was slowly sucked into the trap in its center as the narrator descended. Overall, there was an atmosphere of mystique, of mystery, that was well conveyed in mostly cool lighting.

Plays aside, the time was filled with a homey cafe, versions of taverns and pubs--although when I think about it, I'm not sure that anyone ever had any alcohol--and our hotel, a privately-owned yet rather generic place in St. Marys. Conversations ranged from God to beauty to stop-taking-so-many-posed-photos-in-restaurants-already and physical activities ranged from mock fighting to contact improv (a dancers' exercise) to this-is-how-you-do-a-martial-arts-roll. On the way back, we spent longer at the border than necessary and my friends saw me get truly angry (rare); the guard, who spoke with a Middle Eastern accent himself, wasn't "convinced that she's [me] actually American, or him [James, who's Hispanic] either." And this was even though we both had voter registrations and drivers licenses with us. But apparently you can register to vote without being a citizen--who knew? (For all permanent residents, visitors, and illegal immigrants: you too can be a part of the American political process! Just sign up to vote--they won't even check your citizenship, at least if the border guard is to be believed.)

A sampling of photos from the weekend can be found on James's website. Wow, it appears I've just written a novel.

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