Acting update for October 2023

Continuing my updates from Recent (mostly theater) activity, which was about a month ago, I’ll try to bring people up to date on what I’ve been doing in my new acting hobby.

• Every Monday and Wednesday, I had an hour-long rehearsal for the 2-minute scene after acting class. We presented to the class twice: on Wednesday October 25 and Wednesday Nov 1.  The scene went fairly well both times, but somewhat better on the second showing.
• I finished the Arden 3rd series edition of Hamlet before the 10 hours of table read with Santa Cruz Shakespeare happened. The parts I got to read were Polonius (I.2 and I.3, which includes the advice to Laertes and telling Ophelia to stop seeing Hamlet), Claudius (III.3, the thoughts-and-prayers monologue), and Gravedigger (V.1).  I did argue for some minor changes of wording (following the first folio, instead of the second quarto) and for restoring one cut line of Polonius’s that was a great cue for Ophelia.  All the changes I argued for were accepted by Charles Pasternak. The turnout for the table read was much bigger than they expected, with something like 19 participating readers and another 12 or so “auditors”.  That means that they raised at least $5000 from the fundraiser, and probably somewhat more. It was fun to read the parts I had, and I think I did a creditable job (aside from the rather tuneless singing of the Gravedigger).
• The Saturday Shakespeare lectures and reading of As You Like It has also finished. I read LeBeau (I.2), Jaques (II.5, II.7,  III.2, III.3, IV.1 and IV.2), and Touchstone (V.1, V.3).  I liked Jaques’ lines the best, as I had both the fool-in-the-forest and the all-the-world’s-a-stage monologues.
• We’ve had three rehearsals of The Artist in my living room so far, with the next one coming up in about 2 weeks.  The play is beginning to come together, and I think it will be fairly good.
• Tomorrow is the midpoint of the 8-session (Oct 16–Dec 4) radio-acting workshop with Bill Peters through Actors’ Theatre. We’ve had a number of exercises to record so far, and we’ll start working on our projects this week.  I did the first two weeks’ exercises paired with a woman from Capitola, and we recorded at her house, using a Blue Yeti microphone and Garage Band. For the third weeks’ exercise, I was paired with a man from Larkin Valley (too far for me to comfortably ride), so we recorded at my house using Audacity.  It turns out that Audacity can only record from one device at a time, so we tried both sharing a mic and recording our parts separately as separate tracks (listening to the other person’s prior recording over headphones for synchronization).
• For my project for the voice acting course, I plan to read my niece Sari’s children’s books: the Robotastic! series. I’ll probably do them as YouTube videos, since they are picture books, but I’ll have to get her permission before making the videos public.
• On Sunday Aug 29, I auditioned for a short student movie at UCSC (I found the audition info on Reddit). The group was a little disorganized.  They had scheduled the auditions at the classroom in McHenry Library, but they had not remembered to reserve the room in time, so the first hour of the auditions were there and the rest of the time was in a smaller room downstairs (in the Digital Scholarship Commons). They had promised sides for the auditions, which the director was supposed to bring, but the director was late. When the director showed up, not only had she not brought printed sides, but the only copy of the script (which was supposed to be on Google Drive) was on her laptop, and she had not brought her laptop. So the team creating the short tried to remember the script and write it on the whiteboard for us to use. Six people auditioned (group auditions) for the two parts in the 5-minute script—well, seven people if you count the guy who showed up 15 minutes before the auditions were over and the room had to be relinquished. The script consists mostly of sword fighting, though they had not even looked for a right choreographer yet, so we did the auditions with pool noodles.  The auditioning was fun, as long as you did not take it too seriously. They were planning to look over the site and do some rehearsals today with shooting to happen next Sunday. I passed on the name and contact information for the stage sword-fighting instructor I took a couple of classes from this summer.
• On Tuesday, having not heard anything, I assumed that they had give the parts to others—presumably because they wanted students, not an old guy for their video. But on Thursday I got an email offering me the part of “Shadowy Figure” and giving me the whole (2½-page) script. I accepted—despite the disorganization of the student group, I figured it would be fun to try.
• Today, I bicycled up to campus wearing my attempt at a peasant costume—a shirt I made for Society for Creative Anachronism about 50 years ago and a pouch of about the same vintage.  I was not able to wear the old trews I had made, as I’ve put on about 40 pounds since then, and they would not go over my hips. I carried my chain mail haubergeon in my panniers, as I thought it might be suitable for the other character, and my jo (short staff), as I thought it would make a more reasonable weapon for me than a sword.  When I got to the agreed-on meeting place, I was told that they had contacted the fight choreographer (yay!), but that they had decided to put this short on hold, because they were busy with a major project for school (due in a month) and didn’t really have time to squeeze in the short.  Given how disorganized they were, I think this was a wise decision.

Coming up

• In the Theater Arts 10A class at Cabrillo, we should be getting new, longer scenes assigned on Wednesday. I don’t know yet who I’ll be paired with.  These scenes will be in the showcase we’re doing on Monday Dec 11 (thankfully the week after the workshop with Bill Peters ends).
• The 8 tens @8 are coming up January 19–Feb 24, and The Artist is scheduled as the second play of the Part 2 series (unless it changes from the current schedule). I found the dates on the ticketing calendar (https://ci.ovationtix.com/35410), but I’ve not transferred them to my personal calendar yet.

Recent (mostly theater) activity

In First callbacks, I posted about my theater activity for 2013 August 28–Sept 17. Now I’ll bring you up to date on more recent activity.

• On Thursday Sept 21, the cast for The Artist met at my house (being the most convenient for Jonathan and me, as neither of us has a car) to do a read-through of the play. We had a lively discussion of the play, particularly of the arc for my character (Harper).  We were (and still are) having some difficulty figuring out what motivates Harper in last 30–60 seconds of the play.
• On Sunday Sept 24, all 16 casts did a read-through of the entire set of 16 plays, so that everyone could at least hear the other plays once. Several actors were missing (many because of a conflict with Mountain Community Theater’s performance of Something Rotten). I volunteered to cold-read one part for a missing actor—a part that I would not have a chance of being cast in, since it needed to have someone who could convincingly play a teenage (or young 20s) boy. Some of the plays were a little better read aloud than they had seemed on paper, but there were several I was pleased to have no part in!
• Last weekend (Sept 30 and Oct 1) was a Meisner/Chekhov workshop through Actors’ Theatre, with Lana Palmer and Bruce Avery as instructors.  We were guinea pigs for a new teaching technique they were trying that combined Meisner and Chekhov techniques.  It was a pretty intense weekend with 12 hours of instruction and practice (not to mention a little bit of homework to prepare for a Meisner activity). I was a bit drained afterwards, and I think I would have gotten more out of the workshop if the 12 hours had been in 3-hour chunks once a week for 4 weeks, but the experience was worthwhile and I would do a followup workshop with the instructors.
• On Monday and Wednesday (Oct 2 and 4), I rehearsed a 2-minute scene from In the Middle of Nowhere by Kent R. Brown after acting class with my scene partner.  I really need to be off-book by tomorrow, so I’ve been practicing with the $4 LineLearner app.  Monday afternoon (Oct 2)
• Monday afternoon (Oct 2) I got the new Covid vaccine and this year’s influenza vaccine. I had only mild soreness in each arm, though I was a bit more tired than usual this week—whether that was a reaction to the shots, the number of things I was trying to do, or the unusually warm weather that started on Wednesday is not clear. I’ve still not firmly made up my mind about the RSV vaccine, as the risks of Guillain-Barré syndrome have not been clearly quantified for me yet.
• Monday evening (Oct 2) there was a rehearsal for The Artist  in my living room.  I moved all the furniture against the walls, clearing a floor space about as big as the space we will have at Center Stage for the actual performance.  I don’t know when we’ll do rehearsals on the actual stage, but we’ll probably do rehearsals in my living room about once every two weeks until then.
• Tuesday evening (Oct 3), at the ceramics class, I got back the glazed little dishes that I had made with a 3D-printed mold. I’ll do a separate post about them when I have time to photograph them. I did not attempt any throwing on Tuesday, but learned to use the slab roller and tried doing some hand building.
• Wednesday evening I set up my softbox lights and tripod again, and recorded some of the monologues I’ve been working on (none for release yet).
• Thursday was hot, but I mowed the front lawn in the morning before it got too hot and donated blood to the Red Cross midday.
• Yesterday (Oct 7) started 5 weeks of lectures and reading of As You Like It with Saturday Shakespeare (Oct 7–Nov  4). For the first Saturday, I read Le Beau’s lines, which were not particularly challenging. Next Saturday, I’ll be reading Jacques’ lines for Act II scenes 5 and 7, which include both the fool-in-the-forest speech and the all-the-world’s-a-stage speech.  I’ll have to practice both a few times to be ready. I have part of the fool speech memorized and almost polished, as I’m using it as a monologue in my acting class.
• I also re-recorded a couple of the monologues yesterday (Oct 7), and I released one on my monologue playlist: a monologue adapted from Walter Wykes’s The Worker.

Coming up:

• More hour-long rehearsals for the 2-minute scene for acting class on Mondays and Wednesdays after acting class.
• More ceramics classes—we are about halfway through the series of sessions I signed up for, and I’ll be needing to buy another 25 lbs of clay soon.
• Wednesday Oct 11 starts a 4-session table read of Hamlet with Santa Cruz Shakespeare (10 hours total).  I’m still slogging through the Arden 3rd series edition, with its dense scholarly notes, but we have received the cut-down script (cut from the Folger edition, I believe) that we’ll actually be using for the table read.  I also received my hardcopy of the 2012 Folger edition in the mail yesterday from Bookshop Santa Cruz, which was included in the cost of the fundraiser.  I’ve not been assigned a part to read yet, which won’t give me much time to prepare.
• Thursday Oct 12 will be the next rehearsal of The Artist in my living room.
• Next Monday Oct 16 starts an 8-session (Oct 16–Dec 4) radio-acting workshop with Bill Peters through Actors’ Theatre.
• Monday Dec 11 (thankfully the week after the workshop with Bill Peters ends), I have the showcase for the Theater Arts 10A course at Cabrillo.
• The 8 tens @8 are coming up January 19–Feb 24, and The Artist is scheduled as the second play of the Part 2 series (unless it changes from the current schedule). I found the dates on the ticketing calendar (https://ci.ovationtix.com/35410), but I’ve not transferred them to my personal calendar yet.

First callbacks

In More busy theater weeks, I posted about my theater activity for 2013 July 26–August 21, and in Santa Cruz Shakespeare 2024 season I posted about next year’s Santa Cruz Shakespeare season. Now I’ll bring you up to date on more recent activity.

• My Cabrillo College Introduction to Acting class (Theater Arts 10A) started on Monday August 28. The instructor is Robin Aronson, and the class has a waiting list, in part because they have combined TA 10A, 10B, and 10C into a single class with a limit of 23 students for all three courses combined. The first assignment is to work on an audition monologue.
• On August 30, I auditioned for the short plays that Cabrillo is producing this semester. I found out at the auditions that there will be a required rehearsal every Tuesday evening, which conflicts with my ceramics course. I explained, before giving my monologue, that I would not be able to attend rehearsals, and so was auditioning only for the experience, as urged by Dr. Aronson. I used the Robert-in-the-library monologue from Kodachrome, and found out that it ran about 5–10 s over the 2-minute limit (which was longer than I had timed myself doing it). Despite my disclaimer, I was called back for one of the short play, and I had to decline the callback.
• On Friday September 1, I went to the downtown library to get copies of the scripts for the 16 plays being done this year at 8 tens @8, the short-play festival that Actors’ Theatre has been doing for many years, as I intended to audition for it.  I was the first to check out the scripts.  In order to work on them at home, I took pictures of them using CamScanner on my phone, which produced pretty clean scans (except for one title page, which had motion blur).
• On Saturday September 9 and 16, I went to the drop-in improv class with the Fun Institute, which I had not attended for a few weeks. I feel I still need to work on my listening skills and “being in the moment”. I can go once more on September 23, but then I’ll miss 6 weeks in a row.
• On Monday September 11, I went to auditions for 8 tens @8, being auditioner number 13 out of 24 that night (there was another night of auditions on Tuesday, but that conflicted with my ceramics course). Now knowing that the Robert-in-the-library monologue was too long, I used the monologue I was working on in class from The Worker, by Walter Wykes.  (Sorry, I don’t have a recording up on my YouTube playlist yet, but I will do one in the next week or two.)  I got two callbacks from that audition. The way they announce the callbacks is a little unusual, but good for the actors—after each audition, the auditioner gets a slip of paper with checkmarks for which of the 16 plays they got called back for (along with the times of the callbacks)—before the next auditioner is called in.
• On September 14, I went to callbacks for The Stocking Exchange (which I had rather expected, as the director was the one who had done the NextStage Readers’ Theater, and I knew she liked my acting) and for The Artist (which I had feared a little, as I could easily get typecast in the role of the inventor there).  For The Stocking Exchange, there were several (5?) men reading for the part of Nick, and 3 or 4 of us were about equally good, so Sally had a lot of choices. I thought only one of the women did a really good job with the role of Carol, but I wasn’t cast as Nick, so I don’t know yet who was cast as Carol.
  I did get cast as Harper (the inventor) in The Artist, though the director had originally been thinking of me for Blake (the painter). I feel like I’ll work well with this director (who is a computer-science guy from way back), because he cast the play exactly as I would have based on what I saw at the callbacks—me as Harper, Jonathan as Blake, and Camila as X-45.  I’m actually glad now that I’m not in The Stocking Exchange, as I think it needs to be cut by about 30% to fit in the 10-minute slot, and I’m not very comfortable with cutting plays down (I think that we really butchered The Ferris Wheel this summer).
• On September 17, I sent email to Dr. Aronson, asking for permission to change monologues, because I feel I’ve gotten about as polished as I’m going to get on the The Worker monologue.  She gave me permission to change, but has not yet approved a new monologue.  I’m thinking of doing the second half of Jacques’ I-met-a-fool speech from Act II, Scene 7 of As You Like It, starting from “O worthy fool!”.  I’ll ask her in class, or in office hours right after class, if that speech is ok.

I have a lot of things coming up:

• On Thursday Sept 21, the cast for The Artist will meet at my house (being the most convenient for Jonathan and me, as neither of us has a car) to do a read-through of the play.
• On Sunday Sept 24, all 16 casts will do a read-through of the entire set of 16 plays (possibly so that the directors can figure out which 8 are the “A” show and which 8 the “B” show, and what order they should be in).
• The next weekend (Sept 30 and Oct 1) is a Meisner/Chekhov workshop through Actors’ Theatre.
• The Saturday after that starts 5 weeks of lectures and reading of As You Like It with Saturday Shakespeare (Oct 7–Nov  4). I bought the Pelican edition of As You Like It (the one we’ll be reading from), and read it (though we already had two other editions of As You Like It on our shelves.
• Wednesday Oct 11 starts a 4-session table read of Hamlet with Santa Cruz Shakespeare (a rather pricey fund-raiser, but I can afford it). I bought and have started reading the latest Arden edition of Hamlet (which is just the second quarto—a second volume covers the first “bad” quarto and the first folio). We’ll be reading a cut-down script based on the Folger conflated script, but they’ll be sending us that.  I’m amazed at how dense the notes are in the Arden edition—easily 5 times the length of the play, not counting the third of the book before the play and the material after the play. I’m hoping that I get through the Arden edition before we start the table read.
• Monday Oct 16 starts an 8-session (Oct 16–Dec 4) radio-acting workshop with Bill Peters through Actors’ Theatre.
• Monday Dec 11 (thankfully the week after the workshop with Bill Peters ends), I have the showcase for the Theater Arts 10A course at Cabrillo.
• The 8 tens @8 are coming up January 19–Feb 24, though I don’t know which days I’ll be performing yet.

As you can see, I’ve been busy with theater stuff, and I’ll be busier still in the coming months!

Santa Cruz Shakespeare 2024 season

Yesterday, in More busy theater weeks, I mentioned that I would be going to the Grove again tonight to find out what next year’s season will be.  This is very early for the season announcement, which usually is announced in December.

Next year’s season is fiscally ambitious, but artistically very cautious (the opposite of what I’d like to see). They will be doing 3 plays in repertory (two Shakespeare and one non-Shakespeare, as usual), followed by a September play in the Grove, and a Christmas play (probably at the Vets Hall).  The three repertory shows are As You Like It, Hamlet,  and The Importance of Being Earnest. The early fall show will be The Glass Menagerie, and the Christmas show will be some version of A Christmas Carol.

Santa Cruz Shakespeare is greatly increasing their educational program next year—they plan to have something like 20 performances for students, instead of just 4, and they are planning to have a Shakespeare summer camp.  They claim that is a first for them, but Shakespeare Santa Cruz paired with West Performing Arts starting in 2010 to do a one- or two-week Shakespeare conservatory, and John Pasha continued that collaboration at least through 2015, though not every year with Santa Cruz Shakespeare. I do hope that they talk with Terri Steinmann of West Performing Arts and maybe John Pasha as well, as the Shakespeare conservatories were very good (my son did them every summer from 2010 to 2015). Reviving that partnership would be a good thing.

The non-Shakespeare plays for 2024 are all frequently done (though neither Santa Cruz Shakespeare nor its predecessor Shakespeare Santa Cruz have done them before), and both the Shakespeare plays have been fairly recently done (Hamlet in 2016 and As You Like It in 2014). I would rather have seen something a little less frequently produced. And yet another Christmas Carol?? Spare the saccharine! It would have been far better to revive one of Kate Hawley’s pantos (though without Joseph Ribeiro as the dame, they might not be as good). If they had to do a Carol, they could at least have chosen something silly and fun, like Inspecting Carol by Daniel J. Sullivan, which my son performed in back in 2013 (when he was in high school).

I was hoping that after their successful 2023 season (over 18,500 tickets sold—their most ever, and every play an artistic success also), they would have at least one show in the 2024 season that was not just a guaranteed seat-filler. Some of the most interesting performances were plays that are not often performed (like Doctor Faustus by Marlowe in 1993 or The Liar in 2015). Perhaps they should institute a policy of not repeating any play more often than once every 15 years and making sure that they have one “stretch” play each season that is chosen more for artistic merit than for box office. If they are going to do Hamlet again, the least they could do is to pair it with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard, which they haven’t done since 1985 (or Fortinbras by Lee Blessing, though R&G are Dead is a much better play).

Charles Pasternak is planning to play the role of Hamlet himself—I hope he doesn’t make the mistake that so many artistic directors make of giving themselves a plum part each year.  We don’t need another Julie James in town (though the Jewel Theatre is closing after their 2024 season, so maybe Charles is planning to take over her role in the theater community).  Both Charles and Julie are good actors, but it always grates a little to see people casting themselves in lead roles (supporting roles are fine).

I realize that SCS is trying to grow to be one of the most successful summer Shakespeare festivals.  They are gaining on Oregon Shakespeare Festival, but OSF is still 10 times the size, even if SCS has had more artistically successful seasons than OSF for the past couple of years. I’d rather they concentrated on quality rather than quantity, though I recognize the need to have most of the plays be crowd-pleasers, in order to sell enough tickets to continue the company.

More busy theater weeks

In Busy weeks for theater, I posted about theater for 2013 July 13 through 23, which included a trip to Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  This post is mostly about August 1 through 19, which included all 3–6 plays of Santa Cruz Shakespeare (3 in the main season, 2 staged readings, and 1 intern play).

• July 26. I went to see a tech rehearsal of King Lear at the Audrey Stanley Grove. It was interesting to watch the practice of the entrances and exits, the sound cues, and the lighting cues. The actors did not have much prior practice of the exits, as their rehearsal spaces are substantially smaller than the Grove stage. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to bring my hearing aids, so I had trouble hearing the notes that the director (Paul Mullins) gave the cast.
• August 1.  Went alone to see Witch by Jen Silverman, the first of the staged readings.  It is a good play, but feels more intended for an intimate theater than the large stage of the Audrey Stanley Grove. The play could perhaps be presented on a big stage if the three sets (tavern, banquet hall, and cottage) were placed and lighted separately so that you had in effect, three small stages. In the play the devil attempts to gain the souls of three people, with somewhat mixed success. The professionalism of the actors was apparent in the grace with which they performed this piece after only one rehearsal.  The play would be a good companion piece if Santa Cruz Shakespeare were ever to do Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which I remember Santa Cruz Shakespeare doing an excellent job with in 1993, though I don’t remember the details—that was also the year they tried adding a musical to their season (Damn Yankees)—if they never do another musical, it will be too soon.
  If Santa Cruz Shakespeare ever gets an indoor space (the Colligan Theater will be empty after Jewel Theatre’s last season in 2024), the Witch would make a good Halloween play.  But I suspect that Actors’ Theatre may produce the play sooner, as they are starting to do Halloween plays this year (with The Thin Place by Lucas Hnath—I auditioned for the sole male part in it, though I knew I had almost no chance of getting the part and I did not really care much for the script).
  I was not the only bicyclist at the Grove on August 1, as two people who I’ve known for decades at UCSC also rode their bikes.  It turns out that SSC staff had reserved a parking space for me close to the entrance (a perk of being a big donor), even though I had no car.
• August 2. Went to another stage-combat class led by Josephine Czarnecki.  It turned out that this was the last of the summer for me, as the August 9 class got cancelled, and I had a prior commitment on Aug 16. I hope that Josephine comes back to Santa Cruz next summer and offers a similar course, as I ended up missing more sessions than I attended, because of prior schedule conflicts.
• August 4. I attended Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s “weekend with Shakespeare” session about Taming of the Shrew, at the UCSC Arboretum. The talkback with the actors was interesting, as was the final lecture titled “10 things I hate about Shrew” (a reference to the 1999 film Ten Things I Hate about You, which is loosely based on Taming of the Shrew).
  I have to admit that I particularly liked the middle part of the day, when the education director and the dramaturge talked about what they were doing in the educational program this year. The dramaturge, Katie O’Hare, is a UCSC PhD student doing a thesis on Shakespeare (though not on Taming) and had been a middle-school teacher, so helped prepare the lesson plans and materials for the education program, as part of UCSC Humanities Public Fellows program. Unfortunately the web page for that program has not been updated yet for the 2023 fellows.
  As part of their presentation, they demonstrated one of the teaching exercises, which involved two students reading lines from Katherine’s and Petruchio’s first meeting (though they ended the reading before “my tongue in your tail”). I volunteered to read and read Petruchio’s lines—then the other volunteer and I swapped roles and I read Katherine’s lines. Several people complimented me on the reading, some asking me if I were an actor, which was heart-warming, even if it was just polite noises.
• August 5. I went to the weekend with Shakepeare session on King Lear. The discussion with Paul Whitworth (who plays Lear) was interesting, even it consisted more of reminiscences about his early career than about the current work. The panel of scholars (including the dramaturge and including Michael Warren, who worked with Whitworth and Paul Mullins to make the cuts to King Lear to fit within 3 hours) was interesting, as was Sean Keilen’s illustrated lecture that ended the program.
• August 8. Went alone to the second staged reading, “Master Harold” …and the Boys by Athol Fugard. This play was about race relations in 1950 apartheid South Africa—a semi-autobiographical piece by the author. Again the play seemed design for a more intimate theater setting or a TV studio—the whole play takes place in a small tea house. The play is a good one, but not a comfortable one, and so probably would not be a commercial success in Santa Cruz, where the audience is predominantly white people who don’t want to think too much about race.  The acting was once again quite good. This play might make a good one for Aurora Theatre in Berkeley (which has an audience more interested in such plays, as well as an intimate theater space that would work well for the play).
• August 11. I had a coaching session with Bill Peters on reciting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun).  I have put a recording of it up on YouTube channel:
• August 12. I went to see production of Macbeth by Midsummer Ensemble, an “almost entirely LGBTQ+ ensemble”, at Broadway Playhouse.  Many of the cast had been in the stage-fighting course, and Josephine had done their fight choreography (in addition to lending them swords and daggers). They made a few changes to the play to make “a queer interpretation” of the play—like making both Macbeth’s be women (and Banquo also).  Although Macduff remained male, the witches’ prophesy was made good by having him “born of man in the form of woman” instead of “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”. It was a pretty good production for such young actors (mostly in college, though some younger).  The fight choreography was good, though done at half speed for safety, as they had not had much time to rehearse.
• August 14. I went to a staged reading of a work in progress as part of the series for the 36 North playwrights’ collective being presented at Center Stage.  The play was Ink Leaving the Brush, by Steve “Spike” Wong.  It is a reflection on grief, but it has a lot of funny bits as well (particularly the banter between the two men), so it is not an overwhelmingly heavy play.  I think this may be the best of the 36 North series this summer (though there are three short plays still to come). One of the actors (Sarah Kaufman Michael) had been in the Shakespeare course earlier this summer, and it was interesting to see her perform with more modern lines.
• August 16. My family and I walked the 3.7 miles to the Audrey Stanley Grove (though we took an Uber home) to see the interns’ play. My son and I made the picnic supper—we baked naan, cut up vegetables, and made raita. Dessert was just fruit. This year the interns did Lauren Gunderson’s Exit Pursued by a Bear, which turned out to be an excellent choice—not only because it is an excellent counterpoint to Taming of the Shrew, but because one of the other plays in the season was also by Lauren Gunderson. The interns did a fine job of the play.
• August 17. We walked to the Grove again (and Uber home) to see Taming of the Shrew. Although they did an excellent production of the play and made a very serious effort to make it less sexist and Petruchio not quite such a vile bastard, the play remains what it is and so is still problematic.
• August 18. We walked to the Grove again (and Uber home) to see King Lear. This was the best production I saw this summer and may be the best King Lear I’ve seen, though they cut it a little more than I would have wanted. I particularly noticed the cuts from the scene that I had worked on this summer with Shakespeare course with Bill Peters (Edgar pretending to Gloucester that he is on the edge of the cliffs at Dover), but there were several others.
  An unusual choice that worked well was to cast Edgar, Edmund, and Gloucester all as black men (though they did not look much like one another).  M.L. Roberts played Edmund (the bastard son) as well as Petruchio in Taming, Junior Nyong’o played Edgar (the legitimate son who ends up ruling Britain) as well as Lucentio in Taming, and Derrick Lee Weeden played the Duke of Gloucester as well a Baptista in Taming (another father role).
  Another unusual choice was making Kent be a woman, so that the disguise as Caius was cross-dressing as a man. Patty Gallagher did an excellent job of the part.
  The blinding of Gloucester was very dramatically done, with the Duke of Cornwall throwing the eyeballs (semifrozen lychee) off stage from the point of his dagger.
• August 19. We walked to the Grove for a 4th night in a row (though we took Lyft rather than Uber home, as Uber could not get a driver to commit to picking us up) to see The Book of Will by Lauren Gunderson.  This was perhaps the weakest play of the four—too much explanation and too many quotes from Shakespeare, but the cast did an excellent job given the limitations of the script.
• August 21 (tomorrow!) I’ll bicycle to the Grove once more to find out what Santa Cruz Shakespeare is doing next year.

Overall, I think that Santa Cruz Shakespeare had a much more successful season than Oregon Shakespeare Festival this year, both artistically and financially. The weakest of the productions at SCS was as good or better than the best of OSF this year, and SSC made 120% of their ticket sales goals for the season, so they reduced the prices of the few remaining seats for the last week (or two) of the run, while OSF had to make two special appeals to donors just to keep the season running. Because SCS uses a forward-funding model (with this year’s income funding next year’s season), they were not crushed by debt or uncertainty of ticket sales.

It probably has not helped OSF that they had to cancel some shows due to wildfire smoke and others due to COVID in the cast—I’m very glad we went early in the season and so were able to see all four OSF shows with the only problem being that it was too hot. (SCS also has the advantage of lovely weather, if you remember to bring a jacket and throws to cover up after sunset.)