cyrano | My King John was tall and slim

Slept for crap last night. New place, new noises, plus one of those nights where the breather does some weird thing where it won't seal right and I end up fighting it all night long instead of being unconscious. How am I still awake now? I'm pretty much boggled.
So the idea of a shuttle or a taxi both panned out badly. There's a bus that runs from Medford central to Ashland, and it's only two dollars so that's amazingly good. But it doesn't run after, like, six, and so today was the only day I could take advantage of it--all other days involve evening performances. Plus, even if the busses ran that late, I'd be getting out around eleven, back in Medford around midnight and it's still a good half hour drive to Eagle Point. And it would be very rude to try and ask for a ride from working folks then, especially if I'm going to ask them to run me to the airport at three o'clock Monday morning. Auto rental is fiendishly expensive but it solves all my problems. Maybe next year I'll do all matinees?

Weather here is currently gorgeous--cool and sunny. I don't expect it to last, but I plan to enjoy it while I can. The hills are all full of trees, and the place is green in a way that Mountain View would like to be but just can't manage. Downtown Ashland is very tourist friendly. Lots of parks and benches and of course quaint and curious shops of all color and form. Everybody is very friendly, and not in a scary Stepford way. It's an organic, warm kind of friendly.

I took advantage of my membership, and I lounged in the Gertrude Bowmer Members Lounge. I did crossword puzzles from my last SFChron for a couple of weeks (I already miss it), and I asked the lady at the counter lots and lots of questions about how things worked. Which was exactly what I needed--a source of information that I could plumb the depths of without feeling like I was intruding.

The New Theater. It's the smallest of the three stages (I thought there used to be performances at the Black Swan. But I cannot confirm this.) and so usually it's where the arty and experimental stuff gets done. It's a classic black box theater, with the seating in a U-shape around it. The long arms have a single aisle, at the top. The small crossbar has two aisles down the middle. Which means if you're on one of the arms, near the crossbar, and you have to get up, you have to fight your way down the entire row, or clamber over the railings and vault to freedom. Also, each seat in the New Theater has three seat numbers. There's the brass plate, which is the one we all looked at first. There's a red sticky tag which determines seating for "Bus Stop". And then there's a black sticky tag which determines seating for "King John". Wicked ritahded. I have no idea who thought that up, but I hope they reconsider.

They did a turn of the century setting for the play; there was a very stark set of stone flooring and a rather bauhaus building facade, upon both of which could be projected black and white (or black and red or blue and white) footage of World War One battles. This is no longer cutting edge and inventive--I now consider it to be the standard method of dealing with battle scenes in the histories. Eleanor has a fabulous grey coat in a military cut with epaulets. All the costuming was pretty, but it all looked like costumes rather than clothing.
King John is not one of Bill's more popular plays, and there's a good reason. There are some interesting characters, there's some fine writing, but the story (pulled mostly from Holinshead's Chronicles) blows. The first three acts are good. John is stirring and dramatic, Constance is desperate and shrewd; Lots of talk about Richard and Geoffrey and John made me want to watch Lion in Winter again.
In the fourth and fifth acts, things pretty much went to shit. Characters get confused, motivation is blurry, everybody is muddled, and nobody's plan works. Except, apparently, some random priest who poisoned the King for being an anti-Papist. That sort of came out of nowhere--We're fighting, we're fighting, we're not fighting because the papal legate has forgiven John and told the Dauphin to lay down his arms, and suddenly John's on his deathbed. Woops. There's nobody to really care about except Arthur (the cute blonde kid Prince) and he's dead for most of the time. There's some talk about patriotism and England not being conquered by foreign dictators, but given that the Plantagenet line was basically Norman (It was, wasn't it?) that dog doesn't really hunt. It runs around in circles baying frantically and then stops dead in its tracks to chew an itchy spot on its butt. Which was kind of how the plot felt. The two words at the bottom of my little piece of notepaper are Thwarted. Inconstant.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

the breather does some weird thing where it won't seal right

Have no idea if yours is made by the same people as mine -- or even if you mean the mask, and not the machine -- but sometimes if I don't shove the humidifier in all the way it doesn't seal and I get the leaky weirds.

Yes, there were performances at the Black Swan before the New Theater was built. The reason there are different seat #s on some of the seats is that NT can have the seats reconfigured for different staging options. Look at the seating charts above the ticket windows. (When

elflet and I saw the Scottish play in the NT, there were actor entrances in all four corners, and seats on every side.)

Yeah, I meant the mask. It blows on me, and the pressure is bad, and it's just not fun.

The malleability of the New Theater makes sense out of this, but I still feel that the logistics probably could have been worked out much more smoothly. (:

I sometimes think I am the only person in the universe who was sold the right mask the first time.

Confirmed, I've been to a performance at The Black Swan, circa 1992, with my AP English class. It was, indeed, tiny and intimate.

I forget what we saw there, though. Playboy of the Western World, maybe? I know we saw that, just don't remember if that was the Swan show.

Yeah, as already commented, they used to do stuff in the Black Swan, before they built the New. And also as already commented, the seats move around, hence the different seat numbers. It was, however, confusing for several people around us when we were there. And yeah, the performances were good, but the plot is an obvious reason why it's one of the less-performed ones.

I really enjoyed the first three acts, so it exceeded my expectations. (:

And the girl playing Arthur was particularly good, I thought.

Yeah, she was pretty much the only redeeming part of 4 and 5.

but given that the Plantagenet line was basically Norman (It was, wasn't it?)

It wasn't 'basically' Norman, it *was* Norman. :)

I thought so! But I couldn't confirm it while I was in the theater and I didn't bother to double check while I was typing it up.

Forgot to mention, one of the things I really liked about the acting was how King John kept looking back at his mother for approval. "Am I doing it right yet? Huh? Am I? Am I?"

And then, after showing how much he loved his mother and how dependant on her he was, comes Act V.
"So how's old mom doing?"
"Oh yeah, we forgot to tell you. She died April First."
Like maybe they were going to mention it, but thought he'd figure it was April Fools, and then he just didn't notice she was all dead, her ear hole stopped with dust. Maybe *that's* why she missed the big coronation.
And yeah, again with the "I liked the first three acts" review. (:

I thought before that they had established that she was off storming the castle, or holding it, or something. Which is why she wasn't actually on the premises.

Hmm. This is possible. I didn't finish reading the script beforehand and may have missed some of the nuances. But still, you'd think they'd mention it to him. "By the way, the queen mother's dead."

My King John was tall and slim

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