OREGON DISPATCH #15 – BLESS THE BEASTS & THE CHILDREN Greetings from The Rogue Valley in Southern Oregon! My days in Ashland get stranger and stranger. Surrealism is creeping into the adventure of my playwright residency at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a small five hundred-employee operation with four hundred thousand patrons who will traipse through the season on the Mount Ashland trail, not necessarily on foot, most in cars, but still I pretend I have a horse, although I mostly take the bus everywhere. Could it be that after fighting it for so long, trying to hold on to whatever urban swagger I might have had (which admittedly was suburban swagger) I am beginning to embrace the notion of the rural community life? Granted, that the rural community is a destination theatre city with a ridiculous ratio of high-end restaurants to actual people living here. Could it be that like Zsa Zsa Gabor before me, I could say, “Goodbye city life, hello country wife...” and ‘enjoy’ (what is that word?) The environs for what they are? I walk by MIX, the hipster Stump town coffeehouse that makes its own handmade ice cream and bakes its own bread. I look at the bearded vaguely Pacific North westerners at the counter in their plaid and corduroy and realize they are not actual lumberjack who have learned how to steam milk and drop little hearts of foam over your cappuccino. No, they are this year’s graduating class from Ashland High School who metaphorically dream of that train that will take them far away to other lands or at least get them laid before all the tourists go home to more populated destinations. I am having some clarity. I am looking at the guitar player in the town square singing Springsteen’s ‘I’m On Fire’ in honor of the Gulch Forest Fire thirty five miles away, and I notice that he is wearing a very nice pair of Keen’s. A pair I would like to own one day. His dreadlocks are a little too same length for my taste. It must be hard to drop out, all that styling. I look down at his guitar case and there sit two school textbooks by Derrida and Foucault; I smile and wince, two men who taught me much about croissants, post-structuralism and manipulation. I still use it in relationships today… Everything is beautiful here, even the ugly. I woke up yesterday morning after a fitful night of sleep and I knew I had two big gigantic events; one was to speak at noon to a group of about fifty lovely people, who all paid $12 a piece to hear me wax about commissions and adaptations. Thankfully, I had a secret weapon: Julie Felise Dubiner, veteran dramaturge and yuckster. I am counting on her gift of gab, commission’s knowledge and general hosting skills to save the day. She comes through perfectly, one hour seems like minutes, and mostly I say profound things, like ‘Uh…” and “Yes, exactly!” The other is that in the evening we speak to a group of exceptional High School Drama students, seventy-five or so, who travel from around the country to spend ten days in a dorm, bond, fall quickly in and out of love, express all their theatrical passions, even the really nerdy one’s (“The new stripped down Les Miz is the best I have ever seen!”) I listen patiently as they set up chairs for our encounter, but I want to scream, “You are only sixteen, you haven’t been subjected to Les Miz’s like I have, and you haven’t begun to sing ‘One Day More’ in the key of bitter because you haven’t had to sit through twenty years of Les Miz, I love and envy you, dear theatre child”. But I don’t, I barely move my lips as I mutter to myself incoherent babble about how they get to do Neil LaBute plays and I had to suffer through “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”. Once again, Julie Felise Dubliner knocks it out of the ballpark. She actually knows how to talk to young people because she has one. I have a coffee machine. Before those wonderful events, I was walking to the theatre and at the corner of my street I came up on three deer holding court in my neighbor’s yard. I don’t know why, but it still thrills me to see them and, to the risk of sounding like the neighborhood weirdo, I call out to them, “Hello Happy Deer.” The big one, with the strange scar on its side, answers back, “What’s so good about it?” “What?” I said, confused by a deer answering back, with a question. He cocks his neck up and turns with a side eye, “I said, what’s so good about it?” I stammer for a moment and they giggle in that harsh way that little girls giggle at you when you are trying on the Hello Kitty backpacks at Target. Duh, I wasn’t going to buy it, I know I am grown ass man, I was just trying it on, little girls. The smaller deer, a teenager of a deer I find out when it’s speak in a high pitched voice, says “It’s no big thing, we’re just deer, we’re just messing with you, go on your way Mr. Theatre person, Mr. Residency person, Mr. just-here-for-the-fun-part person.” Wow, I feel wounded as I turn to leave, they never take their eyes off me as they keep munching on my neighbor’s rose garden. I decide to take a photo with my IPhone, just to document them in case they ever come around again, and just as the phone clicks on my perfect picture, the third deer, vaguely speaking in a Portland accent, says “That will be five dollars.” I wait. Silence. His eyes widen in that mean ‘did you not just hear what I said’ look and he continues, “I don’t go up to your theatre and just walk into… ‘Into The Woods’, which by the way, ironic, really ironic… clever even. What’s your next play, ‘The Starbucks at the Corner’?” I wouldn’t be so hurt if their laugh wasn’t as surprising as it is. It’s a middle-school laugh, full of all the hurt of not really belonging. WUT! Oh my goodness, that is what is happening! I am doing that thing, that awful thing that people do on vacations. When I arrived here in May, I wanted to be better than this place, to not fall in love with it, to just act like the tourist, the outsider. Then June came around and I fell in love with the people, the small town life, the marion berry jam, the four dollar coffee shipped in from Portland. By July I was fully in love and alive. The loud birds at my window, where once I tried to shoo them away, I was singing with them. The cows in the meadow down near the Dutch Bros drive-thru smile in the morning to me, the neo-hippies across the street lulling me to sleep with their drunken Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young covers. But now, here we are at August, the university is calling. I have to pay my rent in L.A., the return to city life awaits me at the end of the month. I can’t stay here forever. And it’s killing me. I look at the sullen deer and I say, “You don’t understand. It’s not that I don’t want to be here…” The oldest deer, the one with the scar shouts back, mouth filled with grass, “We totally understand. It’s nature. We don’t emotionally let you in because soon you will have to emotionally shut us out to get back on the 5 Freeway. It’s the way of the world, evolution, the theatre season, we get it...” Slowly they move away. Their eyes on me the entire time, let’s face it deer jerky is a thing around here. I have to. I have to make the best of these last few weeks. It’s not the end, just the beginning of the commuter propeller plane experience, but that’s different than being here on Monday when the actors oversleep and the locals take back their Starbucks and the real people are at Paddington Square looking for things that arts people would never care about… (Did that tomato slicer I ordered come in?), in short, real life begins again. That’s what I want, a real life. But I am in the business of make believe.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 18:44:41 +0000
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