Ashland Oregon Shakespeare Festival

I spent Friday, June 16th 2006 to Sunday, June 18th 2006 in Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of a trip I organized for some friends and I.

The whole trip was great! I saw two plays and both were very well done. And I got to eat at a few decent places and two surprisingly good ones; these reviews are recorded elsewhere.

The Merry Wives of Windsor, a fun play I saw on Friday night and one of Shakespeare's verbally witty and slapsticky comedies, had a very obvious theme: don't mess with women. My only disappointment with the performance was a very surreal ending scene. (I'm also a little disappointed by the bumpiness of the plot, but I'll take that up with Shakespeare.)

On Saturday night I saw Cyrano de Bergerac, written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. It was an excellent, emotionally exhausting romantic tragedy set in the seventeenth century. I was tired just watching it; I'm amazed at the energy had by the actor playing Cyrano. He was great and appropriately received a standing ovation. Superficially the theme dealt with the difference between inner and outer beauty. After deeper thought, one realizes it's more about the difference between visual beauty (i.e., physical beauty) and oral beauty (i.e., verbal eloquence).

Sadly, I had to skip a third play to participate in an online puzzle competition I do every year, and I think I did as well as I usually do. Not great, not bad, but I'm happy with it. A few people on the trip asked about the puzzles I was so devoted to that I skipped on performance. I showed them and they went over really well -- some people got addicted and spent a couple of hours working on these.

As for Ashland itself, it's a cute town that very much reminds me of Banff (Canada). Both towns are cozy and small, surrounded by verdant hills, and filled with neat little independent stores and boutiques (targeting the upper-class tourists that visit both places). Although expensive to purchase anything, they're fun for window shopping and have a wide variety of restaurants.

Even the five to six hour ride to Ashland was pretty pleasant, with nice views of Mount Shasta and Black Butte for long portions of the drive.

And the two people that I didn't know well before the trip I clicked with fairly well during the trip -a pleasant surprise-.

All in all, good clean fun.