"Hooray for Capt. Spaulding!"

Oregon is a somewhat puzzling state.  For non-residents, it may seem simply connective tissue -- with I-5 being its artery -- lying between the latte culture of Puget Sound and the dreamworld/nightmare that is California.  Recently, the nation has awakened to the wonderful peculiarities of Portland ("Portlandia"), but Portland is a small cosmopolitan oasis in the northwest corner of a large state.  The rest of the state seems empty and, east of the Cascades, endlessly bleak.

But down near the California border, straddling I-5 and roughly midway between Portland and San Francisco, is the cultural oasis of Ashland.
But hark!  I've already described the town and its history for you -- in an essay two years ago!  You can go read it.

And so, two years later, my college friend Jim B. returns once again to Ashland, again taking a hands-on class in bicycle construction and repair.  And, again, I drove down to meet him, talk over old times, view together with alarm the present state of the nation and the future course of mankind, do some local explorations, and take in a couple of plays at Ashland's "Oregon Shakespeare Festival."

We started off with a production of a Broadway musical -- Animal Crackers -- a musical that originally -- of course -- starred the Marx Brothers: Groucho as Captain Spaulding, Chico as Emanuel Ravelli, Harpo as "The Professor," and Zeppo as Horatio Jamison.  The Broadway show opened in 1928, but the production is better known to most of us through the 1930 Marx Brothers movie.

The Ashland cast has come up with an incredible set of Marx Brothers clones.  The plot itself is inconsequential.  The musical was merely a platform for Marx Brothers gags, antics, mugging, acrobatics, and ad libbing -- combined with occasional forays down off the stage to delight and humiliate members of the audience.  Harpo was resplendent in fright wig and bicycle horns.  Chico was played by a young Japanese-American who -- after the first few sentences of broken Italo-English -- was totally believable as an Italian immigrant.  Groucho was simply Groucho -- he could have hosted quite convincingly a half-hour of "You Bet Your Life."

A highly recommended evening of sheer, mindless entertainment, if any of my readers plans to pass through Ashland this year.  "Hooray for Captain Spaulding!"

The other show was a production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  For reasons not apparent to me, the production was set not in Renaissance Verona, Italy, but in 1840's "Verona," California.  The Montagues and Capulets are two Spanish hidalgo families.  Shakespeare's Prince of Verona becomes "General Prince, U.S. Commander of Verona."  Aside from a few minor translations of "Farewell" and "Good evening" to "Adios" and "Buenas Noches," the script remains true to the original.  My mind took only a couple of minutes to ignore the "updating" of the setting, which seemed to neither add nor subtract a thing from the significance of the play.

I'm not sure why they bothered.

But the acting was excellent.  Romeo and Juliet were played by unusually youthful-appearing actors -- appropriately so, since Shakespeare's Juliet was only 13 and Romeo not much older.  They spoke convincingly their Elizabethan lines to each other, while their facial expressions and body language were those of any two young American teenagers overwhelmed by the wonder of first love.  Their skillful interpretation of Shakespeare did far more to make the play relevant to Sunday night's unusually young audience than did any transposition of the setting from Italy to California.

Drama aside, Jim and I had a great visit together.  We spent a day visiting the Oregon Caves, a national monument I'd been wanting to tour since  childhood.  The caves are not as huge or dramatic as more famous ones such as Mammoth Cave, perhaps, but their geology and diversity are very interesting.  Props to the young geology graduate who works for the Park Service as a volunteer guide.  He has a true talent for sharing his love of geology.

Jim has lived in Indiana for most of his adult life, and I insisted that we drive on to the coast in Crescent City, just across the California border, to remind him of the ocean and his younger years in Seattle.  A beautiful coastal landscape, shaped by steady winds off the ocean and presided over by a still functioning light house.

A climb to the top of a strange mesa formation -- Table Rock -- near Medford, just north of Ashland, occupied part of another day.  The flat table top was originally the surface of a solidified lake of volcanic lava that covered the entire area.  Most of the lava and the soft substrata eventually eroded away, leaving only a few flat-topped formations like Table Rock looming over the agricultural valley.  We finished up the day renting mountain bikes and spending a couple of hours touring the area in and around Ashland.

A highly enjoyable long weekend.  Next on my to-do list is rental of the original film of Animal Crackers.  Were the real Marx Brothers as funny as their imitators in Ashland?