I Don't Get It, Do You Get It?

(Wednesday, September 27th). The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's "New Theatre"(newest of the three venues for plays at Ashland) often is the setting for avant-garde, experimental works by new playwrights. Its seating can be configured in three different ways allowing for imaginative staging. Since it opened, we've seen some very clever work performed there. But today we left scratching our heads --- what the heck was that play supposed to be about? Our guess is that majority of the Boomer Generation in the audience were as perplexed as we, and upwards of a dozen playgoers left during the intermission after the first act.
According the the playbill, "Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner"deals with the food Americans eat, the "Costco mentality" of consumption, and our obsession with fat and losing weight. Minerva, the main character, is costumed to look like a stereotypical obese American housewife, with a husband who sits in front of the TV watching NFL football and apparently is unfazed by her fatness. But then it digresses into a study of the relationship between Fat Minerva, and her slim, but slutty sister, Alice, and Alice's declaration that a cop whom she met during a traffic stop is "Mr. Right", even though she doesn't know his first name. It finally ends with dialogue between Minerva and her husband, Al, about the difficulty of saying "Those Three Little Words"
While the actors performed their roles well, the play couldn't decide whether it was a comedy (it drew lots of laughs from the audience) or a tragedy, or something else. So polite applause came at the end of the final act, but there was no "Standing O" or curtain calls for the cast. (Click here for a less than enthusiastic review of the play).