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Blackbird Program Note
by Robert HirshCaution: Proceed at your own risk. This note will reveal essential plot elements that you may prefer not to know in advance. Please consider saving it to read after you’ve seen the show.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise –The Beatles
Even more than I realized, when I scheduled it last summer, David Harrower’s Blackbird is a fit ending to Willamette STAGE Company’s fledgling season. For openers, it’s a piece that — despite the recent announcement of plans to create a film version — begs to be experienced “live,” and in a setting like our intimate black box venue. And it meets our “small cast, simple settings” standard. Most importantly for me, it certainly meets the “provocative” test announced in our slogan — not because of its “controversial” subject matter, but because of its unflinching insistence on looking under the rocks of society’s tendency to pronounce verdicts and ignore complexities. Blackbird resolutely refuses to offer clear answers to the multitude of surprising, disturbing questions it raises.
One Scots reviewer of the original Edinburgh Festival production put it this way: “The brilliance of [Blackbird] is that it goes into places you wish it didn’t. This is neither a newspaper article nor a black-and-white morality play, baldly explaining the grim consequences of underage sex. Rather, it is a compellingly uncomfortable drama that encapsulates the unresolved, misshapen, emotional mess that might accompany any suddenly interrupted relationship, legal or otherwise.
What if there is a part of the woman that does not feel abused? What if her feelings towards the man are amorous as well as angry? What if there is a part of him that was genuinely, not exploitatively, in love with the child? What if the terrible damage inflicted on the girl was as much because of the way the abusive relationship ended as because of the abuse itself?
These are the unpleasant questions the playwright dares to make us ask…Blackbird is a profoundly alarming work not because it excuses pedophilia — it doesn’t; it is unambiguous in its condemnation of sexual abuse — but because it shows us the muddiness of water that we like to think is clear.”
Harrower challenges us to run alongside Una and Ray on a fifty-yard dash fraught with ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty, guilt, desire, despair…with the awful, astonishing complexities of life.
Thanks for coming with us on the ride. And we hope to see you back for our second season, beginning next fall.
No one can love or understand me Oh, oh what hard luck stories they all hand me Make my bed and light the light I’ll arrive late tonight Blackbird, bye bye –Mort Dixon and Ray Henderson
Rabbit Hole Program Note
by Robert Hirsh“Rabbit Hole,” the woman in the Connecticut Repertory Theatre lobby said to me, shaking her head. “Oh, yes, I’ve read about that. I don’t think I’d want to see it. It sounds so sad.” How many variations on that theme had I heard in the past year, months, weeks? I shuffled my feet and shifted my gaze, fled to the defense, muttered something about how much humor there is in the script. She nodded, but seemed unconvinced.
Two hours later, I was seated in a darkened theatre watching the last moments of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s The Three-Penny Opera. The actor playing Peachum stepped forward, fixed the audience with a steely glare and said, “The powerful of the earth can create poverty; they just can’t bear to look at it.”
I was immediately reminded of my lobby conversation, and I blenched at my unwillingness to confront her reluctance. There are, it seems, so many things we “can’t bear to look at.”
Like all powerful works of art, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole challenges that aversion. It beguiles us, tempts us to look at life as it is lived. A life-shattering event turns a family’s world upside down, and leaves a couple emotionally stranded, drifting perilously apart. We accompany them as they flounder and struggle to put their lives back together, to find a pathway through the fog of despair.
Lindsay-Abaire provokes us to feel, to think, and — yes, all right, frequently and crucially — to laugh. But Rabbit Hole’s humor is precisely modulated. It never blocks our deeper emotional responses; instead, it catalyzes and augments them. We laugh not in isolation, but in communion with our fellow audience members, and with the unique and endearing characters whose journey we share.
That vicarious journey leads us inward, toward our own hearts and spirits, our own sorrows and joys, our own lives in all their challenges and promises and unpredictabilities. And the response lingers, accompanying us out of the theatre, kindling — if we allow it — an urgent and universal conversation about loss, coping, and recovery.
Once again, welcome to live theatre!
Rabbit Hole in Rehearsal
by Robert HirshRehearsals are underway for David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and I’m extremely excited about our production.
We’ve assembled a wonderful cast, including Kimberly Gifford, co-founder of Thriving Theatre; local favorite actor-director Pat Kight; Billi Veber — Jessica in wSc’s recent Skyscraper; and Corvallis High School’s Phil Allen. And, oh yes, yours truly is back on the boards for this one.
Even better, we’ve brought back most of our great Skyscraper production team: Casey Woodworth, Skyscraper’s assistant director, co-directs Rabbit Hole, Ross Jackson is building the set, John Elliot is lighting designer, and Glenn Theodore is our stage manager.
Make your plans now. Tickets will go on sale April 18.
You won’t want to miss Rabbit Hole!
Congratulations to Our New Charter Subscribers!
by Robert HirshHere are the winners of our Charter Subscription drawings, held during this summer’s Bard in the Quad production of Much Ado About Nothing:
Loretta Brenner
Sandy Chase
Rex and Cindy Cole
Dave Conklin
Nick and Sandy Houtman
Janet Jarvis
Ann Marek
Jack Moran
Peter and Susie Nelson
Jan Elyse Witt and Patrick Robinson
Ken Winograd
Each won a pair of season subscriptions to our inaugural 2007–2008 Season. Congratulations to all and welcome to the Willamette STAGE Company family! To join the family yourself, just click here and become a Charter Subscriber.
The STAGE is here…get on board!
Our Artistic Director
Robert Delk Hirsh is Willamette STAGE Company's founding Artistic Director. Robert's most recent local stage appearances were as Leonato in the 2007 Bard in the Quad production of Much Ado About Nothing, and as The Voyeur in Romeo and Juliet, in 2006. Local roles also include Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind, Matt Friedman in Talley's Folly, Jake in Jake's Women, the title role in Macbeth, and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. He followed the latter by playing Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen at Lord Leebrick Theatre in Eugene. Other favorite roles in a long career include Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, James Tyrone, Sr. in Long Day's Journey into Night, Sir Wilfred Robarts in Witness for the Prosecution, and Sandor Turai in The Play's the Thing. Local directorial credits include Fiddler on the Roof, A Doll's House, My Fair Lady, and Noises Off. Robert began his professional life as a political scientist, received his theatre training at the University of Oregon, taught theatre at LBCC, and has appeared in dozens of industrial films and commercials in the northwest.