After two plays yesterday, we all had a slow start to the morning. But we had a full day of Ashland adventures planned, as usual.
We started off with a walking tour of the city. John had found this one a brochure somewhere, and we have sometimes had good experiences with free local walking tours. This really was not one of those.
Our guide, shown in the picture below on the right, was certainly sincere. But her presentation of the history of the town was a little bit scattered at times and it was not always easy to follow her narrative.
We started off at the lower end of Lithia Park, and for the most part we simply walked up the street next to the park and walked down through the park. This does contain not only some of Ashland’s most historic homes, but some of its most beautifully restored as well. Ellen found landscaping ideas along the way.
Probably the most interesting thing we learned on the trip was about lithia water. I knew that people had come to Ashland to drink the spring water for their health. Until this trip, however, I never understood that it was for their mental health. Lithia water is simply water containing lithium, the drug still widely used today for the treatment of manic depressive patients, and people drank the water for its mood-altering powers.
Lithium was also, I learned, an ingredient in the original formula for 7-Up. The name now makes sense: it was supposed to make you feel “up” because you were imbibing psychiatric medication with each swallow. All all of this without having to worry about an insurance co-pay.
Today was another marathon theater day. Neither of the plays, unfortunately, was as good as All the Way.
In the afternoon we saw Party People. This play is about two young men, one black and one Hispanic, who are the children of former revolutionaries from the 60’s. One is the child of a Black Panther leader, now in jail, and in the other is the nephew of one of the Young Lords. Right away my mind started to do some simple subtraction and I wondered how these boys could have been born in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s and be in their mid-twenties today. But that was just the beginning of the problems with the play. The idea is that these boys are putting together some kind of gallery opening with pictures and video of the revolutionaries. They plan to invite all of these people to the opening – apparently nobody else has been notified about this art show – where they will confront their elders … about something. Jimmy, the character shown in the publicity still below is a nebbish with a MacBook, but, when the guests show up he dressed like a clown and suddenly has an aggressive personality. His jibes reverberate courtesy only of a microphone and audio special effects: the words themselves have no real bite to them.
About a dozen characters wander through the play and deliver monologues. A couple seem to connect with each other, but others seem to have no purpose at all. For example, right after intermission, a young black woman sings a song in Spanish. We never find out who she is or how she is related to anybody else. As best as I could follow it, the song was about slaves being transported from Africa to the Americas, though what “caracoles” – conch – had to do with it was unclear to me. A character appears who discussed his suicide. Huh? The white woman shown in the picture castigates one of the revolutionaries for killing her husband, a police officer, forty years earlier. How exactly had she heard about this opening when nobody from the Village Voice had? Never explained.
Nor is the play willing to take any stand about the former leaders. At one point, a story is told about how a couple of the Panthers had tortured another one for supposedly being a police informant. Yet a gruesome as the details of this are, they not really condemned for it. The older Black Panther maintains that he did not kill the police officer, but was framed for it by the police. And that seems to be the closest the play can come to assigning some kind of blame for the chaos of those years. It is all the fault of a nameless establishment. But then the two young characters suggest that the revolutionaries needed to use media to convey their message. They confidently assert that YouTube and Twitter will help them help the people. This is historical nonsense. The Black Panthers were masters of media manipulation.
There were two older women sitting next to me in the theater. At the interval, one said to the other, “Is there anything I can get you?” The other woman immediately shot back, “Yes. A cup of hemlock!” My feelings exactly.
The evening play featured a much different kind of party. This was Ashland’s revival of Animal Crackers, the 1928 musical that George Kaufman wrote for the Marx Brothers. The play all revolves around the antics at a Long Island mansion where a famous painting is stolen and a couple forgeries put in its place. The story line really makes no sense at all; the play simply provided a structure for a series of classic Marx Brothers jokes and routines.
I wanted to like this play, and I found little fault with the actors. They had lots of energy and they appropriately improvised some jokes and shtick in classic Marx Brothers style. But I ultimately found that seeing the play added nothing to watching the movie, and I failed to really figure out why it should rise again as a stage play. Since the play was really written for the Marx Brothers, it seems best to watch them do it, not watch other actors imitate them doing it.
