Sex and pop culture

I'll get to that momentarily...

Laura and I spent four nights in beautiful Ashland, OR, last week. Lovely place, even as the oppressive smoke from various wildfires drifted in and out. We took in a couple plays, rafted the Rogue, and shopped for local crafts, wine, and peaches.

Smoke is a serious issue. Ashland's Oregon Shakespeare Festival has had to cancel many of their outdoor performances this season, taking a $2 million hit. We had tickets to Romeo and Juliet, which was moved to the local high school auditorium due to hazardous smoke levels. We opted instead to trade in our tickets for their indoor production of Oklahoma!

This Oklahoma! came with a trendy twist: both of the lead couples were same-sex. I'm not fond of musicals; I prefer my Rodgers with Hart; and politically correct theatre generally leaves me cold. Three strikes... but I loved it. The performers were first-rate and the staging was brilliant. I couldn't help thinking that the bawdy, leering, but good-natured double entendre and physical theatre (think butter churn operated vigorously between trans legs) would be considered distasteful if not oppressive in a "straight" production... but the LGBTQ version was liberated, and liberating. Bravo!

Meanwhile, we've been watching The Innocents on Netflix. It's mostly a snooze. Perfunctory plot involving some shady researchers and reluctant shape-shifting human guinea pigs. Beautiful locations squandered. But the leads, a couple of innocent teenagers in love, keep your attention. Spoiler alert: In Episode 4 they finally do it. Tender– a little bit of heat, a little bit of flesh. True love. Then by Episode 5 we are back to the standard fare of smart characters acting dumb. So disappointing.

While in Ashland, we also escaped the smoke one night to watch BlacKkKlansman. I liked it a lot... but that's a topic for another post. Suffice to say that there is less exothermal chemistry between the two leads in Spike's joint than there is between the kids in The Innocents, or between the same-sex farmers and ranchers in Oklahoma! Thank goodness for the youngsters and gay folk who are keeping sex safe for entertainment.

Kevin Spacey

We watched Horrible Bosses this weekend, a dumb comedy that provided more than a few good laughs. Kevin Spacey was one of the three horrible bosses. He could play this kind of amusing creep in his sleep, and judging from the performance, that's pretty much what he did. Ditto for Colin Farrell. Of the three bosses, only Jennifer Aniston, as a nympho-maniacal dentist, clearly put some effort into it. She is very funny.

Spacey first came to my attention in the late 80s TV series, Wiseguy, in which he guest starred as a twisted, drug-addled gangster. The creepiness factor has served him well ever since then, in American Beauty (a movie I didn't care for), in which he turns out to be a creep with a heart of gold, and Seven (a movie I liked), in which he is a creep beyond redemption.

Which brings us to Richard III, the role Kevin Spacey was born to. We were lucky to be there opening night in San Francisco. The production is brilliant. The other actors range from solid to excellent. But it is, as I guess Shakespeare intended it, a one-man show. Every Richard is evil, and it would have been natural for Spacey to model his Richard on all the other humorously creepy villains he has created. The evil is there, and the humor too, to be sure. But evil does not exactly define this Richard. Spacey as Richard is more pure life force. Twisted, wracked with pain, this Richard nonetheless seems to relish every second. The physicality of the performance is astonishing. The set is deep and largely empty; "crippled" Richard charges across it, in full command of his space, as dangerous as a wounded animal, as devastatingly effective as Walter Payton running the football.

But this is Richard, after all, and in the end this life force must get his comeuppance (quite literally, as it turns out, in this staging). Only in a cheesy horror movie would such a villain's corpse come back to life to wreak havoc one last time. I'm sure I was not the only member of the audience wishing that it could happen here too, just this once...