Certain laws of buying school supplies are writ large in pink Pearl eraser and are never, ever violated. Herewith the laws:

–You will be slightly irritated with yourself for choosing to shop for school supplies at a certain store despite a bitter memory of hundreds of backpacks conspicuously blocking aisles the first week of school last year and were still supposed to be on sale two days later but had suddenly disappeared and been replaced by Halloween decorations.

–You will be slightly irritated with yourself for choosing to shop for school supplies at a certain store even though some mailing envelopes you bought there a few weeks earlier mysteriously never made it into your shopping bag.

–The Small Large Smelly Boy, otherwise known as Felix/Martha, will have multiple pages of school supply lists carefully marked with a blue pen.

–You will carry a very small list from the Large Large Smelly Boy that contains only pens, notebook paper, folders.

–The folders must number seven and all be different colors.

–The first shopping cart will be sticky.

–The second shopping cart will be wobbly.

–The third shopping cart will be stuck unwedgably to the fourth shopping cart.

–The fifth shopping cart will have bits of wet parsley stuck all over the bottom.

–The sixth shopping cart will have the child seat clamped shut by the safety restraint.

–You will be determined to use this shopping cart at all cost to avoid standing in the foyer for another hour.

–It will take serious finger muscle to unfasten the safety restraint.

–You will notice the safety restraint is slightly sticky and just plain gross.

–After you unfasten the safety restraint you will have to apply serious arm muscle to unclench the child seat.

–The shopping bags hanging over your arm will land in your face.

–After you unclench the child seat and remove the shopping bags from your face and put them in the child seat and smooth the front of your shirt, Felix/Martha will refuse to touch the shopping cart.

–When you wheel the shopping cart into the store, mega-screen TVs and cases of Budweiser will block your path.

–After negotiating the mega-screen TVs and cases of Budweiser, stacks of shoes on sale will block your path.

–After negotiating the stacks of shoes on sale, racks of clothes on clearance will block your path.

–Racks of clothes on clearance will go on for several miles.

–You will be forced to push the shopping cart through scads of synthetic material and flowery designs with rhinestones.

–You will avoid thinking about the sticky residue you are leaving behind on the synthetic material.

–After another hour, you will eventually make it to the school-supply aisle.

–Even though the spiral notebook with 70 sheets is on sale for 20 cents, Felix/Martha’s supply list will insist on spiral notebooks with 100 sheets that cost $1.79.

–Even though Felix/Martha needs only two single-subject composition books, you will be able to find only three-subject composition books.

–Both Large Smelly Boys will insist on only black pens.

–Even though you need four packages of black pens, you will find exactly one package of black pens.

–Even though pens are buy one get one free, you will find exactly one package of black pens.

–You will put one package of black pens and one package of blue pens in the cart.

–Felix/Martha will freak out.

–You will carefully explain that you will check another aisle shortly but that the blue pens are a just-in-case.

–Felix/Martha will insist that the Large LSB will have to use the blue pens.

–You will carefully explain that you will check another aisle shortly but that the blue pens are a just-in-case.

–Felix/Martha will joyfully show you a battery-operated pencil sharpener that claims to be visually stunning, have superb performance and be an expression of style.

–The battery-operated pencil sharpener will have titanium-bonded blades and an EZ-view shavings reservoir.

–You will regret having eaten a half sandwich with hummus and cucumber for lunch.

–You will leave the shopping cart with the slightly sticky safety restraint near the battery-operated pencil sharpener.

–You will find half of one side of an aisle completely devoted to folders.

–You will find an improbable number of folders that are pink and purple.

–You will find an improbable number of folders that have butterflies and flowers.

–You will find an improbable number of folders that have unicorns and dolphins.

–You will find an improbable number of folders that have fairies and mermaids.

–You will find an improbable number of folders that have rainbows.

–You will find an improbable number of folders that have circles and stripes and paisley designs that are in decidedly girl colors.

–You will find folders with kittens with big eyes.

–You will be mildly excited to find folders with deer and trees until you spot the daffodil.

–You will find folders with designs that look suspiciously like graffiti.

–You will have a difficult time finding solid-color folders.

–You will have a difficult time finding solid-color folders in seven colors.

–If you find solid-color folders they will have vertical pockets instead of the desired horizontal pockets.

–If you find solid-color folders, the color choices will include pink and purple.

–When you ask Felix/Martha if he thinks the deer and trees folder will be acceptable to his brother he will look at you like you just plastered wet parsley on your chin.

–If you find a folder with a big frog, it will have a black background and there will be only one.

–If you find attractive-looking folders with collegiate designs, you will find only four designs.

–One of the four collegiate designs will include a semi-pink color and tiaras.

–You will wonder whether you can mix-and-match the collegiate designs with the deer and trees, but you will notice they are two different widths.

–You will notice some folders have a 3-hole punch and some do not.

–You will hate this about folders.

–You will seriously consider the vertical folders that are clear even though they don’t fold open, but then notice they come in only four colors.

–One of those colors will be pink.

–You will become uncomfortably aware that you are holding several folders of many different designs, three different sizes and three different styles of pockets, none of which is perfectly acceptable.

–Right when you become uncomfortably aware that you are being ridiculous and need to return all the folders, you will look at the entire folder display and wonder where the heck they all came from.

–Right when you look at the entire folder display and wonder where the heck they all came from, a woman will park her cart right in front of the entire folder display.

–You will stare at the woman who parked her cart right in front of the entire folder display hoping she will get the message, but she will be focused on a folder with a unicorn.

–Even though you secretly want to kneecap the woman who parked her cart right in front of the entire folder display, you will sweetly ask if you can move her cart over just a tad.

–You will put back all the folders in what you hope are the right places and begin to re-sort other misplaced folders that you never touched.

–You will become uncomfortably aware that even though your list includes only three items, you have successfully obtained only one.

–You will grab seven solid-color folders even though they have vertical pockets and two of the colors are pink and purple.

–When you ask Felix/Martha to get the cart he will look at you like you just plastered wet parsley on your chin because he won’t touch it.

–Instead, Felix/Martha will agonize over how many colored pencils he should get.

–As you glide the cart past Felix/Martha and keep moving, you will tell him to get whatever damn box of colored pencils he wants.

–You will realize it is long past dinnertime.

–You will find more packages of black pens more than halfway across the store and chuck the blue pens.

–At the checkout, you will discover that the gluesticks are buy-one-get-one-free, but you only have one package.

–At the checkout, you will discover that the sticky notes are buy-one-get-one-free, but you only have one package.

–One of your neatly cut-out little monetary enticements — otherwise known as a coupon — means the checker will have to manually take 10 percent off each school supply, which means every 99-cent folder, every 75-cent filler paper, every stupid-ridiculous-irritating-I-could-just-open-a-vein-and-why-don’t-you-just-put-a-barcode-on-the-bleeping-coupon 89-cent 3×5 memo pad.

–The checker will hand you a receipt only slightly longer than the racks of clothes on clearance that go on for several miles.

–After you get home, the Large Large Smelly Boy will take one look at the folders and without saying anything will casually take out the pink and purple ones and put them aside.

Dear Mr. Scatter,

I see you have delayed your return to the Scatter front for another day. Be assured that this does not reflect poorly on your dedication as a loving father and husband, though I did have to clean out the little black skillet again, contrary to what it says on our marriage contract.

Everything is fine here. Really. Take as much time as you need.

The Large Smelly Boys have called a truce at the dining table, but only because they know that the new Lego catalog will be mine if they don’t.

We are out of leftover pizza.

The Large LSB got a buzz cut. I have figured out the trick to the haircut enticement. It’s called a 20 dollar bill. The Large LSB takes the bill, gets a haircut, leaves a $2 tip and keeps the rest. He has learned that a buzz cut is the cheapest cut and therefore he gets to keep more.

Strangely, however, one sideburn is now fuzzy and one is not-so-fuzzy. He has lopsided cheeks. When I pointed this out to him, he surprisingly demonstrated a rare moment of affection. He told me to kiss his cheek.

He is at the Oregon State Fair today, which explains his zeal for cleaning up the clothes in the middle of his floor this morning. He even gave the cats fresh water and brushed his teeth. It was a proud parent moment. I wish you could have been there.

We are out of ice cream.

I figured out the coffee pot contraption, even without directions. The upside is that I beat you to tossing out the used grounds — two days in a row now.

The Small LSB started typing his wish list, even though his birthday is almost two months away. I can recite from memory all the coveted items in the new Lego catalog. Also, he has been trolling on the interwebs … for trolls. He tells me that troll wives often use their noses to stir the cooking pot when they make soup or porridge. I told him that part is made up.

We are out of Rolaids.

The first day of school this year falls on Tuesday, which is in 5 days, 4 hours, yadda yadda, but I’m not counting.

The Small LSB and I went shopping today. I have already apologized to the store management for the blood-curdling scream in the school-supply aisle. Also, I did not mean to kneecap the lady who parked her cart in front of the row of folders.

It is not my fault if stores stock an improbable number of folders that are pink and purple.

It is not my fault if stores stock an improbable number of folders that have butterflies and flowers.

I see from the contents of your recent missive that you are not aware of our strict procedural policy for cleaning out closets. This is a celebratory event on the first day of school, otherwise known as The Mites Aren’t Around to Know You’re Tossing the Lego Catalogs From a Decade Ago.

Herewith is the strict procedural policy for cleaning out closets (on the first day of school). Please save this and post it in a highly visible area.

Closet Cleaning (on the first day of school)

1. Drop off kids at school.
2. Drive to the liquor store.
3. Buy a new bottle of Maker’s Mark.*
4. Drive home.
5. Open closet.
6. Gather trash bags, recycling bins and cardboard boxes, preferably ones that refrigerators came in.
7. Unscrew new bottle of Maker’s Mark.
8. Throw away cap.
9. Empty contents of closet and sort into appropriate bin.
10. Do not stop until new bottle of Maker’s Mark is empty.
11. Move on to other closets, garages and the ragged underwear drawer of mates as necessary.**

NOTES:

* Be informed that this is not a safe procedural policy to follow if you are going to the office or picking up children after school. Ordering pizza for home delivery is highly recommended. Ordering the pizza early in the morning is also highly recommended.

** It is advisable to either buy new underwear first or take your chances that it will be taken as a sexy message. Management does not offer an opinion on which route is the right course of action.

Air kiss,
Mrs. Scatter

*

Find a previous letter to Mr. Scatter here.

By Laura Grimes

Dear Mr. Scatter,

Everything’s fine. Really. No need to hurry home.

Both Large Smelly Boys are making noises about wanting to be an only child, but I’m sure it’s nothing.

The Large LSB has a Judy Garland film on the telly. The Small LSB does not want the Judy Garland film on the telly.

The giant moth you tried to whack with a broom and some choice words is toast. I found it on the stove. It was near the little black skillet.

Don’t worry, I cleaned it — the skillet, not the moth — even though you’re the only one who had eggs for breakfast and it’s etched in the marriage contract that scouring it is your job.

Judy Garland is throwing statues across a room and trashing it. I didn’t know she was left-handed.

The moth has been replaced by the She Cat. At only 9 pounds, she is only slightly bigger than the moth, but she takes up all of your side of the bed and most of mine.

School starts in less than a week, on Tuesday. Make that 6 days, 5 hours, yadda yadda, but I’m not counting.

Felix/Martha has already taken all his back-to-school letters from his teachers and marked them up with a red pen.

Felix/Martha has already taken his school-supply list and marked it up with a blue pen. Tomorrow is school-supply shopping day.

Judy Garland just threw a hatchet across the room.

The Large LSB unpacked his clothes and put his suitcase away. When I asked about the jumbled pile of  clothes in the middle of the floor, he said I only asked him to unpack, not put away his clothes.

The She Cat’s snoring is only slightly louder than the moth, but quieter than your choice words.

If I fly half-way around the world, that would make Tuesday come earlier, right? Because that’s a lot of time zones. Like 6 days, 5 hours, yadda yadda.

The Older Educated Daughter said she would come with me so that we could double the number of time zones shifted. Maybe we could organize a tour and multiply the effect.

Judy Garland is singing, “You can do no wrong.” Judy Garland is only slightly louder than the moth and the She Cat, but quieter than your choice words.

The Large LSB made spaghetti. Most of the noodles ended up next to the moth.

Tuesday would be a safe day for you to come home.

The school-supply shopping list includes pencils, paper … and pants.

Besides a time change, there’s another obvious advantage to being half-way around the world. I would be half-way around the world.

I have to be home on Tuesday, though. That’s only 6 days, 5 hours, yadda yadda. I plan to clean house that day and throw out a bunch of junk. The first thing I will throw out is a cap to a bottle of Maker’s Mark.

Judy Garland is singing, “I can barely wait.”

Air kiss,
Mrs. Scatter

*

To be reminded of why pant-shopping stores are also known as Chasms of Hell, click here. If you dare.

*

ILLUSTRATION: Engraving by H. Humphrey of “Sin Death and the Devil,” circa 1804. You can buy it here for $22.19. The site says it’s a genuine antique and not a modern copy. It doesn’t say whether H. Humphrey ever ran for president.

By Laura Grimes

Mr. Scatter has been hogging the blog of late. I forgive him, though. It’s not like he’s been eating bonbons. I know full well that he’s the muscle to my muse, the bacon to my trifle.

Art Scatter works to deliver a full-course meal, and I don’t mind being the pastry chef. There’s no shame in that. Funny writing comes with its own tricks and techniques, craftsmanship honed to a sharp wit.

I can’t do what Mr. Scatter does, and, I hate to tell him, but … let’s just say he suggested adding a line to one of my posts a little while back, which was a great idea in thought, but the words … well, I was at a loss how to delicately tell him that he just cast a lead weight in my lightly flowing stream.

I explained that one of the first rules of humor writing is not to reveal an obvious punchline straight off the bat. Take a joke and yank it in another direction and then yank it again. Come in sly on the side, tease it, stretch it and make people reach for it and discover it for themselves. Therein lies all the fun.

And then I stopped talking. I blinked at my current first husband a couple of times. He blinked back at me. I realized I was explaining the craft of writing … to my husband, of all people. But I was explaining a different type of writing than what he’s practiced for eons. It takes a whole different brain from a whole different angle.

Criticism requires straightforward explanatory writing. With flair, surely, and penetrating insights, but the ideas need to be absolutely clear. What do I do?

I turn an idea inside out and come at it any direction but head first. I throw around a bunch of ridiculous contrasts, exaggerate like a goofy caricature drawing, play with rhythms beyond recognition, drop bombs with precise timing and blow the language to hell … if I back myself into a corner, I consider it an opportunity to go around the bend and pop up with a surprise … I don’t settle for the predictable … grenades are my friends …

It’s a whole different set of rules. But it still requires careful craftsmanship.

Deep thoughts need a funny bone, a vital connector piece. I like my trifle. It comes in layers. It’s the well-earned treat. Consider it important to a well-balanced meal and don’t miss the good stuff at the bottom.

*

My name is Laura and I’m an unabashed fan of musicals. There, I said it. Bring on the support team. The weekly meetings. I swear on a stack of scores, though, that I refuse to give up my addiction.

As Mr. Scatter already mentioned, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has a sterling production of She Loves Me. It is fresh, lively, engaging. Every moment is beautifully turned whether it’s sweet as can be or funny as heck. The timing is spot on. It is amazing to me how a character can just lift a hat without saying a word and send peals of laughter through the audience. The set is divine. The costumes are exquisite. I could watch it again and again.

So please tell me, then, why musicals are so maligned? Do people not appreciate a delightful score? A gorgeous voice? A sexy dance? Those charming intimate moments that make you smile? That make you cry? Isn’t that good theater, too, with the added challenge of music and singing and dancing?

And tell me, too, do people miss how hard it is to do comedy?

A short time before The Scatter Family saw the show, the Small Large Smelly Boy and I spent some time making a rubbing. We do one in Ashland nearly every year. The Small LSB has a dog, an elephant and a knight on his bulletin board so far. This year, we rubbed the heck out of King Henry VIII. (We call him Hank. We’re on familiar terms, owing to an overlarge pub sign with him painted on it that hangs in our dining room.) We think it’s our best rubbing yet.

As we happily rubbed away we chatted with the nice volunteer lady who was running the station. She sees a lot of the plays produced at the festival, but she refuses to see the musicals. Why? On the grounds that they’re musicals. She’s not happy that the festival has added them to the mix, those inferior bastard children.

She didn’t elaborate why, but I suspect it’s because she doesn’t think musicals are worth discussing or debating or, gosh, enjoying. She Loves Me is really good theater at work. It might not have a deep literary context to delve into, but it has a lot going for it. For one, I laughed all the way through it. That’s not easy to pull off.

Not all musicals are all light and air. Dark undercurrents run through Oklahoma!, Porgy and Bess, West Side Story, the list goes on.

As I watched She Loves Me I thought of the nice volunteer lady, and I felt sorry for her. She was missing out on a sublime confectionary.

Why again? Ironically because of some of those themes circulating among the shows at the festival. The title of Pride and Prejudice says it best. It’s pride. And it’s prejudice. Preconceived notions put up barriers between people and prevent them from finding happiness. The same themes crop up in The Merchant of Venice and … well I’ll be … in She Loves Me, the same story as Pride and Prejudice turned inside out, just like good comedy.

What else does the nice volunteer lady miss out on? She refused to see The Music Man that the festival produced last season. (I’m sorry we did, but that’s beside my point.) The show has such a knockout score, from the very opening with the rhythms and sounds of the train. How can you not love the ingenuity of lyrics like this?

Cash for the merchandise, cash for the button hooks
Cash for the cotton goods, cash for the hard goods
Cash for the fancy goods
Cash for the noggins and the piggins and the frikins
Cash for the hogshead, cask and demijohn.
Cash for the crackers and the pickles and the flypaper
Look whatayatalk. whatayatalk, whatayatalk, whatayatalk, whatayatalk?
Weredayagitit?
Whatayatalk?
Ya can talk, ya can talk, ya can bicker, ya can talk,
ya can bicker, bicker bicker ya can talk all ya want
but is different than it was.

I liked the nice volunteer lady. Except that she’d probably be the first to volunteer for my support team, I’m sure she’s perfectly lovely in most other ways. I’m also sure she’s not alone in her sentiments.

For the nice volunteer lady (and the rest of you theater snobs), here are just a few reasons why I love musicals.

*

Many years ago a former colleague couldn’t make it to a staging of Guys and Dolls that the Oregon Symphony put on, so I bought the pair of tickets and took one of the boys.

The next morning the colleague sent me an e-mail. “How was it?”

“Great. I always love the opportunity to introduce my kindergartener to betting on the ponies, Bacardi and craps.”

Not to mention gangsters.

After the show, the kindergartener and I spilled out of the Schnitzer Concert Hall and into the South Parks Blocks. The not-yet-Large Smelly Boy danced and twirled and jumped and sang at the top of his lungs, “Luck be a lady tonight!” He hopped from brick to brick and balanced on cement curbs. He was completely oblivious that the park was crowded with people and that many were staring at him. They were smiling. (I, on the other hand, pretended to blend in and look around the crowd as if trying to figure out where his parents were, but that’s also beside my point.)

*

When the boys were young and went to bed early, we made a big deal of letting them stay up late one night so that as a family we could watch South Pacific, which was specially showing on television. It was the 2001 version with Harry Connick Jr. and Glenn Close. (Close was miscast, but because she was an executive producer we’ll figure that’s an argument we’re not going to win with upper management.)

The boys must have been 3 and 6 at the time (I had to count on my fingers). The next day they bobbed around in a swimming pool while scratching their heads with both hands and joyfully singing, “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.”

*

A handful of years ago Mr. Scatter and I saw a performance of The Lion King. The LSBs were adamant about not wanting to go. As soon as the show started, and the magic of that opening spread through the theater as each of the animals paraded in, I knew the boys had to see it and I was bummed that they weren’t there.

The next day I looked for tickets online for the three of us, and it appeared that everything was sold out. So I took the boys to a box office close by. Three seats together were not available anywhere in the run (and the boys were too small at the time to sit separately) … but wait … three seats just opened up for that night’s performance … which was in just a few hours. Could we make it?

I looked at my watch. I looked at the boys. Could we make it?

Yes! We bought the tickets, raced out of there, grabbed dinner, changed clothes and were in our seats just in time to see the magic of that opening spread through the theater.

*

I was in a meeting with a number of people discussing what types of arts programs we wanted at our kids’ school. The meeting went on, lots of people spoke up, a little light was shed on shape and direction, but the discussion was starting to tediously circle in on itself without going forward.

Then a woman spoke up who until then had only quietly and patiently listened. I knew she had a fine arts background in painting. She said I have to go but I just want to say that if we have to pick only one thing (I thought she was going to say visual arts) then let it be a musical because it incorporates all the different art forms and children have an opportunity to participate no matter their skill level or interest. Kids can paint sets, make costumes, be techies, act, sing, dance, play music. It has it all. There’s something for everyone. It brings together a community.

And she left. The rest of us sat there and all looked at each other. Then we said, yeah, that makes sense. What a brilliant idea. Meeting adjourned.

*

So give me my trifle. My funny. My fun. In many ways, musicals, like good comedy, are a great way in, and open the doors to a wealth of good taste.

*

PHOTO: Cast and set of “She Loves Me” at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Photo: Jenny Graham

By Bob Hicks

Art Scatter’s ramble through the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 75th anniversary season is closer to its end than its beginning, and it strikes us once again how much this thicket of theater interconnects. A lot of that has to do with the nature of rotating repertory, which gives audiences the chance to see the same actors in a variety of roles and a variety of plays.

Brooke Parks and Christian Barillas, for instance, who play sister and brother Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, return as sister and brother Caroline and Charles Bingley in Pride and Prejudice. Lisa McCormick, who calculates her future so carefully as the practical Charlotte Lewis in P&P, stumbles headstrong into love as the shopgirl heroine in She Loves Me. Dawn-Lyen Gardner, survivor of rape and warfare in Ruined, becomes a lucky lady-in-waiting in The Merchant of Venice. One way or another, love is in the air all over these plays. And couldn’t Merchant almost have been titled Pride and Prejudice?

Sometimes the connecting game is tougher. What could the troubling and abrasive Merchant of Venice and the little musical gem She Loves Me have in common? Not a lot, unless you consider that the source material for She Loves Me (and for the movies Shop Around the Corner, In the Good Old Summertime and You’ve Got Mail) is the Hungarian play Parfumerie by Miklos Laszlo, and then go a step further to remember that the Hungary of 1937, the year that Laszlo wrote his little bubble of innocence, held little truck with Jews and would as soon have done without them — a desire that was in the process of being satisfied.

Well, it’s a stretch. And really, the light-spirited She Loves Me has nothing to do with the politics and prejudices of Shakespeare’s imagined Venice. But it’s good to remember that both plays have a cultural context, and that both are very much products of their own places and times.

It’s especially good to remember that about Merchant, an always controversial drama that has become especially problematic in our post-Holocaust times. The play was meant as a comedy, with its happy pairings of couples and the merchant Antonio’s replenishment after all had seemed lost. But how do we laugh with these good people, so casually abusive toward Shylock and Jews in general? And how do we ignore the testimony of Shylock, the usurer who is wronged and who demands, with justification if not mercy, his pound of flesh? It’s surprising how relatively brief Shylock’s appearances in the play are, given that history and the power of his personality have wrenched the drama emphatically in his direction.

These days Merchant is often played as a satire on the smug hypocrisy of a dominant Christian culture, which preaches love and practices hate. It’s seen as Shakespeare’s stout defense for the essential humanity of the “other,” or alternatively, as an example of his tendency to isolate and dehumanize the outsider (after all, wasn’t the island Caliban’s before Prospero butted in?). The line that many of us have used is that Shakespeare was such a great artist that he transcended the prejudices of his times: In creating Shylock, he created a lasting argument that defeats his ordinary Elizabethan inclinations.

There is truth in all of that, but as director Bill Rauch’s admirably straightforward Ashland production underscores, the whole truth is more complicated. Yes, the play argues for the dignity of Shylock and, at least through our backward-looking telescope, lays blame on the virtuous Christians. But the underlying worldview of Merchant — the play’s moral compass — is its belief in the validity of the Christian view of the crucial difference between Judaism and Christianity. Judaism, this view declares, is a religion of the law. Christianity is a religion of grace. The law is crime and punishment. Grace is forgiveness and reform. The quality of mercy may not be strained, but it’s demanding, and sometimes it must hurt. So in the courtroom, when Portia beats Shylock at his own game, pushing legality to its extreme logical conclusion, she’s not rubbing anything in, she’s pointing out to him the “error” of his ways. The Jewish law is good but not sufficient. It must be tempered by Christian grace. The demand that Shylock convert to Christianity, then, isn’t rubbing his defeat in his face, it’s lending him a helping hand. For his own good — nay, for his salvation — he must join the Christians in a state of grace. It’s the missionary sentiment in action, and it knows what’s good for the rest of the world. Tell me again: Why are we in Iraq?

In this, Shakespeare was in accord with his place and times — except that, in creating Shylock, he also created a potent and enduring counterargument. A firm belief in a particular moral point of view can slip easily into an equally firm belief that other world views are immoral, which can slip once more into the firm belief that outsiders are infidels, unequals, unclean, to be shunned or even eliminated. And what should the object of these prejudices and abuses think? It’s not that hard to see in Shylock a kind of brotherhood with today’s Muslim world. From the West, we create revolutionaries in the East.

This is extremely uncomfortable territory, which along with the quality of the drama and language is the best reason to revisit it. The Merchant of Venice is a prickly reminder of the possibilities of evil contained in the supposition of good. The world, like the human soul, is a complex and disturbing place. Rauch’s production simply lays it all out, without hiding from its implications or attempting to skew the play. The actors do the rest, although sometimes it must be difficult, tossing out casual slurs and embodying small-mindedness. Anthony Heald as Shylock, Jonathan Haugen as Antonio, Vilma Silva as Portia, Gregory Linington as wild-haired and venom-spouting Gratiano — the actors give the characters their best and lets the chips fall.

Where do they fall? Ask not. They fall for us.

*

One of the festival’s strong suits is its fondness for reviving good but semi-forgotten theater pieces from the past, and with this year’s She Loves Me it’s surpassed itself. If the season didn’t have to end, this production no doubt would roll on and on, drawing happy crowds and eliciting rave reviews. Like the best of American musicals — the likes of South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Oklahoma! — it combines intelligence and wit with broad popular appeal. Director Rebecca Taichman’s production in Ashland is one of those rare and happy theatrical enterprises that picks you up from its first note and doesn’t set you down again until the last.

A surprise Broadway hit in 1963, She Loves Me is both small in scope and broad in its particulars: It makes every moment count. With a book by Joe Masteroff (Cabaret) and music and lyrics respectively by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, who would go on as a team to create Fiddler on the Roof, the play is a nearly seamless wedding of words and music. Its melodious score recalls the warmth of Viennese operetta, and in its submission to the forward necessities of the drama it follows the lead of Showboat and Oklahoma!

This is the love story of pen pals who have never met but fall in love through their letters, never realizing that they work in the same shop and don’t get along very well at all. There’s a hint here of the Shakespearean penchant for mistaken identities, which always must be sorted out before the characters can discover their true selves. The brash and wonderful Lisa McCormick as Amalia Balash and Mark Bedard (a gifted comedian who also plays the flippant Gobbo in Merchant) as introverted Georg Nowack lead a sparkling cast of singing actors. Taichman gives the show time to play around — the little extensions, double-takes and sight gags, such as Eddie Lopez’s hilarious bumbling busboy ballet, that plump up a musical comedy like yeast enlivening dough — and the actors take full advantage of it. With the show’s wittily shifting set pieces and confectionery costumes, it’s also a delight to see.

Rauch is obviously a devotee of musical theater, and since he took over as artistic director the company has eagerly pursued the tradition. Last season brought The Music Man. This season, She Loves Me. Next season moves on to British operetta and Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. This ongoing commitment to musical theater could have a distinct impact on the makeup of the acting company, adding to the list of qualifications for at least some slots professional adeptness with song and dance. This is a good thing. As the festival goes, it grows.

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PHOTOS, from top:

• Antonio (Jonathan Haugen, left), Shylock (Anthony Heald, center) and Bassanio (Danforth Comins) discuss the terms of Antonio’s bond in “The Merchant of Venice.” Photo: Jenny Graham.
• Amalia Balash (Lisa McCormick) shows off her new dress for her first date with her anonymous pen pal in “She Loves Me.” Photo: Jenny Graham.

Lanky and improbably lean-headed, with a cliffside of forehead pierced by a widow’s peak of bristling orange hair, Dan Donohue looks a little like the late-night television host Conan O’Brien — or maybe an O’Brien sired by Loki, the god of mischief.

As Hamlet in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s current production of the Danish play, Donohue wears his jester’s cap naturally, less like a disguise than a key accoutrement to an essential part of his makeup: Hamlet the Fool.

We’ve come a long way from Olivier, the quintessence of the romantically doomed heroic prince. Olivier once talked about the advantages of being not quite short and not quite tall: at about five-foot-eleven, he could shift the sense of his body big or small. Donohue is similarly poised between the comic and the dramatic, at ease in either direction and often, onstage, using elements of one to feed the other: He defies type. In the impenetrable yet irresistible question mark that is Hamlet, it’s an excellent place to begin.

There is no such thing as a definitive Hamlet. A lot of good actors have stumbled in the prince’s shoes, perhaps daunted by the familiarity of the language and previous performances, perhaps unwilling or unable to choose a Hamlet rather than reach for the Hamlet. Donohue is ready for the role. Consciously or subconsciously, he’s been preparing for Hamlet for a long time. On the Ashland stages he’s played Iago, Caliban, Mercutio, Prince Hal — all excellent prep for Hamlet. And anyone who recalls his Dvornichek in Tom Stoppard’s Coward-like farce Rough Crossing, or who sees his brief turn as the waiter in this season’s sparkling revival of the musical She Loves Me, understands his brilliance at deadpan comedy. He knows precisely who he wants his Hamlet to be, and that, combined with his potent craftsmanship and willingness at key moments to simply drop off the cliff and into the abyss, makes this one of the extremely few truly satisfying Hamlets I’ve seen. It’s a wonderful performance, and you really ought to see it.

I spent a couple of hours with Kenneth Branagh when his 1996 movie version of the play was released, talking with him about acting, his career, and his approach as actor and director to Hamlet. (His version has always struck me as intensely political, the portrait of a prince trying to bring back balance to a disastrously listing ship of state. It’s also one of the few versions to really make hay with the looming offstage presence of Fortinbras, waiting to strike.) Branagh followed, among several others, Olivier, Richard Burton and Nicol Williamson in creating film versions of the role, and he didn’t see one version as replacing another, only as the necessary following of night from day. “Every generation needs its own Hamlet,” he said.

It’s too much of a stretch to say that Donohue’s prince speaks for a generation, but he’s very much shaped from a generation. This is a Hamlet for our time, a prince muddled and bittered in the sterile solace of irony. Donohue stands a little to the side, dripping sarcasms over a general state of personal and institutional corruption that feels out of his control. He exudes a touch of generational suspicion that everything worth doing has already been done and the only rational or honorable course is to tear things down so you can start over again. It’s a sense of futility: Folks, we’re in over our heads, and it ain’t our fault. It’s here where Donohue seems to feed off the inspiration of Shakespeare’s fools, shrewd men who use humor and mock confrontation to speak otherwise unspeakable truths — or at least, unspeakable in the halls of power. We’ve had our own versions, from Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor to Hugh Laurie and Stephen Colbert.

Donohue’s cloak of cynicism draws out the coarse comedy hidden in the play, providing him multiple opportunities to shock the characters around him with behavior just outside the accepted norms. He cuts to the quick. Snip-snip. The leg of his expensive suit pants shears at the seam. Snip-snip. He decapitates Polonius’s necktie and hands it to him for a bookmark. Perhaps taking his cue from Howie Seago’s ghost, who performs in sign language, Donohue brings an eloquent, dancerly movement to his performance, a physical expressionism that whispers of hyped-up noh. At key moments his mask of cynicism slips and the struggling idealist emerges, carrying an immense sadness and curdling rage as he pushes to the surface. The world has turned, this Hamlet realizes, and there is no good way to turn it back.

Donohue’s approach to the language is both fresh and knowing, steeped in tradition without being humbled by it. Too many Hamlets gear up for the big speeches, taking a big metaphorical breath and then leaping into the Famous Words. Donohue enters by the back door, slipping into the speeches almost before you’ve noticed and, once he’s inside, toying with them. It feels naturalistic but isn’t really at all. The speeches seem at once extemporaneous and ritualistic: He toys with the well-worn phrases, placing them in metaphoric quotation marks, emphasizing them by de-emphasizing them, treating them with ironic affection, and all in all creating a whole new rhythm. He’s not alone in this stylized naturalism: the superb Richard Elmore, for instance, delivers Polonius’s famous “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” speech in a colloquial, offhand, slightly blowhard but also practical way.

Any Hamlet exists within a context, and director Bill Rauch has shaped a production worthy of its core. It, too, knows what it wants to be, and despite its bells and whistles its calling card is its freshness and rethinking of the language so that it flows, as much as possible, as if it were being spoken for the first time. Jeffrey King’s Claudius, Bill Geisslinger’s gravedigger, Armando Duran’s Horatio, David DeSantos’ Laertes — all are quick and deceptively casual on their deliveries, thinking out the rhythms and emphases as if they were new. And company newcomer Susannah Flood is bright and gutsy, even funny, in the ordinarily thankless role of Ophelia: for once, she makes you truly regret that Hamlet drives his girlfriend around the bend. Stylistically, the production is a little too contemporary for some: “It’s too noisy!” one knowledgeable and perceptive onlooker complained, speaking not just of the rap-style play within the play but also of the effects-laden production as a whole. I don’t agree. With a couple of minor exceptions I think Rauch’s decisions are smart and effective, carrying the core of the drama into a contemporary setting and making it feel like a story only just being told.

Of course, it’s not definitive. In the end, Ashland’s Hamlet doesn’t answer the many questions that have plagued and beguiled audiences over the centuries. Did Gertrude help Claudius plan the thing? Did Polonius and Rosencranz and Guildenstern deserve it? Should Hamlet have just ignored the ghost and let the New Order establish itself? Why did he treat Ophelia so unspeakably? Did he have the hots for Mom? Was he mad? (a question, I think, that’s reductive and largely irrelevant, anyway.) There’s always next time, when the questions won’t be answered once again.

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PHOTO: Dan Donohue as Hamlet is nobody’s — and everybody’s — fool. Photo: David Cooper.

By Bob Hicks

Art Scatter, despite its name, is mostly about pulling things together. We examine the daunting scatter of incident that is contemporary culture — this endlessly broad turmoil of emotions, beliefs and events — and gather them together, looking for patterns, similarities, fragments of coalescence. Out of chaos, we seek structure and story. We do this for you, our readers, but also for ourselves, because story, we’ve come to believe, is how we make sense of the subterranean roil of chaos that is life.

Maybe that’s why the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has become an annual touchstone in our lives. Mr. Scatter first came to this company, many years ago, as a professional observer. He’s stuck with it, gradually becoming friend, admirer, devil’s advocate, occasional scold, and in his own small way, participant — as are all who feed the festival with their time, money and attention. Whatever its faults, the festival believes in story, and in the essential wrestling with chaos that story represents: the quest to wrest comprehension from the incomprehensible.

Ah, but how to make sense of a glorious day of theatergoing that begins with the iron filigree of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and concludes with the hellfire and brimstone of Ruined, Lynn Nottage’s corrosive drama of Congolese warfare and rape? How, that is, besides the minor comparisons of stagecraft, plot, style and technique (all of which, in both productions, are admirable)? These are two peas that at first, second and even third glance do not appear to come from the same pod.

Your Honor, we call to the witness stand Aretha Franklin and Rodney Dangerfield.

The idea of respect, which Franklin turned into a national anthem and Dangerfield into a national punchline, is the common concern of these two vastly divergent and in their very separate ways compelling stories.

In Pride and Prejudice (the stage adaptation is by Joseph Hanreddy and J.R. Sullivan) we view a world in which the marital union of families is evolving from a mostly economic matter into a mostly personal one. For Elizabeth Bennet and her sister Jane, marriage is a compact less between two family firms in search of stabilizing their fortunes (although that remains important) than between two people whose natural inclinations coalesce creatively into that oddly durable state of being we call love. And love, this story tells us, is impossible without respect — which means, stripping away all pretenses, do you stand with that other person when you see her at her core?

That, finally, is the position Ruined takes, too, although its journey to the proper pairing is far less genteel, and is, in a far more physically dangerous way than for Lizzie Bennet and Mr. Darcy, an act of courage. Gentility is less than an afterthought in the frightening reality that is the Congo: it seems an impossibility. Here is a land where, it seems, everything has broken down. One cannot know one’s friends or enemies, who shift with the tide. Gruesome death or maiming can come at any moment. Ripped apart by constantly shifting guerrilla warfare between sides that seem identical in their obeisance to brutality, it is known as the rape capital of the world. Mere ruthlessness rules. Acts of compulsion (the young women in Mama Nadi’s bar and whorehouse are little more than slaves) can actually be acts of mercy, protections from fates even more dire. Here is a place where the fundamentals of respect — for civil and economic discourse, for rules of interaction, for other people, for one’s self — have simply disappeared. The problems that these characters face are far more immediate and crucial than Mr. Darcy’s distaste for his potential mother-in-law’s country manners. But in both stories, the characters must stumble toward their own confrontations with decency and respect.

In Pride and Prejudice, the process is warm and witty and familiar. I’m not sure how this production would play for audience members who haven’t read the novel or seen the immensely popular 1995 BBC televised production starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, but I doubt there were many in the audience who hadn’t done one or both: onlookers were primed for certain lines of dialogue, applauding almost before they were delivered. Ritual has its pleasures. The casting and costuming for this tale are lovely, and what director Libby Appel and her actors have achieved most importantly is a feel for Austen’s world. The novel is trimmed intelligently, the language is intact, the flow and blocking are deceptively easy, the familiar characters as fresh as a summer day in Derbyshire. Detail counts. “The expressions on their faces!” the Learned Sister exclaimed approvingly, to which I would add, the timing of their expressions: It was musical. “We have envisioned this production as a beautiful ball that teems with music and dancing and flirting and falling in love,” Appel comments in the festival program. Love, indeed. With all respect, of course.

Unlike Austen’s story, Ruined is far from familiar: It takes us into new and perilous territory, which is all the more perilous because we understand that the reality is even more horrific, if possible, than the version that Nottage presents to us onstage. Ruined isn’t a “great” play — that is, it’s not canonical; my guess is that it will be studied 50 years from now but rarely produced. But it’s a crucial story for our time in the world, when atrocities are occurring of which most of us are only dimly aware. Nottage brings us face to face, in human terms, with a reality of civil and moral breakdown that has been beyond our ken. Director Liesl Tommy and her actors — the wondrous Kimberly Scott as Mama Nadi, Dawn-Lyen Gardner as the serially tortured and raped Sophie, all the rest — have allowed us to see and feel and smell the thing in a way that just might nudge us beyond a state of general apathy or helplessness.

A little respect, please. In both of these stories, it goes a long, long way.

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PHOTOS, from top:

• Mama Nadi’s approach gets her girls’ attention in Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined.” From left: Chinasa Ogbuagu, Dawn-Lyen Gardner, Victoria Ward. Photo: Jenny Graham.
• Elizabeth (Kate Hurster, right) is troubled when Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner (Michael J. Hume, Robin Goodrin Nordli) suggest a visit to Mr. Darcy’s estate in “Pride and Prejudice.” Photo: David Cooper.

By Laura Grimes

We’re traveling, we pack of five breathing each other’s air and bumping inside each other’s heads. We eat the same food. We stop from spot to spot, sightsee, and mere snippets intermingle, weave together something anew and haul us along.

Everywhere we go we pick up words and take them with us. They lift us. They quiet us. We break bread with them. We swirl wine with them. They hang in the air among us.

Our books go from suitcase to table to car to kindle to stereo to suitcase to car to lap to bed.

Each time, bits let loose. Literary crumbs pinch and mold into a new story, unique and unashamed. It becomes our own literary travel journal. Jumbled. Weird. Scattered. And somehow cohered.

*

When The Large Smelly Boys bicker in the car, I hit play and they magically silence before the almighty audio book. Nancy Farmer, god bless her. Past summers we plowed through her The Sea of Trolls and The Land of the Silver Apples. Just to be safe, we have along her The Islands of the Blessed on iPod, CD and hard copy. Thank heavens, because we’ve used all of them. In less than a week, the hard copy was devoured by two members of the Scatter Family.

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We embody the Zits cartoon books in the backseat. I am totally freaked that those two cartoonists know everything that happens in our house. They live with us. They have spy cameras. Something. Tipping forward the fridge to empty the entire contents into a backpack? Our house! Using a  steamshovel to clean out a teen’s bedroom? Our house! The mom in Zits fixes her teen son’s collar and his brain bubble says, “Everything my mom touches turns to dork.” Freaky!

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The Scatter Family popped into a shop the other day, a quirky place at the coast full of antique and battered books. Like laced candy, odd, old-timey covers lured us and then captivated us, spellbound and addicted. They hold their own against time and trends and the overflowing sweep of pop culture, not unlike the windswept trees that lean against the coast cliffs and staunchly defy the elements.

Past the big-name mysteries lying in neat rows on a table near the entrance, past the kids section with two copies of Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott and a Hardy Boys book (where we confirmed for the second time a trivia question that had been nagging us — their first names are Joe and Frank), I spied a copy of The Ambassadors by Henry James.

I found it prone in a stack of books sandwiched between Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence and Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver.

It’s a Signet Classic with yellowed pages and a dated illustration on the cover. Copyright 1960. A tiny sticker on the front says $2.95.

The inside back cover, brown on the outside fading to light, is smacked in the middle with a green stamp:

PAPERBACK PARADISE
Quality Resale Books
Sun Plaza South
9024 103rd Ave.
Sun City, Arizona 85351

I already have several editions, but the strange stamp sealed the deal. Or maybe it was the strange sandwich. I didn’t care.

I remembered how I used to carry around an odd, old copy of the book, and like a magnet, it drew people to me, asking about it and sparking conversations. A book obsessed with manners and minute social interactions spawned other social acts that spiraled in tendrils their own way.

I got on a bus to go home one evening. I was lost in thought in my book when I felt someone peering over the seat in front of me. It was a friend with a sly smile.

“What are you reading? That looks really old.”

I explained what it was about. Or tried to. I’ve never figured out how to distill a book by Henry James into a simple plot summary. I might as well try to hack down a runaway squash vine. It was easier to change the focus and ask, “What are you reading?”

He held up his book. It was a giant hard copy of The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 by David McCullough.

He explained how the engineering firm he worked for had just been awarded a contract that had something to do with the canal.

I pointed out how he had no jacket. No bag. The only thing he carried was that giant book.

On another day, I was standing against a wall reading the same beaten book while waiting for a train when I sensed someone next to me. I looked up to see another friend with a sly smile standing exactly like me with a book propped open.

“What are you reading?” he laughed and pointed almost accusingly. “That looks like it’s from the last century.”

“It is.” I tried to explain the book again, mangling it more and more as I became keenly aware that plotwise it sounded like the dullest book on the planet. It’s not easy to explain that you are thick into hundreds of pages of obscure and mostly outmoded social etiquette. It was much easier for both of us just to dissolve into chuckles.

“What are you reading?”

I think it was a spy thriller. We boarded the train and he told me how his son snitches his daughter’s cologne and how he doesn’t leave the house in the morning until his shirts are layered just so, tucked in in some places but not in others and more than one pair of suspenders are up, down, clamped to this and that, his hair is slicked and he stinks to high heaven.

I told him I would be thrilled if my son just showered.

I think that was two summers ago. I’m still waiting for my son to shower.

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Words from The Islands of the Blessed, Chapter Twenty, filled the van:

“I shall never marry,” Thorgil said scornfully. “Shield maidens have all the power and status of men. If they wed, they lose it. They can no longer go a-hunting or bring home fine plunder. They are bound to the house, cooking, cleaning, and chasing after smelly brats. There is no honor in such a life.”

*

Back at the quirky used bookstore, another book caught my eye, as much for the title as for the crude lettering and the beat-up cloth cover. The Egg and I was written unevenly with a Sharpie across the dull lime-green spine. I have my own copy of the book already, on my nightstand, at the top of the stack. A newer paperback.

I flipped open a few pages of this version: Copyright, 1945, by Betty MacDonald.

I flipped a few more pages:

I turned the page to the opening chapter and the first sentence:

1
AND I’LL BE HAPPY
Along with teaching us that lamb must be cooked with garlic and that a lady never scratches her head or spits, my mother taught my sisters and me that it is a wife’s bounden duty to see that her husband is happy in his work.

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In The Islands of the Blessed, Chapter Twenty-Two, a group of characters is trying to convince Schlaup, the giant half-troll, that he needs to marry Mrs. Tanner, a despicable conniver:

“I know how these things are done,” Schlaup burst out suddenly. “Just because I’m not smart doesn’t mean I don’t know how marriages happen. First, the troll-maiden asks you to dance. She brings you presents: elks, bears, that sort of thing. Then she weaves you a cloak of spidersilk, which she has pulled herself from the spinnerets of a giant spider. Lastly” — he blushed deeply, turning a bright orange — “she drags you into her cave. The next morning everyone looks to see how many scratches she’s left on your browridge.”

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The Scatter family landed in Ashland. We will take in nine plays in six days. The Large Smelly Boys, for all their troll-like behavior, love going to Ashland. They burp and bicker and outstretch the patience of everyone in the family, but a few nights back when one of them popped in a video of Twelfth Night (1996 version, directed by Trevor Nunn) to prepare for the play, they went still in rapt attention.

The Duke Orsino, Act 1, Scene i:

O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purg’d the air of pestilence;

Twelfth Night was the first play the LSBs ever saw at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in 2005. They have begged to go back ever since.

We were nervous how that first trip would go. We were taking a big chance. Could they stay up? Would they behave? Would they embarrass us? Mr. Scatter had much more than his fatherly reputation at stake.

Feste/Clown/Fool, Act III, Scene i:

No, indeed, sir; the Lady Olivia has no folly: she will keep
no fool, sir, till she be married; and fools are as like husbands
as pilchards are to herrings, the husband’s the bigger; I am,
indeed, not her fool, but her corrupter of words.

It was opening night, and, fortunately for us and the festival, the show was charming and delightful. The 11-year-old-at-the-time was completely absorbed and blissfully unaware how loud he was laughing out one end and making noises out the other, which resonated and vibrated on the metal seats all the way down the row. I know, and I was three seats away.

Concerned, I watched the people around us, but they were laughing as much at him as they were the show. At intermission (we often call it halftime), I watched a young man seated behind the LSB watch him, text, watch him, text, while smiling amusingly. After halftime, the 7-year-old-at-the-time fell soundly asleep on my shoulder and snored softly.

Feste/Clown/Fool, Act I, Scene v:

Wit, and’t be thy will, put me into good fooling! Those wits
that think they have thee do very oft prove fools; and I, that am
sure I lack thee, may pass for a wise man. For what says
Quinapalus? Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

I felt like we were our own little drama, the venerable theater critic and his motley mob. Sir Toby Belch and Feste the Clown were on stage and The Scatter Family was in the audience.

By Bob Hicks

Ah, the adventures of the road. The brain trust at Art Scatter World Headquarters has packed up and squeezed itself temporarily into the Scattermobile, partaking of adventures large and small. We’ve ingested the oyster and the clam, descended into Devil’s Churn, gazed upon the gathered elk, spied osprey and eagle and hawk, felt the chilling spray of Hellgate Canyon as it soaked the curl from our hair. We’ve dined in the company of Jack London’s ghost at the Wolf Creek Inn. We’ve discovered disturbingly misplaced apostrophes on public signs, dangling hopefully like unacknowledged offspring at the reading of a rich man’s will.

Now we’re in Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where we’re settling in long enough to take in the nine plays still in repertory, having missed the already departed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Well. It’s a marathon that’s become a tradition of shared argumentation and pleasure. Mr. Scatter, Mrs. Scatter, the Learned Sister and the Large Smelly Boys experience it all, each from his or her own vantage, each with the advantages and handicaps of his or her own delights and prejudices. Late August is high season, and a good time to be doing this: The shows have hit their groove and become pretty much all that they can be.

Today is a double-header (as the great Ernie Banks used to say before taking the field for the usually hapless Chicago Cubs, “Let’s play two!”). In the afternoon it’s a stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, a favored manuscript in the Scatter Essential Library. A few hours ago  there was some conjecture that if only there’d been one more lively and level-headed Bennet sister, she’d have been ideal for the good and charming Colonel Fitzwilliam. In the evening it’s Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, a story of the Congolese war, in a production that has been reported to be shattering and memorable.

Last night the marathon began in what should have been splendid fashion with this season’s Twelfth Night on the open-air Elizabethan Stage. But the Brain Trust was in rare accord that this was a weak production, pretty but safe, usually opting for the easy laughs (and not always getting them), underestimating the desire and ability of the audience to dive deeper into the mysteries. Sad to say, we felt condescended to — and although we know that wasn’t the intention, it was the effect.

Twelfth Night may be, as many have argued, the closest thing we have to a perfect comedy. But it arrives at its perfection at least in part through its imperfections: a clown who isn’t especially funny, a comic villain who is at least as sinned against as he is sinning.

Feste, the clown, has good company in Shakespeare’s plays, especially from the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It. The role of the fool isn’t necessarily to crack jokes (although he should be good at that), but to deflate powerful egos without having one’s head separated from one’s shoulders: Think Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Feste manages this remarkably well, moving easily between flawed masters (Orsino, Olivia) even as he takes dead aim at the high-level factotum Malvolio. Feste tightens the screws and eases the tension at the same time, a fine trick, and in the festival’s current production, actor Michael Elich shades it both ways beautifully — better even, Mr. Scatter thought, than Ben Kingsley in Trevor Nunn’s movie version, because Kingsley stripped the clown’s character a little too bare (and Elich sings better, too). In Twelfth Night, Feste isn’t just an observer and commentator, he’s a participant, and in participating he reveals his own dark vanities.

Malvolio is another case entirely, one of the most interesting comic characters ever devised, partly because when you stop to think about him he’s barely comic at all. Malvolio is a blood brother, or at least a blood cousin, to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Angelo in Measure for Measure: a man who breaks because he can’t bend. Like Angelo, Malvolio exudes a kind of virtue but lacks empathy. Like Shylock, he is outcast (with far better reason than Shylock, who is scorned without legitimate cause) and, humiliated, vows revenge. Malvolio needs to be played sharply and shrewdly and humanly, like the competent and fatally proud man he is. Play him simply like the butt of the joke and you’ve missed the point: He’s the worm in the apple, the curse at Sleeping Beauty’s christening party, summer’s impending winter of discontent. The Malvolio I remember best is the late Peter Fornara, from probably 30 years ago, who played the man as calculating and intelligent and thirsting for power. By the end of the story you felt, as in Merchant, a sense of hovering shame at the actions of the play’s “good” people, and of an earthquake about to happen. You felt present at the death of a competent administrator and the birth of a violent revolutionary. The effect wasn’t to eliminate the merriment of the rest of the characters but to underscore that Illyria is very far from Paradise and that, like the playgrounds of the Norse gods and heroes who cavort beneath the sword of Ragnarok, it can’t last.

Christopher Liam Moore, Ashland’s Malvolio, is a good actor but it felt as if he didn’t have a chance. The play’s direction, by Darko Tresnjak (a veteran of The Old Globe in San Diego), so plumps up the farcical and obvious that Malvolio becomes a mere cartoon character. Other very good actors (Miriam A. Laube as Olivia, Robin Goodrin Nordli as Maria) get caught up in the same sort of grinning mummery, stepping away from genuine emotional engagement and into cartoonland. They, and this show, could have been much more. Mr. Scatter wishes the production could have followed a little more closely the example of Tony DeBruno, who brought a simple warm engagement to his portrayal of the plotter Fabian, and so stands out in a minor role.

Still, this is Twelfth Night, and you can’t keep a great play down: It’ll triumph, at least partially, against most odds. This is a polished production, and handsome to look at, and several scenes and characters work well, even though it’s mostly empty calories. It would have been nice, though, to actually care about it.

Next stop: the lush lawns of Pemberley.

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PHOTO: Viola in disguise (Brooke Parks) discovers an affection for Orsino (Kenajuan Bentley), as Feste (Michael Elich, center), Curio (Fune Tautala Jr., back left) and Valentine (Jorge Paniagua) look on. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

By Laura Grimes

When I complained to Mr. Scatter that I had only snippets, no whole stories, he said, “Do centered asterisks.”

“Wha?” I creased my brow.

“Do centered asterisks.”

Like that’s supposed to help me. I’m not sure what the heck he’s talking about.

Oh, wait, there’s one!

*

Oh, heck. Now it’s gone.

The Scatter Family is on the road. At the moment, we’re at the coast. Longtime Scatter readers know that when we’re at the coast, tradition calls for really roughing it — which means we buy a tub of cookie dough and then race to see if we can bake all the cookies before it’s time to leave. So far, our winning streak is perfect.

Some months back, we plowed through a tub of dough, blogged all about cookies and plungers, and got back home to headlines that the cookie dough had been recalled because of an e. coli outbreak. Coincidence?

Let’s hope our winning streak for dodging bacterial diseases also stays perfect. Fingers crossed, please.

It’s our landlord duty to eat this dough, though. We need the tub. We need another plunger caddy. It just kills me to have a naked plunger.

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Another one! Sneaky little buggers.

Besides eating cookies, however, our forays on the coast have another, very serious purpose: science excursions. We have done extensive research and have several important facts to report.

1. The Hatfield Marine Science Center is between octopi. The big, square tank displayed prominently near the entrance is empty. Deriq, the last giant Pacific octopus that lived there, died July 25. Read about it here.

This worthwhile educational center is often overshadowed by the big Oregon Coast Aquarium just around the corner. The two share a lot of similar displays — the tanks of fish and anenomes — but this one is more intimate, has more hands-on activities, and usually is overlooked by the crowds of people.

We discovered long ago what a kick it is to see the octopus getting fed. We know the whole routine and the spiel that the keepers deliver. A few months back, the Large Large Smelly Boy was at the center and I wasn’t. He texted me that the octopus was about to get fed. (I am still envious just remembering it.) I texted back: “Milkshake or smoothie?”

“Smoothie.”

“Yay!”

The keepers explain that when an octopus bites a crab, it first paralyzes it and then injects an enzyme that turns the crab meat to the consistency of a milkshake or smoothie. I always prefer the smoothie analogy. It takes a couple of hours for the crab meat to break down and then the octopus sucks it out.

Some years back, the center had a surprisingly sociable octopus — I think its name was Ava. When she nabbed the crab, she would happily parade it around the tank to show all the visitors.

2. Starfish are really called sea stars, a fact I can never get used to. We were reminded of this at the center. The next day we were at the Oregon Coast Aquarium and checking out their new Swampland exhibit.

“Oh, look, seahorses!” Mr. Scatter exclaimed. “Only we aren’t suppose to call them that anymore, are we? What are we suppose to call them now?”

I knew he was confusing seahorses with sea stars, but I kindly refrained from pointing this out. Instead, I pointed to the placard.

“Let’s see. We can call them ’seahorses’ or we can call them ‘Hippocampus erectus.’ ”

3. Teenagers prefer to go on scientific excursions by themselves. The Large Large Smelly Boy toured the aquarium with us for a short while and then said, “I’m going elsewhere. I have my phone.”

A few minutes later my phone rang. “The turkey vultures are flying around.”

A few minutes later my phone rang again. “There’s a diver inside the Passages of the Deep.”

“If you want to share the trip with us you should just walk around with us.”

“But then I would have to be seen with you.”

When he returned he reported the entire sum of his findings:

“What’s a bad thing to say to a piranha? Pull my finger.”

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Aaah! Another one!

But, wait. I have a centered asterisk of my own up my sleeve. Behold: