"Actors think the audience won't understand unless they put in something of their own, and so they strike all sorts of attitudes." --Aristotle

In lieu of a fuck, the Duchess consents to a finger-bang as she stands halfway up a stepladder. She writhes, a greedy sock puppet, upon the avid digits of her husband's son. Meanwhile, sonny-boy--Spurio by name--uses his free hand to finger the contents of a nearby pudding bowl. Suggestive!

Don't go rifling through the text of Cyril Tourneur's Jacobean blood-and-thunder play Revenger's Tragedy in search of this two-hander's psychological inspiration just yet. In the case of Stark Raving Theater's production of Tourneur's play, be advised that we're not dealing with Freud but fraud.

This above scene demonstrates two truths about such productions: (1) Rather than embracing the texts, local directors would rather diddle them; and (2) even if the directors were interested in explicating the text, they'd still be saddled with actors who leave the audience little choice but to sympathize with the abused pudding bowl.

On average, cockatoos enjoy more voice training than Portland actors, and often speak English with more conviction and better diction. Not surprisingly, the staging of classics is a risky enterprise here in America's most livable city. It's impossible to call this Revenger's Tragedy "bad," as that presumes a body of good classical work in Portland to measure it against. So why not call a halt to the charade? Let's end the staging of classics if all we're going to get is more ignorance tricked out in shouting and Vaudeville bits.

To be fair, Tourneur's melodrama is hardly Lear. But it has themes worth exploring, and some rather cruel comedy if played properly. This is all lost, of course, when you approach the text's language with hostility and laziness. There are three actors who do acquit themselves well: Michelle Seaton, Anne Marie Falge and Jodi Eichelberger (whose routine with a signet ring is the highlight of the evening). The usually good Torrey Cornwell and Randy Patterson have fleeting moments, but the rest...well, why bother?

Still, Stark Raving made the bold decision to ruin something out of the ordinary, rather than raking Comedy of Errors or Taming of the Shrew over the coals again. It's a lesson that the Lakewood Theater might apply whenever it casts myopic eyes upon American classics.

A few angry comments greeted my drubbing of Lakewood's decision to produce Arsenic and Old Lace last week, so let's take another look at that company. As part of the Lakewood Center of the Arts, Lakewood tends to specialize in the predictable. Whether it's a good play like Arsenic or dreck like Annie, Lakewood aspires to the obvious. With an audience that will silently endure even Lloyd Webber on skates, Lakewood often produces work that its patrons could chant along with. This center for the arts receives generous funding--but where's the art?

As we rid our stages of bad Shakespeares, awful Ibsens and rickety Shaws, let's also ditch Arsenic, Harvey and Our Town for now, and direct Lakewood toward entertaining but forgotten works by Kaufman, Connelly, Philip Barry and Sherwood that demand rediscovery. Not that Lakewood would always do these pieces justice, but it could at least strive as a company to produce interesting failures rather than just common ones. Just look at Stark Raving's production. No--on second thought, it's better not to.