...is the motto of the Original Practice Shakespeare Festival here in the Portland area.

Naoto and the girls and I went to see an outdoor, free production of "A Midsommer's Night Dreame."

I didn't have great expectations going in that the Suzuki portion of the family would be able to pay attention that long. But since this play has fairies in it, I was kind of hoping.

Girl 2 lasted until the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-a-play in the last act.

Girl 1 watched the whole thing.

Naoto fell asleep. :) (not really, I am exaggerating for effect. But he did tell me "wake me up if I snore", so I'm allowed.)

Anyway, the cool thing about this production is supposedly they do the whole Shakespeare play thing the way the players might have done it lo those many ages ago.

1) minimal rehearsing
2) an onstage "prompter" (who in our case, would blow a whistle if entrances were slow, help actors with their lines, and blew her whistle and asked for extemporaneous "airplane dances" from various actors if an overhead jet interrupted)
3) little scrolls that the actors read their lines from

I was at first a little doubtful about watching a play with actors reading their lines, but what it brought to the production was a kind of sense of looseness. The actors ran/walked/sat among the audience, made joking asides to eachother when they lost their place, and overall made it really fun.

Puck stole the show. My girls' eyes were glued to him the entire time. Not only was he phsyically clownish (hopping and cartwheeling about) but he pretty much added humor either in the forms of exaggerated expressions or comic asides to the audience (for instance, when Demetrius is being led through the forest by an invisible Puck looking for Lysander, he says something like "call out coward" and Puck, pretending to be Lysander, called out "you suck!") Naoto thought he looked like Seth Meyers from Saturday Night Live.

So all in all, I think it was successful introduction to Shakespeare. The girls didn't whine, and I got to see a very interesting production.

They company is doing more performances here in Portland. I recommend them.