Theater beyond cornflakes
By Paul Haist
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Morton Paglin's new play is to theater what the art song or leit is to music.
For some that may beg the question, "Are not songs, by definition, art, or, at least, shouldn't they be art? Isn't that the intention? Isn't 'art song' like saying art painting?"
Well, that overlooks the almost ineffable quality that distinguishes an art song, and which occasionally distinguishes other art.
Theater, like song, may be endowed with a nature within the universe of art that makes it more than ordinarily capable of possessing that almost ineffable character, a character I will dare to eff, so to speak, at this time.
An art song is an exquisitely elegant song that derives from an aesthetic as finely drawn and as highly refined as possible. It is iridescent, filled with its own light, like the purest and most highly burnished gold. It is unalloyed beauty opposite which all else pales.
Paglin is a UC Berkeley-trained Ph.D. economist who was for many years on the faculty of Portland State University. His interest in plays and theater "goes back a long way," at least to his post-grad days at Berkeley, he said.
He's a scholar who takes a scholarly approach not only to economics, but also to theater.
"Three Years" is his fourth play in the past 11 years.
The first, "Life Among the Fabians," (think George Bernard Shaw and English socialists, not the 1950s teen idol Fabiano Anthony Forte who ably demonstrated that some songs are, indeed, not art) played successfully for a necessarily brief run between season productions at Artist's Repertory Theater here.
His second play, "Fertility Rights," presciently explored the emerging trade in human eggs, which exploration may have brought out an irrepressible dismal scientist in the then still nascent playwright who wrote of egg markets and egg brokers.
Paglin satirized the phenomenon by putting a price of $50,000 on one ideal egg.
Shortly later, he found an ad in a college newspaper in which a real couple offered exactly $50,000 for a human egg that met their exacting specifications.
"Life imitates art," Paglin chuckled.
With his third play, "Old Passions/New Lives," Paglin embarked on his current flirtation with the works of Chekhov. This was an adaptation of the Russian's novella, "My Life."
Throughout his new career in theater, Paglin has been motivated by his belief that something is missing in much modern theater.
"My goal was to bring back (to theater) people who have ideas and are not afraid to articulate them," he said.
He expresses admiration for some modern playwrights, such as the British Nobelist Harold Pinter, whom he quotes with obvious relish and a wry smile: I've got your cornflakes ready. Here's your cornflakes. Are they nice?
Paglin said he finds much modern drama "thin, lacking in intellectual content."
For those who long for more intellectual content in their theater, they will find it, one astonishingly scrumptious cornflake after another, in "Three Years," which opened Nov. 9 under the direction of Portland theater veteran Keith Scales at the West End Theater where it will continue Thursdays through Sundays until Dec. 3, except the Thursday of Thanksgiving.
Paglin describes "Three Years," the time frame of the story, as "an unconventional love story with a Chekhovian twist," which he foreshadows by quoting Oscar Wilde: "The only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting what you want."
The playwright elaborated.
Wilde's remark, he said, "illustrates the condition of Chekhov's characters: They suffer if denied what they long for, but are profoundly disappointed when their dreams are realized."
The drama centers on the difficulties arising from a marriage in which only the husband is in love and in which neither spouse shares interests of the other.
The affluent merchant-class couple's entirely sufficient difficulties (who would need more?) are further complicated by conflicts—personal and political—arising among their family and closest friends, as tsarist Russia drifts helplessly toward a rocky lee shore.
The characters, said Paglin, manifest "the conflict between passion and reason" in a typically Chekhovian structure in which "the action is more internal than external."
The play's cast, which Paglin called a group of "very intelligent actors," includes David Loftus (Laptev, the male lead), Melissa Whitney (Julia, the female lead), Ken Moore, Alison Frost, Robert Projansky, Jonah Weston, Joe Healey, Ben Plonte and Maryanne Glazebrook.
Theatergoers may recall Loftus' appearance last March as the attorney for physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Northwest Classical Theater Co. production of Heinar Kipphardt's "In the Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer."
All tickets for "Three Years" are $15. They may be purchased online at www.threeyearstickets.com or by phone, (800) 838-3006.
Call (971) 255-0604 for more information about the production.
Curtain time Thursday through Saturday is 7:30 p.m. Sunday matinees begin at 3 p.m.
West End Theater is located at 1220 SW Taylor St. It occupies the premises formerly occupied by The Movie House.