‘Direwood’ has a tongue-in-cheek sense of fun that is a flight from the seriousness of current artistic and political life

By Annette Drager

One enchanted evening, a group of about 20 people found humor, wit, and a bit of absurd pleasure at a unique theater in the woods between Colver Road and the railroad tracks in Phoenix at the first production by Green Theater Collaboration.

The fun begins inside in the King’s banquet room, a space and time donated by the Ryan Family and the Rogue Valley Brainery and Lodoteca.  Amid recoiled props and set material, we meet the bard who introduces the guest to the drama and leads them through the Direwood. Seven scenes unfold in the well-acted drama, each in a different part of the lighted forest.

Magic, sorcery, song, and dance embellish the original story, echoing Shakespearean themes used in “Hamlet,”
“King Lear” and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  Add a bit of Joseph Campbell’s myth and the zany style of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and you get a blend of present-day and ever-universal elements done in audacious ways.  

Some of the themes are betrayal, romantic love, advertising and consumer consumption, narcissism, class perspectives and biases, and the problems of succession to power.

Everything has a tongue-in-cheek sense of fun, and one must go with the flow. It’s definitely a flight from seriousness, allowing one to lighten up and broaden our often too stressful current artistic and political life.

“Tales of the Direwood” will show again at 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 30 and 31. By the way, there were no mosquitoes! Tickets can be purchased online.

Phoenix resident Annette Drager, born in 1941 in Ashland, is a 1959 graduate of Ashland High School who studied under Angus Bowmer at what’s now Southern Oregon University.