Annoying Theatre Update: Jane Eyre surprisingly watchable

In the face of snide comments about my snooty pastimes, and because of the last play I saw, I just want to take a moment to rave about the Guthrie. Most recently I've seen Private Lives, 1776, and last Friday night, Jane Eyre, and it's on the basis of that last play that I really had to realize how impressed with the place I am, because I hated that rotten book so damn much. And yet, they somehow managed to stage a decent play out of such dire, dire source material, largely due to the talent of the cast, without a whole hell of a lot of help from Charlotte Bronte's idiotic story. Seriously, how about an ending that makes any damn sense instead of just plunging headlong into the woods and counting on supernatural nonsense to drag you back? It's an achievement to extract a workable performance out of that nonsense (although it's still a slow-paced play about the most miserable person on earth and opens with a seemingly endless montage of child abuse).

Of course, no offense is intended to a certain Oldtown resident and Charlotte Bronte aficionado, but unlike Amstelboy I think I only passed the Jane Eyre unit in junior high by writing a paper about one of her sister's books for extra credit. So I read two books while failing all the quizzes on one of them because I didn't bother with the schedule the rest of the class was on, but I feel I achieved a sort of moral victory by showing my disdain for that over-romanticized tripe. I also had a certain student affectionately known as Eyeballs to take the heat off of me, because while I would read an entire novel just to piss on the class, he would just piss on the class. Our combined strategies for handling the requirement to highlight key passages really didn't endear us to our instructor: I claimed there was nothing so momentous that I needed to highlight for in fear my little brain couldn't contain it, and he just highlighted random passages, because like me he could knock the book out in a couple hours if he had to. When nobody did their homework one day, and sternly keeping the laughter out of his voice he asked our teacher if she graded on a curve, I think he drew all her accumulated wrath for the next two months.

But leaving aside my tortured adolescence, I do love the new Guthrie. Part of the charm of it is the whole atmosphere of the new building, built as a modern tweak to the ruined mills around which the early life of this city revolved, inserting itself as the new heart of the Mill City, with giant, ghostly murals of the playwrights whose work gives life to the building. And it has created a whole new street life on Second Street of outdoor restaurants and cafes to go with the Guthrie's own Cue (try the sheepsmilk ricotta ravioli). I still can't walk the halls without pausing to examine all the backlit pictures of over 40 years of Guthrie productions, with the young faces of all those actors some famous some not shining out the dark blue walls, or without stepping out onto the endless bridge. All the windows that hint at all the nooks and crannies of bars, lounges, and classrooms throughout the building are all mirrored, reflecting to the street below an inverted image of all the theater goers peering out.

The eccentric thrust stage with its irregular aisles and multicolored seats and alpine slope was toned down a bit in its transfer from the old building, but still keeps it grounded as one of the United States' theatrical landmarks, and it stands out that much more for the new proscenium theater, exhibiting the restrained wit of England and the ardent pathos of Ireland in plays like Deirdre, Major Barbara, and most recently, Private Lives. There's been a zany, sparkling brilliance to the works I've seen on the thrust stage from the hilarious ensemble that managed to elicit tears of laughter and chills of patriotism in 1776, or the bright comedy with a dark heart they made of The Merchant of Venice. And after a year I still have yet to go to the third theater in the building, the realization of Joe Dowling's dream to bring the Guthrie Lab home and have a building that offers a venue for every type of stage: setting actors back behind the wall of the traditional proscenium arch, the vivid intimacy of the thrust stage, and the experimental Dowling Studio, where each play creates its own theater and its audience's place in it.

It's a cool place, is all I'm saying, and the next time any of my loyal readership (all three of you on a good day) are in town, come have a drink. Because blue... is the new black.