Guilty Pleasures -- Everyone dies, and GP weeps


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A year or so ago, the major motion picture "A Perfect Storm" was on TV. Now, Guilty Pleasures had not paid much attention to this film when it first came out in 2000, or for that matter, the 1997 nonfiction book the film was based on.

So, there on the couch sat Guilty Pleasures, watching George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg get tossed about, seemingly lost forever to the sea before the commercial break ... wait, just seemingly, right?

Nope. Bam! Ending credits. Everyone drowned.

Sobbing -- and embarrassed -- Guilty Pleasures had not known there would be no happy ending.

Flash forward to a couple of weekends ago when Guilty Pleasures was visiting a former high school flame turned fancy-pants actor in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore. (The launching pad for last week's ode to nearby Weed, Calif.)

One of the productions that Fancy-Pants is in -- as Second Gentleman and Herald -- is Shakespeare's "Othello." (Its final performance is tonight.) And in order to avoid another "Perfect Storm" incident, this friend and others warned Guilty Pleasures that in "Othello," "everyone dies."

Well, duh, it's a tragedy.

But Guilty Pleasures -- who miraculously made it through high school without reading the classic play and somehow avoided all movie versions -- had no idea how tragic "Othello" really is.

Perhaps it was the chilly fall feel in the open-air Elizabethan Stage, or maybe it was the second-row seats, but this production, starring Peter Macon as Othello and Dan Donohue as Iago, quite literally took Guilty Pleasures' breath away.

It's one thing to say that "everyone dies." It's another to watch a man manipulated into madness murder the person who loves him the most.

Once again, Guilty Pleasures was left in tears -- but also ready for more amazing theater.

Well, ask and ye shall receive.

The following night, Fancy-Pants was back up on stage, this time as George Gibbs in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," a play in which, once again, everyone dies.

 

* Guilty Pleasures is a weekly look at whatever Guilty Pleasures wants to look at.



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