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THEATER REVIEW Review: OSF's 'Roe' frames a contentious piece of history with compassion Comment By Bill Varble for the Mail Tribune MailTribune.com By Bill Varble for the Mail Tribune Posted Apr. 24, 2016 at 8:14 PM Updated Apr 25, 2016 at 10:51 AM By Bill Varble for the Mail Tribune Posted Apr. 24, 2016 at 8:14 PM Updated Apr 25, 2016 at 10:51 AM » Social News Lisa Loomer’s “Roe” is the eighth play developed in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s American Revolutions series of history plays, and it’s one of the best. Forty-three years after the U.S. Supreme Court made abortion legal again, Loomer in effect lifts a corner of the quilt of history and invites us to have a peak underneath. “Roe,” co-produced with Arena State and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, had its world premiere production Sunday afternoon at the OSF’s Angus Bowmer Theatre, sure-handedly directed by OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch. This is a big play with big ideas, a big issue, a big cast. But Loomer’s control of her material is so deft that not only is what could have been a deadly drag a rousing entertainment, its two-and-a-half hours flashes by like you’ve been time-warped. The play begins with with the 24-year-old Sarah Weddington (Sarah Jane Agnew), who in a couple years will be the lawyer who successfully argues the pro-choice side of Roe v. Wade, taking part in a late-‘60s-style women’s group comically using the now-iconic book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” in an earnest but clumsy attempt to examine their cervixes. Next we meet Norma McCorvey (Sara Bruner), the hard-drinking, trash-talking lesbian bartender who is pregnant, wants an abortion and will become the “Jane Roe” (to protect her identity) of Roe v. Wade. Both are flawed, believable characters, and while the middle-class Weddington would go on to make history, it’s the working-class McCorvey, or “Roe,” who has the more riveting arc. But in the first act, all she wants is an abortion. “Roe” is not a screed for or against abortion, and there would be little point in such a play. Rather, Loomer’s main theme is the process by which everyday people get swept up in the big currents of history, often with a random dose of chance. Norma wants an abortion. Weddington and others are looking for somebody on whose behalf they can challenge a Texas abortion statute. Weddington uses McCorvey. And the latter, though she’s rough around the edges, courtesy of an abusive childhood, is no dummy. The case works its way through the system for a couple of years, and Norma never gets her abortion. “You didn’t give a damn about Roe the person,” Norma later tells Sarah. “All you cared about was Roe the case.” Loomer’s key strategy in telling the complex story of “Roe,” with both its run-up and its ongoing aftermath, was to skip ahead first in years, then in decades, and have many of the characters act as narrators for whom the scenes are flashbacks. This obliterates the fourth wall, allows Loomer to choose which parts of the story to linger on and makes explicit the crucial differences in the characters’ accounts of the events. If history used to be written by the winners, it’s now written by everybody who has an ax to grind and can get an agent. A graphic instance of this is when Weddington and McCorvey show us their books (Weddington’s “A Question of Choice” and McCorvey’s “I Am Roe,” both written a couple of decades after the landmark 1973 ruling). Most of the play’s dozen actors play multiple parts (although not Bruner and Agnew), and there’s a lot of quick costume and scene changes and clever use of projections that never become excessive or distracting. Catherine Castellanos is superb as McCorvey’s long-time lover, Connie. Kate Mulligan (name corrected from previous version) is wonderfully hideous as McCorvey’s breathtakingly hateful mother. When the ‘70s turn to the ‘80s, we see Ronald Reagan, the Rev. Pat Robertson, Pee-wee Herman. When McCorvey casually does drugs, she shrugs and tells us, “Hey, it’s the ‘80s.” When she does drugs later she says, “Hey, it’s the ‘90s.” “Roe” is not a courtroom drama. But in the first act we do hear a little from the lawyers, interacting with recordings of the voices of justices Warren Burger, Potter Stewart, Byron White and Thurgood Marshall from the actual trial. In a key moment, McCorvey has gone to work at an abortion clinic, and the radical anti-abortion group Operation Rescue moves in next door with a charismatic leader played by Jeffrey King. With each side hurling bitter accusations at the other (number of “babies” killed, number of abortion clinics bombed or shot at), it would have been easy to make the King’s character a cardboard villain, but he is instead a rounded character and not unsympathetic to McCorvey. The real McCorvey went through some radical changes, which Loomer elucidates without dwelling on. In the end she feels used by both the women’s movement and the media. Well, yeah. In the way that everyday people from Elian Gonzales to Joe the Plumber get used in an ever more frenzied mass media age. Then the world moves on the next feeding frenzy. Loomer finds the humanity in all her characters. In the end, she seems to suggest that, polarized as we are, if we’d open our hearts and minds a bit, maybe we could find a little compassion for each other. By Bill Varble for the Mail Tribune MailTribune.com By Bill Varble for the Mail Tribune Posted Apr. 24, 2016 at 8:14 PM Updated Apr 25, 2016 at 10:51 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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