The ensemble of "Book of Days" on stage at Columbia Center for the Arts. The drama premiered on May 8 and will run for three weekends. Sean Avery photos.
The ensemble of "Book of Days" on stage at Columbia Center for the Arts. The drama premiered on May 8 and will run for three weekends. Sean Avery photos.
From left to right: Kayla Berg, Emily Vawter, and Andrew Cushman on stage in "Book of Days."
From left to right: William Thayer Daugherty, Emily Vawter, and Dawn Rankin.
From left to right: Jasper Krehbiel, William Lounsberry, and Kayla Berg.
David Dye plays Boyd Middleton in "Book of Days," which premiered at Columbia Center for the Arts on May 8.
From left to right: Bill Noonan, Kathleen Morrow, and Emily Vawter.
From left to right: Kayla Berg, Tucker Hoffman, and Jasper Krehbiel.
Chelsea Jarrett plays Ginger Reed in "Book of Days," which premiered at Columbia Center for the Arts on May 8.
Kayla Berg and Andrew Cushman perform a scene from "Book of Days" at Columbia Center for the Arts.
William Lounsberry and Jasper Krehbiel perform a scene from "Book of Days," which premiered at Columbia Center for the Arts on May 8.
HOOD RIVER — Dublin, Missouri, is a typical American town with typical American residents, tight-knit but stuck in their ways, dominated by a lucrative cheese plant and domineered by the Catholic Church. Everyone knows everyone, but nobody knows the truth — or maybe they're hiding from it.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson’s “Book of Days,” brought to Hood River by director Ashly Will, offers an intimate look into Dublin’s curious community and its sinister secrets. The light-on-its-feet ensemble drama turned richly thematic murder mystery premiered at Columbia Center for the Arts (CCA) on May 8, and will run for three weekends.
A lifelong Gorge resident, Will got her start in the local theater scene as a teenager, working with the original CAST Theatre troupe. She later got involved with the Columbia Gorge Orchestra Association and began directing and choreographing productions in the area, including “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Evil Dead: The Musical.”
After seeing two separate productions of “Book of Days” in college, Will fell in love with the show’s attention to character, its sweeping ensemble, and its shocking third-act curveball. “It’s minimalistic and beautiful…a great character study,” she said. “You kind of know what the mystery is in general, but there’s an M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end.”
Led by a dense cast of in-depth performances and razor-sharp dialogue, Will’s take is a home run — a funny, timely and timeless critique of American society and the powers that be.
From left to right: Tucker Hoffman, William Lounsberry, and Andrew Cushman perform a scene from "Book of Days" at Columbia Center for the Arts.
The story has several moving pieces, jam-packed with interesting relationships, personalities, and threads. When a washed-up Hollywood filmmaker (David Dye) arrives in town to direct a play about Joan of Arc, cheese plant bookkeeper Ruth Hoch (Dawn Rankin) assumes the lead role. Later, after her boss (Bill Noonan) turns up dead in a supposed hunting accident, she grows suspicious and begins to dig deeper. When her community chooses to look the other way, corrupted by greed and religion, Ruth must channel her character’s thirst for truth to achieve justice.
Obviously, a lot is going on here, but the show never feels bloated. It’s dialogue-heavy, driven by vigorous conversations, where every single character gets their chance to shine. It felt like watching an entire mini-series over two and a half hours, with each episode (or scene) dedicated to a specific character or new combination of characters.
The shared spotlight, Will explained, is a result of the cast’s engaged preparation process. During rehearsal, the actors each wrote a bio for their characters and shared them with each other. Later, they were placed in the “hot seat,” tasked with answering questions about their role. “That made it as good as it is, because they really took it to heart and worked on their relationships,” she said.
Dawn Rankin plays Ruth Hoch in "Book of Days," which premiered at Columbia Center for the Arts on May 8.
Standout performances include Rankin, who excels in the lead role. She is the beating heart of the play and a driving voice of reason for the audience. Her frustration brews and boils over as her community continually neglects or dismisses her perspective.
Jasper Krehbiel commands the stage as the entitled boy wonder James, best known for his glory as a high school basketball star, who’s cheating on his wife (Kayla Berg) and after his freshly dead father’s fortune. His narcissism, greed, and cruelty make for a perfectly hateable antagonist.
Jasper Krehbiel plays James Bates in "Book of Days," which premiered at Columbia Center for the Arts on May 8.
Though there are too many to highlight, each of the play’s 10 remaining lead performances are firing on all cylinders — a critical result considering its minimalist set design, which only includes props and costumes. Its lack of highly technical or flashy components allows the character work to govern the stage.
Meanwhile, the show’s tone naturally drifts in and out of light and dark, starting funny, breezy, and easy to watch like a “walk-and-talk” film with loose plot conventions, carried by its characters, before growing darker, tenser, and more upfront with its themes.
“Book of Days” examines the Catholic Church, how it grips and controls small town communities, conceals injustices committed by its ranks, and perpetuates systems of misogyny. “It’s timely in a way, where we are not believing things we’re seeing in front of our faces,” Will said. “People will not let go of certain beliefs to see the truth in front of them, and there’s a deep-rooted misogyny running under everything.”
Will hopes that audiences feel a little shaken as they walk out of the theater. “Even though it’s not directly about our current political climate, it is about what we believe and refuse to believe,” she said. “We’re in a weird era where things are not what they seem, things are ugly; the higher-ups have too much power and the little guys have too little.”
“Book of Days” will close on May 23. For tickets and more information, visitcolumbiaarts.org.
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