The set of Museum (photo credit to Marvin Walder)
Museum is the first of the SOU Theater Department’s three productions scheduled for this academic year (The Merry Wives of Windsor and Blood Wedding are scheduled for winter and spring terms respectively). It ran for ten days and its last showing was on the 24th of November.
To date, it’s the shortest SOU production I’ve seen, at a cool, uninterrupted eighty minutes. For context, Spring of 2024’s play, Pericles, ran for over two hours. And unlike other recent productions, Museum isn’t linear. It details the day shift of a beleaguered security guard named James (Aud Godlove), who must babysit an exhibit called “The Broken Silence” on its final day. A slough of patrons ranging from pretentious hobbyists, obnoxious foreign students, and photographers visit the exhibit and make his life harder, whether it’s by taking pictures (without the Director’s express, written permission!), sniffing the exhibits, or stealing the clothespins.
Southern Oregon University is an arts school. The quality of productions like Museum are a testament to that. What made this play particularly enjoyable was it poked fun at the art world, even as it is clearly written and acted with an obvious and deep appreciation for it. The forty some patrons slip into James’s third floor throughout the course of his miserable, eighty minute day and intensely scrutinize canvases that are blank other than the theater lighting’s shadows falling on them. They whine constantly about the art world’s decline and the imminent extinction of jobs like James’s, only to boorishly handle the exhibit and make life more difficult for other patrons. The play ends with James breaking out a flask of booze, after the exhibit is looted by a mob of stuck-up southern women.
Aud Godlove as James the Security Guard (photo credit to Marvin Walder)
It is, nonetheless, a very funny play. The hijinx museum-goers get themselves into is never ending and never fails to entertain. Tina Howe’s script knows when to repeat a gag (like James’s escalating battle against photographers and sketchers, and the Director’s seeming inability to turn them down) and knows when to find a new one, rapidly shuffling between the wacky stories behind the three artists whose work the museum features. It’s a bit like watching a plate juggler– lots of separate storylines are flying around in the air, and you take in the work itself by watching the way they play out adjacent to each other. Museum is playful and funny without devolving into a series of art punchlines.
Tina Howe, who passed away in 2023, produced Museum at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre in 1976. A favorite trope of Howe’s was to write whole plays centered on mundane events, like traveling to the beach, or eating at a restaurant, a strategy that’s on full display in Museum. Howe’s first full-length play, The Nest (1969) was so poorly received by critics that it nearly ended her career. In any event Howe persevered, and wrote Museum. Museum is an affectionate caricature of the art world that will particularly resonate with students at Southern Oregon University.
