The morning of our last day of plays was spent, surprise!, in a theatre. 😄 We went on a backstage tour of Festival Theatre, which was both a lot of fun and an intriguing contrast with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Whereas OSF has actors act as tour guides, regaling tour-goers with stories about the shows as well as facts and figures, Stratford has volunteers leading the tours, with a grade school teacher-like strictness about "staying together, everyone!" and a sense of intruding on the actors'/crew members' world ("we have to be out of here by 10:30 a.m. sharp"). The volunteers were well-prepared and had good cheat sheets to help them provide interesting facts and figures, however, and because the Festival Theatre is a one-stop shop for costumes as well as dressing rooms, stage, etc., we could see more colorful items than on the OSF tour.
After a long slog through a heavy downpour to get amazing homemade butter tarts (and a solid diner breakfast) at Madelyn's, we made it back to Studio Theatre in time for Mother's Daughter, a play written by a Canadian woman playwright, who just happens to be the assistant artistic director at Shaw Festival. The play is about Queen Mary (no, not that one, the other one, "Bloody" Mary), the first English queen to reign without a king-spouse alongside. It was very historical (Elizabeth, soon to be Queen Elizabeth, was in it a lot, since she was a half-sister to Mary), while also feeling very contemporary and being written with modern language and sensibilities. This was the third in a loose "trilogy" (more a series, really) of powerful women of that era, delving in to what their lives and dilemmas and challenges must have been like.
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