The top of a privet hedge

Jon Ferguson‘s new show, Ligustrum Vulgare, is playing tonight at the Bryant Lake Bowl. (And I’m dragging Peter Schilling to go see it.) If you don’t already know, Ferguson is the Brit-born director who, in 2005, created the anti-war “clown show” Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban, which starred many members of the Live Action Set. Even now, it stands out as one of my all-time favorite theatergoing experiences…

Now Ferguson is turning his attention to the smaller battles we wage with, say, those oddball neighbors of ours. Ligustrum Vulgare was inspired by a newspaper article he once read about a guy who killed his neighbor in a dispute over the appropriate height for a privet hedge (thus the name Ligustrum Vulgare, Latin for privet hedge). I interviewed Ferguson earlier to week about this show (we’ll be running a short preview in our December issue–just in time to alert folks to the last two performances) and, not knowing much about it, the thing that struck me most was the method he used in casting the show’s actors. He purposefully sought out performers with “qualities of stillness and melancholy,” he said. And I knew this to be the case, at lease in one instance. One of the cast members is a mutual acquaintance of Ferguson’s and mine. This person embodies the very definition of a malcontent. I thought it pretty remarkable though, that Ferguson was able to view this characteristic as a strength. Lesser artists would’ve cast all their friends, since they’re so easy to get along with.