Actor/director/producer Lyda Woods is preparing for her next production, “Rogues: Tales from the Valley,” based on her satiric mystery, serialized in the Tuesday edition of the Ashland Daily Tidings. It is a take-off on the San Francisco Chronicle’s 1980s “Tales of the City” by Armistead Maupin, which was later turned into a PBS series. A staged reading starts at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 7 and 8, at Paschal Winery and Vineyard. Woods and I got together, on a rainy winter day, at the Black Sheep restaurant in Ashland.
LW: ”Tales of the City” explored San Francisco at a very critical time: San Francisco was becoming a Mecca for alternative life styles. I loved that series, and it always stuck with me.
I would really love to explore the characters that make up the Rogue Valley, and there are so many of them. Each character is not based on any one person, but a mosaic based on experience and imagination. I’m looking at how these characters can transform. I see the Rogue Valley as one organism. I wanted to explore how we are all interconnected and what that means. There are so many micro-cultures, yet we are interdependent. I want to be entertaining and grab the audience.
Ashland Theatre 