![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIt's been 30 years since I first attended The Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It's changed a lot in that time, not always for the better, but instead of creebing about what it no longer is, let me celebrate what it is now. This is not one of your tiny local Shakespeare festivals, where a group of motley local actors put on a run of a Shakespeare play for a couple weeks in a grassy amphitheatre, then break for a month to prepare the next one, doing maybe three plays in a summer. No, OSF is a huge regional theatre with a fully professional cast and an eight-month season, running as many as ten plays (only half of them Shakespeare) at a time in continuous repertoire. They have three theatres of widely varying size and style, all of them (plus box office, administration, a lecture hall, and a huge gift shop) clustered around a tiny plaza right in the middle of the smallish town of Ashland in southern Oregon. No long treks between theatres as in Stratford, Ontario. The presence of OSF has gradually given Ashland an entirely boutique downtown, but this does mean there's at least a dozen restaurants, all quite good, from which you can rise from your table and be in your theatre seat in less than ten minutes. The close-knit geography, the two showtimes per day, and the large selection of plays make a trip to Ashland a kind of theatrical immersion, and that's OSF's real selling point. This year I went with my mother for four full days during which we saw eight productions, five of them plays by Shakespeare.
Despite its name, OSF is often at its best in its non-Shakespeare offerings, and we found that the case this year. Some of their best work has been in American comedy of the 1920s and 1930s. A production of Kaufman and Ferber's 1927 The Royal Family, a portrait of the Barrymores so thinly disguised that their first reaction to it was to sue, filled that place this year. The pompous gassiness of the characters' speeches found no echo in crisp, tight performances. I was especially amused by the description of what the authors intended as a wild parody of avant garde theatre that could easily have been actually staged thirty years later.
Even better was a finely nuanced production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, a play I'd never seen nor read. It succeeds through its depictions of common human aspirations divorceable from their context, despite a plot consisting mostly of complications visible coming a mile off.
Best of all was a newish English play, Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones, which very roughly does for Hamlet what A Thousand Acres did for King Lear. It was performed in the New Theatre, a 300-person space so tiny that even I could throw a rock across it, on an amazingly real garden set. This play was remarkable for some truly fine and imaginative acting, a point really brought home when I subsequently checked the very plain script on a couple points. If you haven't seen this play, please don't read the script: you'll only spoil it for yourself. See a production if you possibly can. Highest marks to Suzanne Irving as a mousy woman who allows everyone to walk all over her, then finally has her say in a second-act soliloquy that rivals Lucky's in Waiting for Godot for impact.
Like most Shakespeare festivals, OSF likes to tinker with the Bard, creating improbable stage and costume designs which clash uneasily with the Elizabethan dialogue. This year the most tinkered-with play was the only one which invariably benefits from such treatment, The Comedy of Errors. It was set in a modern-day casino, with the Syracusans talking in the accents of Texan country bumpkins and the Ephesans using those of New York mafiosi. This gimmick both increased the humor and helped one to distinguish the two sets of twins, as each set was played by only one person (with doubles from the walk-on cast for the reunion scene).
Dialogue actually overheard in the lobby:
King Lear was weak in the daughter department, but Ray Porter (also the two Antipholi in Errors) as Kent and Gregory Linington as Edgar, after plain beginnings, did well in their characters' adversities. Lear himself was the large, mighty-voiced Kenneth Albers, who turned a comically befuddled king in the opening scenes into a loud, defiant boomer in the storm scene: this featured a lot of recorded thunder, and by the dim lighting at this moment one could look up through the Allen Pavilion's open central roof on a clear night and see the brightly-shining stars, kind of an odd effect during a storm scene.
Lastly, OSF ventured this year to perform condensed versions of all three of the Henry VI trilogy. These plays are little-read, but having seen past full productions of all three here, I know they can be dynamite on stage, particularly Part III, an even better work than its sequel Richard III - whose title character first emerges as a major figure right here. This year OSF put a 2-hour Part I in the New Theatre, distinguished by Tyler Layton's brave attempt to overcome the author's libel on Joan of Arc, and an outstanding take on the English general Talbot by Jonathan Haugen, who reminded me of one of OSF's greatest past Shakespeareans, Denis Arndt*, in his bluff naturalistic take on the dialogue.
Parts II and III were condensed into a single 3-hour play at the Allen Pavilion which zipped dramatically by while still leaving room for the more reflective sections, such as King Henry's powerful denunciation of war (part III, act II, scene V). The tall, gaunt, but strong Cristofer Jean as Henry gave us a king who abjures fighting more through moral revulsion than the more usually-played befuddlement, while Robin Nordli (who also played Beatrice in Much Ado) spit fire as the toweringly bellicose Queen Margaret. James Newcomb as the evil Richard of Gloucester wields his crutches in battle like Doc Octopus. The only real problem with the production was an unintentionally funny depiction of Warwick's switching of sides, due to utter inertness by the actor playing the part: he just up and abandons the convictions of a lifetime without any emotion at all.
We revisited some old favorite restaurants, and some new ones. Best new find was Pasta Piatti, which looked unutterably yuppie but turned out to be a really fine, and amazingly inexpensive, basic Italian pasta place.
Final recommendation: if anything ever goes wrong with your car in the small town of Mount Shasta, California, be sure to go to G&M Auto Repair on South Mount Shasta Boulevard. It looks like a decaying shack, but Gary who runs the place not only knows what he's doing, he's friendly and informative about it, and open on Sundays to boot.
*Arndt is otherwise best-known for playing Michael Douglas's boss in Basic Instinct
Despite its name, OSF is often at its best in its non-Shakespeare offerings, and we found that the case this year. Some of their best work has been in American comedy of the 1920s and 1930s. A production of Kaufman and Ferber's 1927 The Royal Family, a portrait of the Barrymores so thinly disguised that their first reaction to it was to sue, filled that place this year. The pompous gassiness of the characters' speeches found no echo in crisp, tight performances. I was especially amused by the description of what the authors intended as a wild parody of avant garde theatre that could easily have been actually staged thirty years later.
Even better was a finely nuanced production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, a play I'd never seen nor read. It succeeds through its depictions of common human aspirations divorceable from their context, despite a plot consisting mostly of complications visible coming a mile off.
Best of all was a newish English play, Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones, which very roughly does for Hamlet what A Thousand Acres did for King Lear. It was performed in the New Theatre, a 300-person space so tiny that even I could throw a rock across it, on an amazingly real garden set. This play was remarkable for some truly fine and imaginative acting, a point really brought home when I subsequently checked the very plain script on a couple points. If you haven't seen this play, please don't read the script: you'll only spoil it for yourself. See a production if you possibly can. Highest marks to Suzanne Irving as a mousy woman who allows everyone to walk all over her, then finally has her say in a second-act soliloquy that rivals Lucky's in Waiting for Godot for impact.
Like most Shakespeare festivals, OSF likes to tinker with the Bard, creating improbable stage and costume designs which clash uneasily with the Elizabethan dialogue. This year the most tinkered-with play was the only one which invariably benefits from such treatment, The Comedy of Errors. It was set in a modern-day casino, with the Syracusans talking in the accents of Texan country bumpkins and the Ephesans using those of New York mafiosi. This gimmick both increased the humor and helped one to distinguish the two sets of twins, as each set was played by only one person (with doubles from the walk-on cast for the reunion scene).
Dialogue actually overheard in the lobby:
First Man: There's Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus, see, and when you're reading the play, just remember that S is for stranger and that Antipholus of Syracuse is a stranger in Ephesus. That way you can tell them apart and remember which is which.Much Ado About Nothing, dressed in early 20th-century summer suits, was notable mostly as the only production I've seen in which the near-tragic second half outshines the sunny opening. Not all the cast were of the best (there was no hope of matching a Dogberry I once saw who actually made sense), but I enjoyed Jeffrey King's boisterous Don Pedro, and the loud, self-confident Benedick of Brent Harris (who also played Tony, the young enthusiastic acting scion, in The Royal Family). The next day we attended a fascinating lecture by Barry Kraft, the Festival's dramaturg (also fondly remembered as the best Hotspur ever), discussing the expectations Shakespeare set up by naming the romantic lead woman Hero (not her name in his source material) and then frustrated in his audience by not following the plot of a Hero and Leander story.
Second Man: Antipholus doesn't start with an S.
King Lear was weak in the daughter department, but Ray Porter (also the two Antipholi in Errors) as Kent and Gregory Linington as Edgar, after plain beginnings, did well in their characters' adversities. Lear himself was the large, mighty-voiced Kenneth Albers, who turned a comically befuddled king in the opening scenes into a loud, defiant boomer in the storm scene: this featured a lot of recorded thunder, and by the dim lighting at this moment one could look up through the Allen Pavilion's open central roof on a clear night and see the brightly-shining stars, kind of an odd effect during a storm scene.
Lastly, OSF ventured this year to perform condensed versions of all three of the Henry VI trilogy. These plays are little-read, but having seen past full productions of all three here, I know they can be dynamite on stage, particularly Part III, an even better work than its sequel Richard III - whose title character first emerges as a major figure right here. This year OSF put a 2-hour Part I in the New Theatre, distinguished by Tyler Layton's brave attempt to overcome the author's libel on Joan of Arc, and an outstanding take on the English general Talbot by Jonathan Haugen, who reminded me of one of OSF's greatest past Shakespeareans, Denis Arndt*, in his bluff naturalistic take on the dialogue.
Parts II and III were condensed into a single 3-hour play at the Allen Pavilion which zipped dramatically by while still leaving room for the more reflective sections, such as King Henry's powerful denunciation of war (part III, act II, scene V). The tall, gaunt, but strong Cristofer Jean as Henry gave us a king who abjures fighting more through moral revulsion than the more usually-played befuddlement, while Robin Nordli (who also played Beatrice in Much Ado) spit fire as the toweringly bellicose Queen Margaret. James Newcomb as the evil Richard of Gloucester wields his crutches in battle like Doc Octopus. The only real problem with the production was an unintentionally funny depiction of Warwick's switching of sides, due to utter inertness by the actor playing the part: he just up and abandons the convictions of a lifetime without any emotion at all.
We revisited some old favorite restaurants, and some new ones. Best new find was Pasta Piatti, which looked unutterably yuppie but turned out to be a really fine, and amazingly inexpensive, basic Italian pasta place.
Final recommendation: if anything ever goes wrong with your car in the small town of Mount Shasta, California, be sure to go to G&M Auto Repair on South Mount Shasta Boulevard. It looks like a decaying shack, but Gary who runs the place not only knows what he's doing, he's friendly and informative about it, and open on Sundays to boot.
*Arndt is otherwise best-known for playing Michael Douglas's boss in Basic Instinct
