Back To Basics -- This Year's Change In Focus For The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Has Put Some Fans In, Well, A Bit Of A Tempest

ASHLAND, Ore. - The Oregon Shakespeare Festival opened its 59th summer season here last weekend with an eye-catching version of "The Tempest." Meanwhile, behind the scenes at the West Coast's largest theater operation brews another sort of tempest - for now, a teapot-sized one.

Shakespeare's penultimate play and one of his most captivating, "The Tempest" begins with a furious storm at sea. In Jerry Turner's vivid staging, that squall becomes a cacophonous shipboard pantomime in which the roar of the angry ocean blots out the cries of frantic sailors.

Nothing quite so cataclysmic is plaguing OSF. Unlike last summer, when the company offered a stimulating but controversial open air production of a Jacobean revenge drama (John Webster's "The White Devil"), the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre entries are all Shakespearean works.

Alongside "The Tempest," there's an enjoyable 19th-century mounting of the flavor-of-the-decade comedy, "Much Ado About Nothing," plus a crisp rendering of "Two Noble Kinsmen," a bulky tragicomedy co-authored by the aging Bard and a younger colleague, John Fletcher.

The throngs visiting the popular Ashland theater this summer will find the same smooth-running operation, nestled in the bucolic inland Oregon town, that they've come to know over the years. They'll also see a troupe of actors who are generally more fluid and natural with the classics, and less prone to displays of chest-pounding hamming than in past seasons.

But from some conservative quarters one hears an insistent rumble over OSF's recent personnel changes and shifts in dramaturgy. The dissatisfaction began last season, and it's escalating - to the point where some sectors of Ashland's tourism-dependent economy are growing a little nervous.

They needn't be - not yet, anyway. Box office tallies show that 1994 ticket sales so far are several percentage points above last year's. And in 1993 the company's attendance of 349,579 was only 1.4 percent less than in '92 - not shabby, considering the recession.

These statistics don't appease some old-timers, who contend OSF is alienating its loyalists. Most of the complaints come from people in the Ashland area, and land in the lap of artistic director Henry Woronicz.

A leading OSF performer for eight seasons, Woronicz took over the festival helm two years ago from the venerable Jerry Turner. And Woronicz has been refreshing the acting company, and gently nudging it in a more contemporary direction, ever since - with Turner's support.

However, in a May 1 article in the Medford Mail Tribune titled "Much Ado . . . About Nothing?" a sampling of longtime OSF patrons carped about Woronicz's artistic choices, bemoaned the departure of some favorite actors and doubted whether they'd attend the theater so faithfully in the future.

Much dismay was expressed over "the dirty words" and blunt urban concerns in the modern plays now seen in OSF's smallest venue, the Black Swan - for example, Constance Congdon's "Tales of the Lost Formicans," and David Mamet's "Oleanna," both of which have been performed in Seattle and numerous other cities.

The argument goes: OSF is now choosing plays its artists want to tackle, instead of ones that please the audience - or at least the more unadventurous segment of that audience.

At an Ashland press conference last Sunday, a reviewer for a senior-citizen magazine volubly complained to Woronicz about the visually eclectic, nontraditional version of "Hamlet" OSF is running indoors at the Bowmer Theatre through Oct. 30, and the multicultural casting of Lanford Wilson's play,"The Fifth of July" (also at the Bowmer).

Woronicz, who directed "Hamlet," calmly defended his aesthetic freedom and even admitted his wasn't the world's greatest "Hamlet" (it wasn't, by a long shot). But finally, in frustration, Woronicz blurted out, "People forget we are an arts organization, not a cash cow or a tourists' organization!"

Truth be told, OSF has come to be a combination of the three - both by design and by accident.

But its most essential task must be its artistic one. And if OSF's attempts to premiere new plays have suffered from a lackluster choice of material, in other respects Woronicz is slowly making progress at a late-20th-century agenda no more radical than that of most regional American companies, and a lot less provocative than some.

In any case, it's hard to imagine a lot of outraged customers stomping out in the middle of this summer's mild-mannered outdoor shows.

A `Tempest' to excite the eye

"The Tempest" is most noteworthy for its splendid visuals, highlighted by Susan Tsu's sumptuous costumes, Robert Peterson's glittery lighting and the towering rod puppets that grace Michael Ganio's imaginative scenic design.

As befits a play about the uses and limits of magic, director Turner sprinkles mystical effects throughout. And though afflicted with the only bad costume in sight (a menthol-blue spandex body suit topped with a Jiminy Cricket hat), B.W. Gonzalez as the genie Ariel epitomizes the enchantment. She's a blithe island Tinker Bell, popping up all over the set in a twinkling and de-materializing just as deftly.

The show also boasts an engaging pair of young lovers in Corliss Preston (as Miranda) and Jay Karnes (as Ferdinand), and a couple of amusingly goofy knockabout clowns in David Kelly (Trinculo) and Sandy McCallum (Stephano).

But oh, for a Prospero of more depth and texture! Michael Kevin plays the pivotal Italian nobelman-turned-sorcerer with the kind of bombastic blandness that used to mar a lot of OSF shows.

And the casting of a black actor, Tyrone Wilson, as the bestial slave Caliban is a tired schematic noble-savage gambit that falls flat in this production.

A dashing `Noble Kinsmen'

"Two Noble Kinsmen," as far as we know, was Shakespeare's final play - or his final third of a play, depending on which scholars you believe. All agree, though, that this saga of a pair of lovelorn medieval knights (based on Chaucer's "A Knight's Tale") was a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher.

Only the play's opening and closing acts contain the kind of superior wordplay we expect from the Bard. But there's a surfeit of pot-boiling plot in the midsection to keep things interesting.

The cousins Palamon and Arcite (Jay Karnes and Ray Chapman, sporting Prince Valiant wigs) are the dearest of friends when captured in battle by the soldiers of Theseus, Duke of Athens (LeWan Alexander). But male bonding goes out the window after they get a glimpse of the duke's lovely sister-in-law Emilia (Robin Goodrin Nordli).

Emilia (a former Amazon, no less) has no interest in either dude, but that doesn't stop them from vying for her hand with vengeance. So all manner of tragical and comical complications ensue. And an unintended victim of them is a jailer's daughter (Corliss Preston), whose crush on Palamon makes her crazy as an Ophelia.

Nagle Jackson, the director, trimmed the rambling script, but might have cut more. The show could lose a half-hour to its betterment. Overall, though, "Two Noble Kinsman" is performed with chivalric panache, streaked with humor and and historically fascinating. It captures-century drama as it began to evolve from Elizabethan formalism to the more morally ambiguous, class-concious, open-ended sprees of the Jacobean era.

And from a modern perch, the play is also a veritable cauldron of sexual confusion - a dimension largely untapped in Jackson's cogent but fairly literal reading.

A mature `Much Ado'

The one piece of real interpretive boldness at OSF this summer appears in "Much Ado About Nothing." The comedy's tart-tongued and reluctant lovers are usually handsome young things in their late 20s or early 30s - say, Kenneth Branaugh and Emma Thompson, who starred in Branaugh's 1993 film adaptation. Under Kirk Boyd's direction, however, they're positively middle-aged.

Think about it and it makes real sense: at the start, Beatrice (the twinkly Michele Farr) and Benedick (Paul Vincent O'Connor, the giant-sized Shakesperean version of Art Carney) are long-confirmed singles, and proud of it. And their witty cynicism is fed by experience.

Other than this bold stroke of casting, Boyd's staging is straightforward to the brink of blandness. But it's also highly attractive, thanks to set designer William Bloodgood's elegant setting, with its romantic curved staircase and wrought-iron flourishes, and the charming hoop-skirted and feathered-helmet costumes by Gayland Spaulding.

It's pleasing to listen to, as well, with the continual presence of a live chamber trio playing Todd Barton's lilting music.

And except for the void where some sexual chemistry should be, the piece is quite nicely enacted by, among others, Farr, O'Connor, Joe Hilsee (as faithless Claudio), and Ray Porter - who proves that a guy can be very funny as the puffed-up constable Dogsberry without blackening his teeth, or garbling his malapropisms. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Festival information

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland is running 11 plays in repertory this summer. -- In the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre: Shakespeare's "The Tempest," "Two Noble Kinsmen," and "Much Ado About Nothing." -- In the indoor Bowmer Theatre: Allan Cubitt's "The Pool of Bethesda," Lanford Wilson's"The Fifth of July," Kaufman and Hart's "You Can't Take It With You," Shakespeare's "Hamlet," and Jean Anouilh's"The Rehearsal." -- In the Black Swan: Constance Cogndon's "Tales of the Lost Formicans," David Mamet's "Oleanna," and George C. Wolfe's "The Colored Museum." -- The season runs through Oct. 30. For schedules and reservations, call (503) 482-4331.