Appel's Ashland -- Oregon Shakespeare Festival Weathers The Storms To Open Its New Season

The opening last weekend of Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 1997 season was a significant occasion, ushering in the regime of a new artistic director, Libby Appel. But the festivities were very nearly overshadowed by a natural disaster.

On New Year's Eve, torrential rains swept through the picturesque Rogue River Valley town of Ashland, Ore., where the festival has grown and prospered since its founding in 1935.

In sylvan Lithia Park, just below OSF's three-theater complex, the wooded paths and quaint bridges where visiting playgoers often stroll between shows were devastated when Ashland Creek overflowed its banks. The extended downpour sent trees, shrubs and tons of mud cascading down hillsides into the park and, later, into the tourist-oriented cafes and shops that line the nearby town plaza.

The flooding quickly overwhelmed Ashland's sewage and water systems. For 10 days the local citizenry lived on rationed bottled water, while city crews began an estimated $1 million park clean-up project, and shopkeepers started clearing the muck out of their own establishments.

By last weekend, however, Ashland was (at least superficially) back to normal, with the park out of commission but most stores and cafes in operation and ready for the annual onslaught of tourists the town depends on.

And Ashland was getting back to the business that draws roughly 200,000 visitors to southern Oregon each year: the presentation of classical and modern dramas, by the largest regional theater operation on the West Coast.

In one of those synchronistic art-imitates-life junctures, OSF (which was undamaged by flooding) kicked off its 11-play 1997 season with Appel's moody staging of "King Lear" - a play that reaches its dramatic apotheosis with a torrential storm.

Also entering the repertory were new productions of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," the Tom Stoppard-Ferenc Molnar farce "Rough Crossing" (another play featuring inclement weather) and a stark, two-actor version of the Henry James novella "The Turn of the Screw," adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher.

It was the unusual back-to-back coupling of two monumental tragedies about beleaguered fathers and their ungrateful progeny that drew the most attention from visiting critics, and best communicated the aesthetic intentions of Appel. Though she presided over a 1996 season assembled by her OSF predecessor, Henry Woronicz, the 1997 lineup is the first entirely concocted by Appel.

"I wanted to open with something really gutsy," she told assembled journalists. "I thought of no better way to begin at this theater than with these dark, probing, complex and difficult plays."

Yet while the winter roster of ambitious indoor productions reflected the specific passions of this vivacious former university professor, Appel appears to be guiding the company along much the same artistic course charted during the three-year tenure of Woronicz.

The theater's 65-member acting company - by far the largest fulltime resident acting ensemble on the West Coast, and one of the few left in the country - contains mostly OSF veterans, many recruited by Woronicz. (One of the few prominent newcomers is noted stage and film actor Anthony Heald. See sidebar.)

And though Appel dismissed three associate directors long linked with the festival when she took charge, her own artistic team is dominated by OSF regulars, too. Appel herself had staged five earlier shows at OSF, before assuming control of the theater last year.

Two newcomers Appel brought into the company are literary manager Douglas Langworthy (who brings translation skills to his post), and associate artistic director Tim Bond. Formerly the head of Seattle's Group Theatre, Bond now has duties that include expanding OSF's commitment to ethnic diversity and its outreach to multicultural audiences - long-overdue initiatives that Woronicz began, and Appel has pledged to push forward with vigor.

And if the early 1997 productions are any indication, the OSF aesthetic will probably enlarge and embroider the pattern established in recent years. In essence, expect to find a mingle of Elizabethan classics with British and American contemporary scripts on the theater's three stages, plus one world premiere play per season. (This year's is "Magic Fire," a drama set in Argentina by Lillian Garrett-Groag, which opens July 30.)

And you can anticipate an elaborated production style that tends to eschew stage realism and pseudo-Elizabethanism in favor of bold visual and thematic statements. In this modernist vein, classic texts are often uprooted from their literal and historical moorings, and suspended in a realm of greater abstraction and symbolism - a theatrical trend that OSF has come to late, but is now embracing with gusto.

`King Lear'

The attractions of this approach, and its limitations, co-exist most vividly in OSF's current "King Lear." Informed by the modern paintings of Franz Kline, Clifford Stills and Francis Bacon, and by the absurdist drama of Samuel Beckett, Appel's metaphorical staging begins with a strikingly original image.

When the lights come up on the dark, gleaming Angus Bowmer stage, all the characters in the play are suited up in black tie and evening gowns, seated on a row of straight-backed chairs. The stiff formality of the tableau and the symmetrical pecking order of King Lear's court are soon deftly undermined, as intrigues and schisms are revealed in a series of hushed tete-a-tetes and singular declarations.

And when the egomaniacal Lear (played by James Edmondson) does not get the lavish adulation he seeks from his daughter Cordelia (Miriam A. Laube) at this state occasion, he literally derails the royal line by tossing chairs around, unseating and scattering his family and his entourage.

What a wonderful metaphor for the domestic and political splintering to come. And Appel, with scenic artist William Bloodgood and lighting designer Robert Peterson, gives us several more stunningly resonant images later - including the sight of the humbled, howling Lear wandering hand-in-hand across the stormy wilderness with a tattered chain of faithful old comrades.

The disappointment of this skillfully composed, verbally cogent interpretation is that it seduces the eye and stirs the intellect, while only grazing the heart.

That's largely because the production's psychological conceptions tend to be broader and less developed or interlinked than its visual ideas. Edmondson's Lear is so unhinged and lethal from the start, we get few of the gradations of his descent from power into humiliation and madness.

The machinations of his grasping daughters Goneril (Tamu Gray) and Regan (Kirsten Giroux), and of the scheming bastard noble Edmund (Derrick Lee Weeden), are utterly predictable in their toxicity. And Lear's tender reunion with the faithful Cordelia and relationship to the vaudevillian fool (Demetra Pittman) are only mildly moving when they should be heart-rending.

The parallel fatherly plight of the blinded Earl of Gloucester (Dennis Robertson) is somewhat more textured, with direct references to the existential blindness played out in Beckett's "Endgame." But the show's novelty and sophistication is invested mostly in stage pictures, such as ones Appel and company whip up during the storm scenes.

Streaked with strobic flashes of crimson and white lightning that illuminate a sheer wall equipped with symbolic doors, this wild tempest keeps you guessing whether it's occurring on an actual heath or inside some arty antechamber in Lear's addled brain.

`Death of a Salesman'

Though closely related thematically to "King Lear," OSF's "Death of a Salesman" is a study in opposite effects. The elaborate design scheme grafted onto this iconic and (so far) timeless 1949 American drama is unpersuasive. But the rude power embedded in Miller's characters burns through.

Mounted with close attention to human dynamics by OSF associate artistic director Penny Metropulos, the Miller drama unfolds inside a confusingly open-ended set by famed designer Ming Cho Lee, a set that flattens and mingles the action more awkwardly than fluidly. (The most pronounced element here is another wall, the brick backside of the Brooklyn tenement that towers over the modest home of Willy Loman.)

As the play opens on a note of domestic weariness and humor, Douglas Rowe's Willy seems at first a bit tenuous, perhaps too bland and handsome, as the self-deluded salesman who becomes a shuffling refutation of the American Dream.

But there is an arc to Rowe's performance, and over three hours his Willy ages, implodes and yet somehow expands and even brightens before our eyes.

By the time Rowe gets to the play's emotional crunch scenes - Willy's casual dismissal by a callow young boss (David Kelly), his pathetic realization that his wayward son Biff (Bill Geisslinger) actually loves him - his failures and dreams become important to us, and keenly emblematic of so many broken-souled American dreamers.

Rowe is amply supported by Dee Maaske's fierce Linda, by Michael Elich as Willy's equally deluded son Happy, and by U. Jonathan Toppo and Tony DeBruno, as neighbors whose dull success places the Lomans' flashier failings in stark relief.

In build, age and manner, Geisslinger is a fervent Biff but not an ideal one. Otherwise, this production offers a fine demonstration of the growing depth, variety and solidity of Ashland's acting company.

`Rough Crossing'

James Edmondson, who was rehearsing his role in "King Lear" while directing "Rough Crossing," describes the latter play as "the cream filling" sandwiched between the dark Oreo wafers of "Lear" and "Salesman."

A more apt analogy for Tom Stoppard's loose adaptation of a Ferenc Molnar farce ("The Play at the Castle") is a complicated cocktail, which only intoxicates if the bartender blends the arcane ingredients in exactly the right proportions.

That did not happen in the recent Tacoma Actors Guild production of "Rough Crossing," a laborious mix of shipboard slapstick, preciously clever wordplay and arch spoofing of silly European romance plays.

OSF gives a more pleasing account, in a somewhat altered version that brings on a retinue of chorus girls and a fussy dance captain (Anthony Heald) for some amusingly dippy production numbers.

Well-cast from its wide assortment of actors, "Rough Crossing" centers on the desperate shipboard attempts of a successful playwrighting team, Sandor (Richard Elmore) and Alex (Robert Vincent Frank) to hang onto the high-strung composer of their latest show (Ted Deasy), after he overhears his leading-lady fiancee, Natasha (Linda Alper) flirting with her old flame, matinee idol Ivor Fish (funny Mark Murphey).

It's all a bunch of nonsense, of course, stretched with running jokes about a tipsy ship steward (excellent Dan Donohue) who serves as an impromptu dramaturg, an endless stream of puns and inside-theater jokes, some campy songs by Andre Previn and Stoppard, and outfitted in Edmondson's staging with a nifty Richard L. Hay set (boasting a Tower of Pisa replica that leans in foul weather) and Marie Anne Chiment's diverting Deco-era costumes.

After six hours of The World According to King Lear and Willy Loman, Ashland audiences will lap up this romp with relief. They'll get a highly polished serving of fluff, but not Stoppard at his best or even his second best.

`The Turn of the Screw'

"The Turn of the Screw," in OSF's intimate Black Swan playhouse, plunges the audience back into darker spheres. Devoid of scenic frills and just 75 minutes long, this spare dramatization of the haunting James novella goes down in one swift, bitter gulp.

Hatcher's script distills the familiar Victorian-era tale of a young English governess, who believes her young charges are haunted by ghosts, into a chamber duet performed here by two riveting actors: Vilma Silva as the unnamed governess and Heald in three roles: as the aged female housekeeper who befriends her, the young boy who distresses her and the aloof patrician boss who "seduces" her.

Staged clean and sharp by Michael Edwards on Hays' steeply tiered black set, lit with geometric precision by Peterson, the production radiates considerably less ambiguity than the original story. While James left you wondering if the phantoms lurking about this country estate were real or imagined, the OSF reading strongly suggests they are the feverish projections of a lonely, sexually frustrated virgin with no other outlet for her passion.

Something interesting is lost in that bluntness. But the play still casts an insidious spell, luring you into the visions of Silva's anxious governess and evoking pity for the unfortunate characters Heald plays with intense simplicity - and in one unisex costume. It is not a tale for children, nor for adults who require a coda of uplift to lighten every tragedy. ----------------------------------------------------------------- More on the festival

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival presents 11 plays in repertory during its 1997 season. In addition to the four plays that opened last weekend, the following shows will be presented.

Outdoors at the Elizabeth Theatre: William Shakespeare's "As You Like It" (June 10-Oct. 12); "Timon of Athens" (June 11-Oct. 10); and "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" (June 12-Oct. 11).

Indoors at the Angus Bowmer Theatre: "Pentecost" by David Edgar (April 23-Sept. 21) and "The Magic Fire" by Lillian Garrett-Groag (July 30-Nov. 2).

Indoors at the Black Swan: Pearl Cleage's "Blues for an Alabama Sky" (April 1-Nov. 1) and "Nora," adapted by Ingmar Bergman from Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" (July 9-Nov. 2).

Tickets: Reservations are strongly advised, especially in the summer months. Schedules and advance tickets may be ordered from OSF by calling (541) 482-4331. Group sales (15 or more): (541) 488-5406. Tickets for the general public: $20 to $27 until June 8; after June 8, prices range from $25 to $34.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland

The festival continues through Oct. 28, though outdoor performances in the Elizabethan Theater end Oct. 8. Ashland is just off Interstate 5 in southern Oregon, 285 miles south of Portland. The drive from Seattle takes about eight hours. Or, you can fly to Medford; many motels offer shuttle service.

WHAT'S ONSTAGE

-- "King Lear": at the Angus Bowmer Theatre, in repertory through Nov. 2. -- "Death of a Salesman": at the Angus Bowmer, in repertory through July 13, and Sept. 25-Nov. 1. -- "Rough Crossing": at the Angus Bowmer, in repertory through Nov. 1. -- "The Turn of the Screw": at the Black Swan playhouse, in repertory through June 29.