Much ado in Ashland: A look at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
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ASHLAND, Ore. — The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been welcoming crowds of theater-lovers to the charming Southern Oregon town of Ashland since the company was founded, back in 1935.
But the theater has expanded considerably over the past six decades into a multimillion-dollar, three-stage operation that hosts 11 classic and contemporary plays per season, and is drawing increased national attention.
Last week OSF, now the West Coast's largest and best-attended drama company, laid out the red carpet for a critical mass of visitors: drama reviewers from around the country who gathered for the annual American Theatre Critics Association conference.
Some 70 visiting critics, from Chicago and Austin, New York and Miami, Columbus, Pittsburgh and other cities, got a rare chance to sample the same fare more than 90,000 regular OSF patrons (a good number of them from Washington) will be taking in this year.
Also on view: indoor renditions of contemporary plays, including the women-in-jazz saga "Oo-Bla-Dee" by Regina Taylor, and Nilo Cruz's Cuban still life, "Two Sisters and a Piano."
The current productions of modern plays at OSF got the warmest reactions of the visiting critics I spoke to. They also praised the superior costumes, lighting and sets that the company musters with a lavishness most smaller Shakespeare theaters around the country can only envy.
But it's noteworthy that my critical colleagues didn't find OSF's Shakespeare interpretations — its main drawing card — particularly fresh or revelatory, in conception or performance.
That confirms my own opinion that if current artistic director Libby Appel is really determined to raise OSF's aesthetic reputation as high as its box-office tallies, her company needs to inject its classical ventures with more subtleties and surprises.
Here's my critical report on five plays which opened recently at OSF and will run in repertory into the fall: "Troilus and Cressida." Tarred as one of the Bard's "problem plays," this bitter comic brief on the malignancies of love and war rarely gets the kind of full-dress, large-cast mounting it is receiving in OSF's vast Elizabethan Theatre.
For the sheer novelty of seeing it, and the power of its second half, this "Troilus and Cressida" is worth a departure from the Bard's "greatest hits."
Many know the play's Greek and Trojan characters, from their appearances in Homer's "Iliad" — the vaunted warriors Achilles (Jeffrey King) and Hector (William Langan); lovestruck Paris (Jeff Cummings) and his adulterous Spartan consort, Helen (Elizabeth Norment); and comely Trojan maid Cressida (Tyler Layton) and her ardent royal suitor, Troilus (charismatic Kevin Kenerly).
But under Shakespeare's savage satirical gaze, these fixtures of legend appear greatly flawed — calculating and egocentric, deluded and faithless. They are ruthless survivors in a world of "lechery, lechery; still wars and lechery," where "nothing else holds fashion."
The play's ambiguous blend of battleground bickering and glory, romantic love and sexual exploitation, are disturbing and exhilarating in Ken Albers' staging — that is, when the actors finally stop shouting and puffing their chests, and speak the caustic verse with quieter, more chilling comprehension.
As it gains nuance, the show gains force — and at last enmeshes us in the chaotic, apocalyptic war zone Shakespeare evokes with such cankerous power.
"The Merchant of Venice." As an Italian Renaissance counterpoint to "Troilus and Cressida," this better-known "problem play" juxtaposes craven, self-serving impulses of humankind with the spirit of mercy and joys of blithe romance. But the tensions between these tones are tricky. And director Michael Edwards only partially captures them in his handsome Edwardian-era setting of a tale that unfolds as a series of moral trials and tests.
There are some aspects of this staging that just don't fly. One is OSF's sturdy leading lady Robin Goodrin Nordli playing the desirable heiress Portia with an exaggerated, swaggering coarseness, as she waves off suitor after suitor.
Another is Jeff Cummings' eager but colorless Bassanio, whose homoerotic ties to Venetian merchant Antonio (Michael Elich) are indicated, but hardly examined. And the clowning of the servant Launcelot Gobbo (Christopher DuVal) sags beyond tedium.
More gripping is the cool, sleek rage of Tony DeBruno's reviled moneylender Shylock. Yet this production does little to unravel the complexities of Shylock, a figure whose oppression of his daughter Jessica (Julie Oda) and determination to exact a pound of flesh from the racist Antonio can't entirely be blamed on anti-Semitism. That's too simplistic, for Shakespeare or us.
Most affecting is Portia's transformative adventure in male garb. Masquerading as a lawyer who argues for mercy (if not equal justice), Nordli gains a wisdom and depth that carries into the play's final scene. There one of the Bard's most beguiling monologues — an extended ode to the enchantments of night — is treated with the wistful tenderness it so deserves.
"The Merry Wives of Windsor." Yes, it has the silliest script of all three outdoor Shakespeare offerings at Ashland.
But this early sitcom about the amorous misadventures of that blimpish old rascal Falstaff is the most consistently satisfying show at The Elizabethan this year — and the most conceptually agile.
Director Lillian Groag has given Ray Porter's buoyantly randy but insecure Falstaff an alter-ego: Don Giovanni, who appears in the mirror to egg him on, in song and gesture, in his botched seduction of two wily Windsor wives, Mistress Page (Suzanne Irving) and Mistress Ford (Judith-Marie Bergan).
The cast zips through a lot of deft farcical shenanigans here. And the show sports a lighter, more ebullient comic touch than is often displayed at OSF.
It also lets some veteran Ashland hands reveal an unexpected flair for slapstick — notably Richard Howard, who's played Hamlet and Richard II, but has rarely been more engaging than in his spry turn as the rabidly jealous Master Ford.
"Oo-Bla-Dee." The title of Regina Taylor's play has nothing to do with the famous Beatles song, and everything to do with a be-bop tune of similar name that long preceded it.
Best known as a lauded actress ( i.e., on TV's "I'll Fly Away"), Taylor is also a practiced dramatist, delving here into the lives and loves of African-American women jazz musicians circa 1946.
The melee is peppery and promising. And there are things to enjoy in Tim Bond's rather gaudy Bowmer Theatre staging of the award-winning script — but also some regrettable excesses.
BW Gonzalez appeals as Gin Del Sol, a young sax player who crashes a combo led by crusty pianist Evelyn (played with sassy brio by Andrea Frye). Also in the group: a druggy drummer (Deidrie Henry) and a foxy bassist (Maya Thomas).
G. Valmont Thomas has some telling, sensitive moments as Shorty, the band manager, whose bluster masks a sense of courageous dignity tested during a perilous night drive through "redneck" country.
But "Oo-Bla-Dee" burdens its depiction of the jazz life with sluggish metaphysical poetry, and stilted comments by a slinky moon-muse (Demetra Pittman) who looks down on the action from on high.
And the play ends on a note of melodramatic racist violence, turning what might have been a rollicking jam session among vital but unsung players into a heavy-handed social indictment.
"Two Sisters and a Piano." OSF is in the process of erecting a new theater to house its more intimate productions. Before the cozy Black Swan reverts to a rehearsal hall, however, it is still housing contemporary plays.
One is the dizzy Off Broadway comedy "Fuddy Meers" by David Lindsay-Abaire, which I didn't catch this visit.
Another is the Northwest premiere of "Two Sisters and a Piano," a small but compelling drama inspired by Maria Elena Cruz Varela, a popular Cuban poet who spent two years in jail for her criticism of Castro's government.
In Nilo Cruz's drama of longing and resistance, the poet Maria (Vilma Silva) and her sister Sofia (Nancy Rodriguez) are under house arrest in their corroding family villa in provincial Cuba.
It is 1991, and the Berlin Wall is tumbling down. But as they struggle to revive their flagging spirits, and resist the aggressive seductions of an intrusive army officer (Armando Duran), the women know their own liberation is a long way off.
Andrea Frye's staging carefully balances the personal and political aspects of the sisters' dilemma. And though the play runs too long, it is well-performed and vivid, staying with you like the scent of a pungent tropical flower.
Misha Berson can be reached at mberson@seattletimes.com.