July 12, 2017
Page 9
Mississippi
Alberta
North Portland
Vancouver
East County
Beaverton
photo by J enny g raham
Disguised as a male actor, Viola (Jamie Ann Romero) sneaks a moment of tenderness with Will (William DeMeritt) in “Shakespeare in Love,’ one of the diverse plays this
season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.
Beyond White Culture
Diversity at the
Oregon Shakespeare
Festival
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has opened all but
one of its eleven shows for 2017. Why should you travel
down to Ashland to partake?
For all the challenges that living in this state -- and, in-
deed, traveling to southern Oregon specifically--presents
for people of color, some of the best theater anywhere is
happening at OSF. We have the opportunity to see the
stories of people of color, written by people of color, and
featuring artists of color who, as in other fields, other-
wise disproportionately struggle for work. Increasingly,
o PinionAted
J udge
by
d arleen o rtega
OSF is a place where theater casts the vision for living
beyond white supremacy culture.
My favorite of this season’s plays, unfortunately,
closed on July 6 -- but I write about it first because the
production will be re-mounted by Portland Center Stage
this fall, Its name, “Mojada,” is a racial epithet--in En-
glish, it would be “wetback,” a derogatory term applied
to people crossing the southern U.S. border without pa-
pers. But the playwright, Luis Alfaro, himself the son
of Mexican-American farmworkers, is known for lifting
up the voices of the marginalized with sensitivity and
respect, and this play goes deep in its exploration of life
among Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles.
The subtitle of “Mojada” is “A Medea in Los Ange-
les,” and Alfaro has taken the ancient Greek story of Me-
dea and located it among immigrants fighting to build a
c ontinued on p age 13