Page 8
September 12, 2018
Arts &
ENTERTAINMENT
Absorbed
by the
Experience
Plays worth
seeing at
the Oregon
Shakespeare
Festival
d arleen o rtega
Theater at its best does more
than entertain; it invites the willing
into a unique act of embodiment
as we experience the gift of pres-
ence offered on stage with an au-
dience that only assembles once.
But this summer, the company and
audiences at the Oregon Shake-
speare Festival have experienced
that act of embodiment in espe-
cially challenging ways. Climate
change has increased the problem
of forest fires to a degree unprece-
dented in the festival’s history, in-
terfering with performances in the
outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theater
to an extraordinary degree. Many
performances have been cancelled
entirely; others have been moved
into a smaller indoor space at Ash-
land High School, which involves
a high level of commitment on the
part of audiences (although it also
sometimes is possible to opt for
an indoor show). The air quali-
ty in Ashland has been impacted
(as has been true elsewhere in the
Northwest).
Nevertheless, the pay-off for
participating in the theatrical prac-
tice of embodiment--including
on the outdoor stage -- continues
to be quite high enough to justi-
fy a trip to Ashland, especially as
by
photo by J enny g rahaM , o regon s hakespeare f estival .
Romeo (William Thomas Hodgson) and Juliet (Emily Ota) fall in love at first sight in Shakespeare’s most popular play. The Oregon
Shakespeare Festival in Ashland is giving new life to the classic story, now showing through Oct. 12.
temperatures cool and disruptions
become less frequent. A talented
group of artists are all the more
primed to offer the precious gifts
of heart and movement that they
have crafted and honed for the
outdoor stage, and the two ad-
ditional indoor shows that have
opened this summer offer soulful
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windows into how humans strug-
gle and the environment responds.
The outdoor shows will espe-
cially appeal to Shakespeare lov-
ers, but also offer temptations to
those who aren’t sure about the
bard. Director Damaso Rodriguez
(who helms Portland’s Artists
Repertory Theater) brings fresh
life to Shakespeare’s most popular
play, “Romeo and Juliet,” build-
ing from his recognition that what
makes this story so tragic is not so
much the untimely deaths of its
protagonists but how easily those
deaths could have been avoided.
Much of the energy of this pro-
duction comes from the sense
that the conflicts and long-nursed
hatred of its characters are traps
they keep laying for themselves
and then leaping into — and even
the two adults who attempt to help
the young lovers (the friar and the
nurse) embody a frustrating sense
of powerlessness that stems from
succumbing to that false sense of
inevitability. Ironically, the col-
lective energy of this very solid
cast serves to hold the energy of
the conflicts in a way that helps
you invest in the adolescent lov-
ers, endearingly played by Emily
Ota and William Thomas Hodg-
son — and they, in turn, make
you believe in the heart animating
their adolescent impulsiveness.
Sara Bruner’s remarkable turn as
Mercutio is alone worth the price
of admission, conveying all the
playfulness, fury, and despair that
the brightest light in the commu-
nity might feel in tangling with
human folly writ this large. [Runs
until Oct. 12]
“Love’s Labor’s Lost” isn’t
one of Shakespeare’s most popu-
lar; its story can feel awkward to
modern audiences and the plotting
isn’t the bard’s best. But in the
facile hands of director Aman-
da Dehnert, who has earned real
credibility as (among other things)
a director of musicals (including
“Into the Woods” and “My Fair
Lady” at OSF), this production
feels playfully abstract; its talent-
ed cast riffs and jives and gambols
and sings, building buoyant waves
of music and movement to hold the
play’s essential conflict between a
group of young men and a group
of smarter young women. The
young men have gambled their
resolve on a dualistic conception
of virtue that somehow doesn’t
include women, and the compel-
ling young women playfully ex-
pose the errors of their thinking.
This cast, clad in brilliant reds and
whites and armed with paint and
music, brims with bright energy;
their charisma carries this produc-
tion. [Runs until Oct. 14]
“The Book of Will” rounds
out the outdoor offerings with a
love letter to Shakespeare and to
theater itself. It builds on the true
story of how a group of the bard’s
friends collaborated to preserve
his work by publishing the First
Folio a few years after his death,
a challenging undertaking giv-
en the expense and difficulty of
publishing in Shakespeare’s day
and the resulting complexity of
compiling a faithful rendering of
Shakespeare’s work from scraps
in the hands of various artists. The
play is short on action and long on
heart; it’s less about the story and
c ontinued on p age 16