Shakespeare festival in Ashland bucks economy

By SASHA PAULSEN
Register Features Editor

There was good news in Ashland, Ore.: In a time when a lot of arts organizations are struggling, the venerable Oregon Shakespeare Festival is not only doing “better than we expected,” according to artistic director Bill Rauch, but it’s commissioning new works — a 10-year American history project — and launching an innovative Black Swan Lab for New Work, in which company actors will be involved in creating plays.

Rauch’s announcement coincided with the opening of the outdoor season at the festival, the unveiling of the three plays that will be performed through October on the Elizabethan stage this year: Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” and a world premiere adaptation of Miguel Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” by  Octavio Solis.

And coincidentally, traveling up to Ashland for the opening of the outdoor season, we were lucky to have reservations (made in February) at Ashland’s Black Swan Inn — part of a personal project of trying out Ashland’s many bed and breakfasts. This one is a winner — walking distance to the theater, but on a tranquil street of Victorian houses. Built by a Civil War general, the inn not only offers charming rooms and gardens, but a reported ghost, along with extremely hospitable innkeepers and outstanding breakfasts.

Ashland is, as my daughter noted, “the only place where it’s perfectly common at breakfast to have someone ask you, ‘So what play did you see last night?’”

The outdoor season

Opening night was an apt illustration of the power and appeal of the festival. As thunderclouds darkened the skies over Ashland, thunder rumbled and lightning flashed, the dauntless audience nonetheless filled the outdoor theater, toting along rain ponchos and pillows, and a mere downpour early on did little to diminish the crowd.

Rather, they seemed to be in agreement that the tempest was merely a grand backdrop for the rarely performed “Henry VIII,” as if wild old Henryhimself in heaven (well, one hopes he’s in heaven) was pulling a few strings to make the arrival of his play all the more impressive.

“Henry VIII” is rarely performed (it was last on the Ashland stage in 1984) with some good reason. It’s not on the list of greatest works, but it is nonetheless an intriguing telling of the story of the king with many wives. Henry has inspired so many works, from the BBC series to the current Showtime “The Tudors,” it’s interesting to see how his tale was told by a playwright who was almost a contemporary (Henry died in 1547; Shakespeare was born in 1564): It’s considerably milder than anything from modern times. Also, it merely recounts the story of Henry’s divorce from his first wife Katherine of Aragon to marry Anne “Bullen” and ends, conveniently, with the birth of Henry and Anne’s daughter, and Shakespeare’s patron, Elizabeth. Anne is merely a shadow figure in this work; the stage is dominated by Katherine, in a deeply moving performance by Vilma Silva.

OSF presents the play in all its Renaissance splendor, from the opulent opening scene, in which the larger than life Henry (Elijah Alexander), sporting what appears to be an entire ostrich on his head, arrives at a pantomime on a huge statue of a horse.

It is this visual appeal — the rich costumes abound — that confirms the sense that one has been dropped into Henry’s time and place and makes this production well worth seeing, and it takes on a special interest in the staging lineup this year, which also includes (in the indoor Angus Bowmer Theater) the world premiere of the utterly brilliant “Equivocation,” by Bill Cain.

The must-see play

In “Equivocation,” Shakespeare steps onto the stage in the character of “Shag” the playwright member of the theater company, the Kings Men. Called upon by Robert Cecil, Shag is requested to write a play — actually King James has already written it, Cecil tells Shag — they just need him to add a bit of dialogue, entrances and exits and “witches — the king wants witches.”

The subject of the play is the Gunpowder plot, the foiled attempt by a group of disgruntled Catholics to dig a tunnel under Parliament and blow up the king, his family and assorted other nobles and politicians.

As Shag reluctantly takes on the challenge of writing a play that tells the truth and keeps his head on his shoulders, he interviews some of the principals in this alleged plot — uncovered by an anonymous letter — that has allowed the government to go after Catholics. His questions begin to grow — how, he asks, could a small army of people dig such a tunnel without anyone noticing, and also, what did they do with the dirt?

Thus begins the challenge of “how to tell the truth in difficult times,” that creates a brilliant link over the centuries into here and now. 

“Equivocation” sparkles and flashes with wit as the King’s Men try to come up with a play that will tell a truth the king might rather not hear, and the king’s counselor certainly does not have in mind. The genius of this work, however, is in its construction and mesmerizing presentation by a cast of six: two fixed characters, Shag and his daughter, Judith, around whom the rest swirl in and out of characters as deftly as magicians.

This is one of the must-see plays in the 2009 lineup.

‘Don Quixote’

The second play to open in the Elizabethan theater, “Don Quixote” was ambitious, but all in all, less  successful than “Henry VIII.”

Solis faced a formidable task in adapting Miguel Cervantes’ epic work — it was originally published in two volumes — for the stage, and at times it seemed that Solis just opened the wonderbox that is the novel over the stage, and let the resulting onslaught of sheep and convicts, windmills and lovers fall where they may. The story of the aging Spaniard who sets out to find the romantic world of knights and quests and fair ladies, of which he has only read, is, in part, a great farce, but it does have underpinnings — and heart. Despite a noble performance by Amando Durán as the dreamer Quixote, and Josiah Phillip as Sancho Panza, his loyal squire, the OSF work rarely made it beyond a lively vaudeville romp. Some elements — the two-person Rosinante, Quixote’s steed; and the improvised sheep, which Quixote mistakes for attacking armies and slaughters — were genuinely amusing. Others, like the giant paper bag puppet head and hands, Quixote’s enchanter, were ham-fisted, rather than effective.

‘Much Ado’

The third outdoor performance is Shakespeare’s comic match-up of wits, “Much Ado About Nothing.” Noting that Shakespeare’s work is set in Messina, when “men are returning from a war,” director Kate Buckley said she considered the question “which war?” and settled on the end of World War II, when Italy had just signed an armistice with the Allies. “I looked at 1943 and Siciliy and Italy in general and found that is when the Italian resistance movement really started,” Buckley said. “It started to make sense that our heroes would be Italian resistance [fighters] and our antagonists may very well be allied with the Fascists or Mafia collaborators with Communists.”

Thus, the lovers Beatrice and Benedict sharpen their wits and discover their love in 1940s costumes and on 1940s sets.

Coming up

Opening June 30 is “All’s Well That Ends Well,” in the New Theater, which is also presenting commedia dell’arte farce “Servant of Two Masters” and Sarah Ruhl inventive, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone.”

July 22, Clifton Odets’ Depression-era “Paradise Lost” opens in the Angus Bowmer Theater, where “Macbeth” and “Equivocation” are playing, (see them together, to learn their link), along with two of the season’s most superb offerings, the moving “Death and the King’s Horseman” and a wonderful version of “The Music Man.”

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