The Bard of Ashland

Ashland, Oregon at first seems like an unlikely location for the largest professional regional repertory theater in the United States. Located 350 miles north of San Francisco and 285 miles south of Portland, it’s not the easiest place to get to. However, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival employs approximately 450 theater professionals and brings in about 125,000 visitors a year.

Its picturesque location is one of the many draws. “I wake up every morning, look out the window, and think I’m staying in some resort,” says Bill Rauch, who will be taking over the reins of the OSF next season. As he sat down for an interview during my recent trip to Ashland, Rauch’s enthusiasm about his new position was plain to see.

The former artistic director of the LA-based Cornerstone Theatre Company is no stranger to OSF, having directed several shows for the festival in previous seasons, as well as this year’s Romeo and Juliet in the beautiful outdoor Elizabethan Stage/Allen Pavilion. The production emphasizes the generation gap between the adults, who are dressed in period costumes, and the play’s youth, who are outfitted in contemporary clothing (costume design is by Shigeru Yaji). The concept works beautifully, and is reinforced by composer Paul James Prendergast’s score, which likewise mixes modern and classic elements while creating tension and setting the mood for several of the play’s sequences.

While it’s evident that Rauch has great love for the play, there’s also a certain amount of irreverence to his staging, which includes visual gags such as marking off a crime scene with police tape and having the slain Tybalt carried out in a body bag. The director also fiddles with the text now and again, most notably by having the news of Romeo’s banishment played out in overlapping scenes between Romeo/Friar Laurence and Juliet/Nurse rather than having the scenes follow one another. It’s a bold choice that pays off, streamlining the action and quickening the show’s pacing.

John Tufts is terrific as Romeo, perfectly capturing the schoolboy impetuousness (made even more evident by his clothing) and youthful ardor that defines the character. Unfortunately, Christine Albright’s Juliet is far too reserved to inspire such devotion, and her lackluster performance causes many of the scenes in which she appears without him to drag. Among the rest of the rather uneven cast, standouts include Dan Donohue’s Mercutio and Mark Murphey’s Friar Laurence.

There’s more to OSF than just productions of Shakespeare, although this year you can also catch stagings of The Tempest, As You Like It, and The Taming of the Shrew. “It says in our mission statement that Shakespeare is our standard and our inspiration,” says Rauch. “But there are a lot of different writers who I feel are connected to the spirit of Shakespeare, and his sense of theatricality, humanity, and use of language.”

Some of this year’s newer works include August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle, and Lisa Loomer’s Distracted. The latter play, which examines how parents should deal with an overactive child, was my favorite production at OSF, but, unfortunately, was not open for review. I hope to catch it again in a future incarnation.

OSF even presents world premieres, such as the new musical Tracy’s Tiger, adapted by Linda Alper, Douglas Langworthy, Penny Metropulos, and Sterling Tinsley from the 1951 novella by William Saroyan. The show revolves around Thomas Tracy (Jeremy Peter Johnson) who is followed around by an imaginary tiger (René Millán). Tracy falls in love with the beautiful Laura Luthy (Laura Morache), but does something incredibly inappropriate while at her parents’ house that spoils the budding romance. He subsequently faces several ups and downs until his tiger materializes in the flesh — and is promptly shot at and hunted by the police who consider the beast to be a public menace.

Several of the quirks and eccentricities in the plot exist in Saroyan’s original, but even so, the musical needs a lot of work. Directed by Metropulos, it doesn’t even do a good job at making some of the basics clear. For example, Laura is followed by an imaginary tigress (Nell Geisslinger), whom Tracy’s tiger can see but it’s not as certain whether either Laura or Tracy can. Tinsley’s jazzy score is serviceable but rarely exciting. Still, the Tracy-Laura duet “Way Way Tenango” is quite catchy while “Time Has Gone By,” sung by Laura’s mother Viola (Miriam A. Laube), is beautifully written, even if Laube’s performance disappoints. However, the terrific David Kelly, in the supporting role of Officer Earl Huzinga, manages to rise above the material and is the best thing about the production.

In addition to the plays, the OSF provides opportunities for talk-backs with cast and creative team members and a backstage tour. My tour was led by company member Shad Willingham, who was both charming and informative as he took us through OSF’s three theater spaces: the intimate New Theatre, the 601-seat Angus Bowmer Theater, and the 1190-seat Elizabethan Stage. Willingham shared stories about the frenzy and excitement created when an understudy has to go on (all company members understudy and are understudied), the joys of working in repertory, and how weather affects performances on the outdoor stage (shows are rarely cancelled; audience members sit in the rain, while actors may change to street clothes so as not to ruin the costumes).

With Rauch beginning his tenure during the 2007-2008 season, there’s a lot of excitement — as well as some anxiety — in the air regarding the kinds of changes he will usher in. The first production the new artistic director will helm is the Sanskrit drama The Clay Cart. “It’s the first non-Western classic we’ve done,” he states. Another first is that the Elizabethan stage, which has traditionally showcased productions of Shakespeare and other European works, will play host to a 20th-century American classic: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

One of Rauch’s long-term goals is to commission a series of plays that examine U.S. history that will hopefully begin to see fruition in time for the company’s 75th anniversary season in 2010. “I think about how Shakespeare really tried to address his age’s anxiety about who was going to succeed the childless Queen Elizabeth through a series of plays that looked at power struggles in the past,” says Rauch. “We will commission a bunch of writers to create a collective body of work that tries to tap into the anxieties, hopes, and dreams of our age as pertaining to the future, and how we, by looking at our past, can better illuminate those paths.”