Oregon Shakespeare Festival (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Oregon Shakespeare Festival Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Ashland, Oregon. 10-14 March and 7-12 August 2012. Several recent studies in dance and performance scholarship have dwelt on the complexities of historical re-performance both on and off the stage. Yet, perhaps because the practice is deemed so normative, at least since the emergence of the auteur-director in late-nineteenth-century Europe, what it means to re-perform dramatic texts in theatre has not been addressed with as much focused attention. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's (OSF) 2012 season— its seventy-seventh—offered several opportunities to think through re-performance, as well as how the festival stages history in the present. The season reengaged classical Shakespearean and Greek plays and various iterations of a Chinese folktale while also commissioning new productions exploring turning points in US history. Taken together, these retakes on classic plays and past events enabled a reexamination of the limits of the state in legislating civil rights, international conflicts, family structures, and appropriate gender roles. The season offered two aesthetically distinct premieres within the "American Revolutions" commissioning project that variously engaged the 1960s civil rights movement from both federal legislative and grassroots perspectives. Robert Schenkkan's All the Way (directed by Bill Rauch) took up President Johnson's fraught struggle to pass the Civil Rights Act while retaining the nomination of the Democratic Party. Party People, devised by the hip-hop theatre collective Universes (Steven Sapp, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp, and William Ruiz [aka Ninja]) and developed and directed by Liesl Tommy, reexamined the legacy of the Black Panthers and Young Lords via a multimedia spoken-word and movement-infused documentary spectacle. Temporally resituated takes on canonical Shakespeare texts included director Joseph Haj's Henry V, inspired by Vietnam War-era photos, Rob Melrose's Troilus and Cressida, in which he cast Greeks as US soldiers occupying contemporary Iraq, and Laird Williamson's Romeo and Juliet, set in 1840s Spanish California. These reengagements of Shakespeare's histories and tragedies joined Alison Carey's comic adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor (directed by Christopher Liam Moore), The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa, relocated to election season in an imagined contemporary Iowa in which gay marriage is not only tolerated, but also fashionable. Together, these plays reinvestigated the costs of battle set against the struggle to negotiate familial structures. Mary Zimmerman's compelling adaptation of The White Snake (devised with the ensemble) also took Click for larger view View full resolution Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella ensemble. (Photo: Jenny Graham.) [End Page 253] Click for larger view View full resolution Lyndon Johnson (Jack Willis) and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (Kenajuan Bentley) argue about voting rights (ensemble at rear: David Kelly, Daniel T. Parker, and Derrick Lee Weeden) in All the Way. (Photo: Jenny Graham.) up the issue of "appropriate" marriage. In a slot devoted to global classics, Zimmerman grounded her reimagining of this well-known Chinese fable in multiple source texts. Like the titular snake, which appeared as stick puppet, bunraku-manipulated object, and in human form, the story frequently paused to shed its skin and note different narrative trajectories, foregrounding the tale's historicity and multiplicity. The production thus made visible the interpretive tensions embedded within various versions of the tale, which follows the desires of a white snake turned to human form who falls in love with, marries, and bears the child of a young man, and which asks whether this interspecies love affair merits our disapprobation or acceptance. Perhaps the most fertile site of inquiry into re-performance, the staging of histories, and various takes on power, family structures, and appropriate gender roles was Bill Rauch's Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (MMC). Conceived in 1984 when he was a student at Harvard, Rauch had previously revised and remounted the production in 1998 at the Actor's Gang in Los Angeles and in 2002 at Yale Repertory Theatre (with codirector Tracy Young); he had also workshopped the piece for several years at OSF prior to this season's performance on the Bowmer mainstage (choreographed for the fourth time by Sabrina Peck). The 2012 production thus animated retakes on each of the core dramatic...