The 1964 Season of the Ashland and San Diego Shakespearian Festivals

Abstract

HE Oregon Shakespearian Festival, at Ashland, presented Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Henry VI, Part i, on its outdoor, Elizabethan-type stage. The three-story tiring house is ornamented with Tudor half-timbering and surrounds a trapezoidal, thrust stage, overhung with a shadow supported on the playing area by two slim columns. An oblique entrance with a gabled casement window above faces onto the playing area far stage right and stage left. In the center is located a curtained inner stage, above which is a curtained gallery of the same width, and on the third level a smaller gallery. That this structure, erected in I959 with reference to the Fortune contract according to its builders, is more suitable for comedy than for tragedy was clearly demonstrated by this season's productions. The impression of the whole comes off as a rather playful, nostalgic notion of merry England, and one expects Mistress Ford and Mistress Page to throw open the casement windows instead of Joan of Arc and a Master-Gunner of Orleans. The darker side of Shakespeare tends to be forgotten at Ashland, and the most successful production of the summer turned out to be Twelfth Night, directed with no little grace and skill by Robert Loper. Three players in particular should be singled out for their unusually fine performances: Elizabeth Huddle as Viola, Gail Chugg as Malvolio, and John Getgood as Sir Toby. One of Ashland's major difficulties lies in the unevenness of its company, which is put together anew each season, and, in general, these three players were not sufficiently supported by the remainder of the cast. The cakes and ale crowd managed a great deal of inventive fun, thanks also to the imagination of Loper, but Orsino did not wallow convincingly in his own love-sickness and Feste did not succeed in developing a character. In fact, the high comedy failed to attain that diamond-like hardness and clarity necessary to set off Sir Toby et al. Malvolio, clad in a sour grimace and a black cloak and pointed hat, equipped with a great key and a staff of office, took over the downstage area with his letter as Fabian, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew roared around behind a pair of potted plants upstage center. The high point of the evening proved to be Malvolio's delivery of his imaginings: Calling my officers about me [with a sweep of the hand], in my branched velvet gown; [a self-satisfied smile] having come from a daybed, where I have left Olivia [pause] sleeping,-[the right hand extended downward toward the fancied bed in a moment of vivid pleasure]. This was followed by one of his characteristic gestures-the pressing of his fists against his chest with an ecstatic, upward gaze. Here Loper and Chugg presented not a mere buffoon but a threatening figure, ill suited by temperament either as a