Reviewed by: Oregon Shakespeare Festival Sonja Arsham Kuftinec OREGON SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL. Ashland, Oregon. 06 7–11and 08 25–30, 2017. Adaptation is tricky: a Janus-faced, yet multifaceted transformation that enables survival while requiring death, disguise, or letting go. As a mode of [End Page 94]theatrical storytelling, adaptations can offer layers of meaning that resonate across historical moments, revelations that pierce through time and space, and postmodern remixes that challenge linear temporality. Adaptations can also house assimilation, betrayal, and loss. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's (OSF) 2017 season, a repertory of eleven plays, many featuring shapeshifters and clowns, animated this range of receptive possibilities through dramaturgy, design, and storytelling. Productions included two Disney film adaptations: a revelatory deconstruction of Beauty and the Beastdirected by Eric Tucker, and a fluid rendering of the cleverly layered Shakespeare in Lovedirected by Christopher Liam Moore. Mary Zimmerman represented her take on The Odyssey. OSF playwright-in-residence Luis Alfaro remixed Medea, while the resident ensemble, the Universes, danced with August Wilson's poetry. In Hannah and the Dread Gazebo, Jihae Park offered a breathtaking comedic meditation on loss and inheritance, riffing on a Korean origin myth. OSF's first Native American–authored play, Off the Rails, adapted Measure for Measureto a Wild West context. And several of Shakespeare's histories and comedies were innovatively updated through casting and design. Over the past several years OSF has intentionally diversified its institutional leadership, production, and casting toward fulfilling a mission rooted in honoring the cultural richness of the United States through new and classic plays. Thus while the season's four Shakespeare plays remained more or less faithful to the text, the design and casting choices, along with choreographic and musical additions, illuminated each production's contemporary valences. A modern-dress Henry IV, Parts 1–2played in the intimate Thomas Theater with directors Lileana Blain-Cruz ( Part 1) and Carl Cofield ( Part 2) sharing designers, actors, and conceptual ideas. Together, the productions traced an arc of storytelling that illuminated the transformation of Prince Hal (Daniel José Molina) into King Henry V, alongside a tapestry of characters inhabiting the multiple worlds that Hal moves through—from court to battlefield to brothel. The productions highlighted a shift in mood from the driving storytelling of Part 1—culminating in Hal's seeming "reformation" in battle—to the looser-knit unsteadiness of Part 2. Where we first meet Hal reveling in a plastic pool filled with bubbles and neon-pink, boars-headed, swimsuit-clad ladies, we see the deterioration of this world in Part 2through Doll Tearsheet's (Alejandra Escalante) roughly bleached hair, worn bodysuit, and rubber flip-flops. Escalante's journey as an actor through both plays vividly indexed this shift while illuminating how the productions' color-conscious casting offered contemporary political insights. In Part 1Escalante portrayed a supremely focused female Hotspur, half-shaved head of hair pinned back military style in contrast to Hal's loose curls, which were tamed into a mirror image of Hotspur's bun only in the final battle between the two. In Part 2Escalante returned as a suite of bewigged characters, including the desultory Tearsheet, a silvery choral Rumor, and Justice Shallow's foolish servant, Davy. The drive of Hotspur, as Hal's masculine-female foil, has fractured. This fracturing can also be read against Hal's adoption of white cultural habitus that he eventually dons in order to rule. In Part 1Hal's allegiance rests predominantly with Falstaff, delightfully portrayed by black actor G. Valmont Thomas. The rebels additionally featured an array of black and Latina actors standing up to white actor Jeffrey King's Henry IV. In Part 2Hal reconciles with his father and denounces Falstaff, taking up the strict tutelage of the Lord Chief Justice (a dynamic and Chanel-suited Robin Goodrin Nordli). Hal transforms the fluid art of trickery learned at Falstaff's feet into the mask of staid political leadership. In the playing out of this shift we witness both the siren song and constraints of dominant culture, alongside the possibilities of ongoing shape-shifting through theatrical representation. Falstaff thus appropriately shifted form in the outdoor production...