Oregon Shakespearean Festival Research Articles

Exciting Shakespeare in 1988

Veteran playgoers who have sat through many (perhaps too many) renditions of Shakespeare's best-known plays will often be out of phase with their neighbors in the audience. For example, during summer 1988 I did not share in the enthusiastic response to the remounted version of Bill Alexander's Twelfth Night at the Barbican or the even louder applause for Bill Cain's Victorian music-hall rendition of the same script at the Oregon Shakespearean Festival. Similarly, one of my fall semester students was ecstatic about seeing his first RSC show in Stratford-Adrian Noble's Macbeth-a show that I (and a lot of other longtime Macbeth-watchers) did not find very engaging. Accounts of such shows in scholarly journals can therefore provide a professorial grade sheet or scorecard (often with the emphasis upon errors rather than hits) but can also leave the impression of the expert having the last word (an academic version of Falstaff wounding a dead Hotspur in the thigh). Rather than providing such a ranked and annotated list of the many and varied Shakespeare productions I saw in 1988, let me offer instead a highly selective (and admittedly idiosyncratic) account of some exciting and revealing moments that range in scope from the reading of a single line to the sweep of an entire play. Perhaps such an account can pinpoint some of the rewards that make all that travel (and sitting) worthwhile.

Reviewing Shakespeare for the Record

B ETWEEN 1975 AND 1980 I REVIEWED the Shakespeare productions at the Oregon Shakespearean Festival this journal. In doing so, I had several advantages denied reviewers who must provide timely accounts newspapers or magazines, I was able to see the productions more than once, talk to key personnel, test my reactions against those of other playgoers, and then, when my muse chose to sing, write my essay (which appeared six months to a year after the shows had closed). The advantages that accrue from the absence of a deadline, however, only spawn a new set of problems. The reviewer who is addressing not a potential playgoer but a reader who will not have seen a production must wrestle with the question: what should a review for the record do, say, or record? The comments that follow provide no definitive answers to this question but rather single out some of the problems involved, as well as several yardsticks I worked out my own use.

Oregon Shakespearean Festival

Journal Article Oregon Shakespearean Festival Get access Alan C. Dessen Alan C. Dessen 1University of North Carolina Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 32, Issue 2, Summer 1981, Pages 267–274, https://doi.org/10.2307/2870049 Published: 01 July 1981

Shakespeare in Baltimore

Oregon Shakespearean Festival, Graham played Lear three times. This Lear, his fourth, was not fully realized. Although at moments, particularly on the heath, Graham's Lear was movingly lost, usually he was a crotchety, cantankerous old nag, hemming and hawing at his daughters and servants with a bark to match the whine of Martha J. Brown's oddly rigid Cordelia. Conventionally presented as more sinned against than sinning, this Lear never managed to make us care. The reason not the need speech was uniformly angry; the soul in bliss speech was uniformly tired; and the blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! speech of III. ii had nothing of a nature's storm in its rhythm as spoken, conveying only crusty determination. Due to this actor's limited scope, his monochromatic Lear, the play was reduced to a family squabble. As the Fool, Albert Sanders was inexcusable. For while Graham's Lear was simply ordinary and plodding, unexplored, Sanders seemed to go out of his way to come up with a bizarre characterization of the Fool. His body folding in on itself, stooped and shuffling, Sanders gazed out at nothing, like a wistful wino on a park bench, not at all like Lear's fool. There was no bond between them. Nothing. As in his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, director Barry showed considerable imagination and insight, especially in Edgar's band of swarming, muddy beggars and in Gloucester's rebirth at Dover, beautifully and simply staged: the gentle Gloucester just fell forward, and that was enough. But despite Barry's tight direction, fine ensemble work by much of the supporting cast, a very well-staged fight between Edmund and Edgar, a poem of a set, and lovely, evocative traditional music composed by Stewart W. Turner, this production of King Lear left its audience bored, tired, and disgruntled.

Oregon Shakespearan Festival

Journal Article Oregon Shakespearean Festival Get access Alan C. Dessen Alan C. Dessen University of North Carolina Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 31, Issue 2, Summer 1980, Pages 278–285, https://doi.org/10.2307/2869553 Published: 01 July 1980

Colorado Shakespeare Festival

Journal Article Colorado Shakespeare Festival Get access Jerry Turner Jerry Turner Oregon Shakespearean Festival Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 31, Issue 2, Summer 1980, Pages 249–251, https://doi.org/10.2307/2869549 Published: 01 July 1980

Oregon Shakespearean Festival

Journal Article Oregon Shakespearean Festival Get access Alan C. Dessen Alan C. Dessen University of North Carolina Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 29, Issue 2, Spring 1978, Pages 278–285, https://doi.org/10.2307/2869124 Published: 01 April 1978

Shakespearean Gold In the Oregon Hills

T HE 42-YEAR-OLD EXPERIMENT-or miracle-called the Oregon Shakespearean Festival is the longest theatrical investigation of Shakespeare's plays ever conducted by a single theatre organization operating under essentially the same artistic management with a single, developing aesthetic policy. It is also one of the most Elizabethan, one of the most demanding, one of the most entertaining, and one of the most popular-its total annual audience now reaching toward a quarter of a million. This year, in a town of about 14,000 people, with the closest metropolis hundreds of miles away, there are three beautiful and excitingly functional theatres-seating 1200, 600, and 150-playing nine different productions of Shakespeare, Sheridan, Williams, Delaney, O'Neill, and Hamilton for more than 350 performances to houses that more often than not are sold out. Last year, with the third and smallest theatre not yet dreamed of, there were 277 performances of eight productions of Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Hellman, and Cohan to a total audience of over 220,000, with the number of tickets sold during the three-month summer season coming (including standing room) to 100.I% of total seating capacity. What ought not to be surprising to us in the West, I suppose, is that so many otherwise knowledgeable people in the rest of the country still think of the Festival as what it was twenty to forty years ago: an unusually good amateur-community-educational theatre presenting plays by Shakespeare for a few weeks each summer; valiant probably, worthwhile certainly, aesthetically at the level of superior college productions, and in no sense professional. That is probably a fair description of its honorable and honored past. But theatre in Ashland today is something you won't believe unless you go there. The standards are professional, the budget is over a million dollars, and-what is never necessarily true-the quality of the staged work reflects the standards and justifies the budget. The Festival is a cultural phenomenon' that should bring joy to the heart and ideas to the mind of anyone sufficiently interested in Shakespeare to be reading this journal. Fortunately, we have available to us the story of how the miracle occurred. Angus Bowmer, the man who started it all in 1935 and has nurtured it ever since, has written what he calls An Autobiography of a Festival: As I

The Oregon Shakespearean Festival, 1975

Journal Article The Oregon Shakespearean Festival, 1975 Get access Alan C. Dessen Alan C. Dessen ALAN C. DESSEN, Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, is the author of Jonson's Moral Comedy and the editor of the recently published Volume VI of Renaissance Drama (Essays on Dramatic Antecedents). Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 27, Issue 1, Winter 1976, Pages 83–93, https://doi.org/10.2307/2869071 Published: 01 January 1976

Scene from Twelth Night as Performed during the Oregon Shakespearean Festival at Ashland

Scene from Twelth Night as Performed during the Oregon Shakespearean Festival at Ashland

Oregon Shakespearean Festival, 1974

Oregon Shakespearean Festival, 1974

Oregon Shakespearean Festival—1972

Oregon Shakespearean Festival—1972 Get access Robin Carey Robin Carey Southern Oregon College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 23, Issue 4, Fall 1972, Pages 398–401, https://doi.org/10.2307/2868675 Published: 01 October 1972

Oregon Shakespearean Festival, Spring Season

Oregon Shakespearean Festival, Spring Season

Shakespeare at Ashland and San Diego

HE West Coast offers the Shakespeare scholar a unique opportunity. In addition to the many new festivals springing up in -04 city parks (San Francisco and Altadena), in universities (Santa Clara), or in any promising natural setting (Marin County), it continues to boast the only two established festivals exclusively devoted to producing Shakespeare in what is hoped to be authentic Shakespearian style. Both the Oregon Shakespearean Festival at Ashland and the National Shakespeare Festival at San Diego have built stages which, according to the best scholarship, both feel to be the closest approximations to Shakespeare's own Globe. Under the guidance of their producing directors-Angus Bowmer at Ashland and Craig Noel at San Diego both earnestly attempt to study responsible scholarship and then accept the plays on their own terms, eschewing ingenious creative reinterpretation, coy modernization, or frantic gimmick. Thus comparisons, though odorous, are inevitable, especially when the results are as strikingly different as they were this year. On the whole, the season at Ashland was successful; that at San Diego was not.1 Let us first turn to San Diego and the most serious problems. Antony and Cleopatra was a great disappointment, especially since it was directed by Allen Fletcher. From the opening pantomime-Antony and Cleopatra reclining on a couch in passionate embrace while the court, an appreciative audience, hovered about them-everything went desperately wrong. The animal sensuality of the lovers was stressed throughout. Antony (Louis Edmonds) was an aging playboy: an exhausted Noel Coward when begrudgingly dragged into politics, coming to life only in the presence of volatile Egyptian morsel. It was impossible to believe of this man that his rear'd arm had ever crested the world. Jacqueline Brookes is, I believe, potentially a great Cleopatra, but Mr. Fletcher's focus stressed the erratic wanton. Theatrically effective was a bedroom scene-all hangings and costumes of hot saffron yellow-in which Cleopatra writhed on the bed in frankly physical frustrations at Antony's absence; but when Enobarbus spoke of her infinite variety, one had the uneasy feeling that, on the contrary, she was exactly the type of woman who would eventually cloy the appetite she fed. Conceivably, some may have felt that this interpretation of the lovers was exactly right, but is there any possible warrant for presenting Enobarbus (Stephen Joyce) from the first as a disillusioned drunk? The ineffectual cyni-

On the Elizabethan Staging of Hamlet

N i96i the twenty-first season of the Oregon Shakespearean Festival at Ashland consisted of ten performances each of Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and All's Well That Ends Well; nine performances of i Henry IV; and three of Jonson's The Alchemist. Founded in I935, the Oregon Festival was the first North American theater to perform Shakespeare's plays consistently in the Elizabethan manner. Before I959 relatively few playgoers from other parts of the United States had heard of the Festival, probably because of what to many may seem to be a remote location in extreme southern Oregon. Nevertheless Ashland is now an important center for the performance and study of Shakespeare's plays. The Festival draws its audiences from all the western States and its company from all parts of the United States, from Canada, and from England. Among other functions, the Festival is partly a teaching theater. Most of the company are advanced students or teachers of drama from many universities. The present Festival theater structure, the third on this site, was built in i959 at a cost of approximately $275,ooo.1 It may be the best equipped strictly Elizabethan playhouse in the world. The more one studies the theater and the performances there, the more one gets the impression that the structure is somewhat larger than life and that Shakespeare, Burbage, and company would be both delighted and somewhat overwhelmed if they were given the opportunity to perform in it. From this superb equipment and from their years of experience in this theater the technical and artistic managers of the company have accumulated an impressive supply of lore, expertness, and even mystique regarding the performance of Shakespeare's plays in the Elizabethan mode.2 In this article I propose to study the i96i performance of Hamlet in order to try to determine what inferences we may draw concerning the performance of the play in the outdoor theaters of Shakespeare's time. After a brief preliminary analysis of the Ashland Hamlet and the Ashland playhouse, I shall discuss the cutting of the play for performance and the staging of the various scenes of Hamlet in the Ashland Festival theater.