Fraught time, this, for touristic forays to the U.S.
But for Vancouverites venturing south of the border anyway, one defense against in-your-face America Firstism might be to stick to the archipelago of “sanctuary cities” that have officially pledged to resist Trumpian xenophobia.
Luckily for us, there’s a convenient chain of such enclaves strung along the length of U.S. Interstate Route 5 (I-5) running from the Washington line all the way down to the Mexican border. One of the shiniest jewels in this diadem is Ashland, Oregon, (pop. 20,000) about 900 km down the road.
Think: lush public parks and campgrounds, variegated fine dining options, daunting property prices, boutiquey retailers, buskers, backpackers, patchouli-scented spas, street-legal cannabis, organic grocers, hot and cold running cappuccino, trans-friendly washrooms and unchallenged pedestrian right-of-way at every crosswalk.
In other words, an errant shard of gentrified Vancouver, so alien to its host country that it’s incurred a boycott by its more mainstream neighbours in the surrounding American “heartland.”
But – for sheer audience size, eclectic repertoire and snazzy production values – nothing in Vancouver can match Ashland’s main claim to fame: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. From a mostly amateur summertime pop-up production on a borrowed stage, the OSF has evolved, over the course of its 82-year history, into North America’s première repertory theatre company.
Nowadays, in its eight-month annual season, the Festival mounts a dozen plays – ancient and modern, edgy experiments and grandiose extravaganzas – in its three state-of-the-art theatres.
OSF still manages to wring new nuance out of its namesake; it’s now two years into its ambitious target of recapping The Bard’s entire stage opus. Yet, in any given season, less than half the Ashland repertoire is Shakespeare anymore.
The company is equally committed to multiculturalism, serving up a potpourri of theatrical vernaculars from all over the world. And it continues to commission new plays, such as decade-long (2008-2018) ‘American Revolutions’ cycle of 37 historically acute scripts that have won prestigious prizes.
Performers come back year after year, both for the job security (rare in the acting biz) and for the chance to appear in such a wide range of classy roles. To be cast in an OSF season is a bit like a tenure-track faculty appointment; to star repeatedly is like an endowed professorship.
But these players earn their perks. Almost all of them appear in multiple shows, which means conning lengthy lines and juggling disparate rehearsal and performance schedules. And in the decade since current artistic director Bill Rauch took over the OSF helm, Ashland productions incorporate more and more musical and “physical theatre” elements, which puts the Festival’s multi-talented performers through their singing, dancing and martial arts paces.
Mercifully, for actors and audiences alike, the annual repertoire comes in three bursts. The season starts with a flurry of indoor productions from February onwards in the 600-seat thrust-stage Angus Bowmer Theatre and the more intimate and flexible “black box” venue of the Thomas Theatre.
With the onset of summer in June, three more expansive shows open in the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre. New plays rotate into some of the indoor theatre slots around mid-summer to carry the Festival through the end of October.
In a three-day marathon, we managed to take in most of OSF’s starting spring line-up for 2017. This binge provided not only a banner weekend of absolutely world-class theatre, but also a sense of the play-going public’s white-knuckled angst at the edge of our current historical precipice.
The Festival’s spring roster includes a couple of intensely political Shakespearian plays – Henry IV (Part One) and Julius Caesar – that explore such themes as leadership legitimation, the fickleness of crowds, class status gaps and the perils of fake news.
Then there’s a pair of drastically different takes on immigrant dilemmas: a Chicano rendering of a classic Greek tragedy and a surreal send-up of the Korean diaspora.
But, so far, Ashland’s most lavish 2017 offering (and biggest crowd-pleaser) is a live-theatre adaptation of Miramax’ 1998 Oscar-winning blockbuster movie, Shakespeare in Love. Stripped of its Hollywood gloss, British playwright Tom Stoppard’s scintillating screenplay only gains added lustre in its translation to the Bowmer stage.
Odds bodkin! Cross-dresser unmasked! Photo: Jenny Graham
Much of the credit goes to writer Lee Hill. Under Stoppard’s guidance, he enriched the allusive script for a more Shakespeare-literate theatre audience. Then, too, the 20-member cast reads like an all-star line-up of OSF’s top headliners. Plus a dazzling pair of Ashland newbies in the leading roles: William DeMerritt as a tongue-tied young Shakespeare and Jamie Ann Romero as his cross-dressing love interest.
Set designer Rachel Hauck makes full use of the Bowmer’s assorted elevators, vomitoria and revolving stages. She further carves up the proscenium headway with ramps, catwalks and balconies. Under the magic of video designer Shawn Duan’s cyclorama projections, these subzones can become anything from roofscapes, to cathedral vaults to moonlit gardens to the foggy delta of the Thames.
The sheer density of bodies onstage and the sumptuous textures of wardrobe designer Susan Tsu’s creations turn the costumed crowd tableaux into scenic elements in their own right – living quilted curtains of rich brocade. Choreographer Jaclyn Miller keeps them gracefully undulating to the strains of composer David Reiffel’s score, as rendered by an onstage trio of Elizabethan period instruments.
But the primum mobile of all this exquisitely interlocking armillary stagecraft is director Christopher Liam Moore.
As both actor and auteur, he’s enjoyed free run of Ashland’s ample resources ever since Rauch, his long-time partner, took overall charge of the Festival. He’s turned this access to brilliant account, mounting definitive productions of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams and performing a series of bravura star acting turns onstage.
But this production is his most ambitious, affecting and funniest effort yet. Pitch-perfect, impeccably timed and well worth braving the border to see.
For connoisseurs of Elizabethiana, Shakespeare in Love offers no shortage of allusive quotations. But, if you prefer to consume your Shakespeare in original, integral scripts, rather than diced up into bite-sized snippets, the OSF spring season serves up a pair of strikingly pertinent canonical Bard-on-the-bone history plays.
Eastcheap bath-time for Prince Hal and consort. Photo: Jenny Graham
The title character in Henry IV (Jeffery King) is bit of a four flusher. Having scammed his way to the throne, he now faces revolts by his jilted allies. The real star of the show, however, is a bloated, narcissistic, truth-challenged, buffoonish blow-hard (Valmont Thomas) who staggers from one disgrace to the next, claiming victory at every stumbling step.
In the Shakespearean Henriad, unlike our latter-day Trumpiad, these traits are split between two distinct roles: the stately, guilt-wracked, paranoid monarch versus the irascibly amoral Sir John Falstaff. Poised between these two Big Daddy figures, England’s heir apparent, the wastrel Prince Hal (Daniel José Molina) coolly grooms himself to succeed to the throne.
His game plan is one of lowered expectations: the more he’s publicly despised as a lowlife Eastcheap consort of Falstaff’s, the more he’ll be esteemed when he redeems himself as a martial hero and filial son on the field of battle in King Henry’s final showdown with the rebels. And this can be accomplished in just one stroke by besting the rebel champion Hotspur (Alejandra Escalante) in single combat.
Molina brings off this bait-and-switch duplicity with elegant ease, equally convincing as a suave Jared Kushner in his court scenes and a profane gangsta cutpurse in the Eastcheap tavern. Thomas’ Falstaff, for all his endearing cynicism, is completely taken in by Hal.
“Thy love is worth a million,” he assures his princely crony. “Thou owest me thy love,” little dreaming that he’ll be callously tossed aside upon Hal’s ascension to the throne in Henry IV (Part Two), which plays in Ashland later this summer with Molina, King and Thomas each reprising their Part One roles.
Starting July 4, both of the Henry plays will be running on alternate days in the black box theatre, so that – with a certain amount of stamina – audiences can take in the whole sweep of Hal’s evolution from trust-fund slacker to reigning monarch.
Even the set (by Adam Rigg) will be substantially the same, except that the presiding backdrop mosaic of King Henry will evolve from a half-baked work-in-progress to a vaingloriously gilt wall-sized icon. Riggs renders the Eastcheap tavern with the louche allure of a Patpong go-go bar; his battlefields are starkly abstract, like parkour arenas.
Altogether 11 of Part One’s 14-member cast will carry over into Part Two. One who will not make the transition, though, is Escalante’s Hotspur. She dies – rather elegantly – in the play’s climactic fight scene. The dynamic physicality of her performance, though, is not always matched by a nuanced diction in her spoken lines.
Bearing much of the play’s expository burden, Hotspur’s speeches can be long and convoluted – hard to square with such an impetuous character. Escalante’s solution, all too often, is to rush through her lines so as to get on with her headstrong action. Her task is made all the trickier by director Lileana Blain-Cruz’ decision to tap a female actor (her previous Shakespearean star turns in Ashland include Juliet and Miranda) for such a conspicuously macho role.
This odd choice called to mind an earlier OSF instance of gender-bending casting: Vilma Silva’s show-stealing appearance as Julius Caesar in the black box theatre a in 2011. That performance, with benefit of hindsight, now seems an eerily prescient depiction of conspiratorial long knives drawn against a feminine wannabe Imperatrix right on the verge of her ascension to world-spanning power.
But this year, even in the wake of the 2016 U.S. electoral debacle, gender is hardly the focus of the OSF’s latest Caesar remount. Rather, director Shana Cooper hones in on other issues, even more pertinent in these dark days of Donald-Dämmerung. Themes like: the malleability of the hive mind, the mutability of factions, the insatiability of power-lust and the slippery slope of political violence.
Cassius and Brutus strategize at Philippi. Photo: Jenny Graham
In broad outline, the background of Shakespeare’s play could be ripped right out of our latest headlines: clubby oligarchs recoil from a populist groundswell that looks set to transform their nominal republic into a military dictatorship.
No wonder, then, that the Rome of 44 B.C. evoked on the Bowmer stage bears a moody resemblance to Trump’s dystopian vision of “American carnage.” Storms rage, soothsayers sound alarms, lions whelp in the streets and ghosts stalk the land.
The imposing ramparts in Sybil Wikersheimer’s sets are all nothing but flimsy sheetrock, knocked full of holes in the course of the performance. Costume designer Raquel Barreto has tricked out the deplorable proles – the fickle mob of “friends, Romans, countrymen” – in eerie dittohead masks, like so many Mudmen of Borneo.
Channelling the stylized gestural language of Germany’s late Tanztheatermeister Pina Bausch, choreographer Erika Chong Shuch and fight director U. Jonathan Toppo use rhythmically paced declamations and geometrically arrayed battle scenes to ratchet up dramatic tension.
It takes more than brilliant stagecraft, though, to breathe new intensity into such an iconic script. To bring the tragedy to life requires first order acting chops. For this, Cooper has turned to some of the OSF’s top headliners – Danforth Comins as Brutus and Armando Durán as Caesar. She has also recruited a relative newbie, Jordan Barbour, in the pivotal role of Mark Anthony.
But for me, the standout performance was Ashland veteran Rodney Gardiner’s Cassius. No mere “lean and hungry” prisoner of envy, this Cassius, nor yet a self-infatuated showboat. Rather, he’s a canny, tough-minded defender of dignity and normative values – a true conservative, in the best sense.
Strategic and commanding, Gardiner presents a paradigm of committed Resistance. And yet his initial resort to violence entrains a civil war that dooms Rome to the very outcome – military despotism – that Cassius and his co-conspirators most feared. As the last of the sheetrock ramparts crumble, the “noblest Romans” inevitably go down “groaning under this age’s yoke.”
After a tableau of such bleakness, a little lightsome diversion might be in order. And what could be jollier than a couple of suicides and assorted ghosts romping through the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) that divides North and South Korea, the likeliest fault line for the looming prospect of World War III?
Strangers in a strange land. Korean-American expats navigate Seoul subway. Photo: Jenny Graham
Yet that’s the offbeat premise behind tyro playwright Jiehae Park’s original script, Hannah and the Dread Gazebo. For her, the uninhabited – but tensely patrolled – no-man’s land of the DMZ symbolizes the whole range of “liminal spaces” that crisscross diaspora identities – the half-defined interfaces between Gen X and boomers, or Korean versus deracinated exile, or consciousness versus coma, or myth versus “news.”
In such zones, anything can happen – an open invitation to Park’s gaudiest tragicomic invention. Her Americanized yuppie protagonist (Cindy Im) is lured back to Seoul by ambiguous news of her senile grandmother’s apparent suicide leap into the DMZ. Over a strained dinner with her mother (Amy Kim Wasche), father (Paul Juhn) and kid brother (Sean Jones), she longs to penetrate the rootless urbanity of the modern city and the Confucian rigidity of her own family.
The others at the table feel equally stifled; they each embark on a private quest to break out of confinement. Brother takes up with a spitfire expat petition-monger (Eunice Hong). Mother attempts her own suicide leap and winds up hospitalized in a coma. Father wrestles with the opaque national security officialdom to find out what’s happened to Grandma’s body.
Sounds like a million laughs, right? But for Park, it’s an open invitation to comic invention. The comatose mother dream-stalks the DMZ, where she encounters a whole gamut of hallucinatory beings: everyone from her own suicidal mother to the late (and weirdly avuncular) North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il to a mythic tiger who narrowly missed out as primordial progenitor of the whole Korean race.
Almost equally surreal are the father and daughters’ bureaucratic misadventures, not to mention kid brother and his paramour’s literally immersive crash-course in Koreana through chance encounters in the Seoul subways. All non-familial roles – hallucinations, bureaucrats, subway tramps et al – are brilliantly performed by Jessica Ko in a dazzling series of deftly minimalist character sketches, greatly helped by costume designer Sara Ryung Clement’s quick-change get-ups.
…and that’s just for openers in this year’s Ashland season. Up next, once the weather warms up in June, the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre will host three grand-scale extravaganzas: a stage version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast musical, a sprawling retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, and – for those who will not have got their fill of Falstaff through the Henriad – Shakespeare’s airy bagatelle The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Two perennial OSF favourites – the late writer August Wilson and the hip-hop inflected rap-and-dance troupe UNIVERSES – intersect on the Bowmer stage to present UniSon, a posthumous celebration of Wilson’s verse.
And OSF artistic director Bill Rauch, for his own 2017 directorial project, has chosen Off the Rails, a reworking of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure set against the backdrop of a Pawnee Indian reservation, its Residential School and adjacent settler township.
Well worth a drive down I-5. But stick scrupulously to the speed limits and be sure your papers are in order.