Four plays in three days. Sounds like a travel brochure blurb. And indeed, folks did head to Ashland this past weekend as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival launched its 2007 season.
The four plays that opened in two theaters on Friday, Saturday and Sunday — over nine hours of theater — put the souls of the audience through their paces, exposing them to a wide range of human experience in a short span.
We started with "As You Like It" in the Bowmer Theatre Friday night. The play has been staged 14 times by OSF — the first was in 1939 and the most recent was in 2002 — and this is only the second time indoors. In this year's production, sad to say, the individual performances were stellar but did not coalesce into a unified constellation.
Someone described the production as "muscular," implying that the spare set and minimal stage business forced the cast and the audience to focus more on the text. This can be a good thing considering the wit and wisdom that flow from the pen of Shakespeare. This can also be a not-so-good thing, considering that two hours and 55 minutes of words can quickly overflow into wordiness. Did we really need the epilogue?
Director J.R. Sullivan described his take on the play as a tribute to the American experience. OSF is after all an American theater company with American actors.
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That feeling lived in the Forest of Arden, far removed from the angst of the city and the court. Sullivan had composer John Tanner translate the play's songs into the American folk idiom of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly for the forest and the pop music of the period — Jerome Kern and George Gershwin — for the urban court.
The more we lingered in the Forest of Arden, the more leafy flats appeared on stage. But the lighting and the costumer's palette remained tawny. In the end, the full spectrum of sunlight, love and optimism couldn't shine through — even in the hopeful Forest of Arden.
In "The Cherry Orchard" which opened Saturday afternoon in the Bowmer, we never see the trees, but we hear about them and quickly learn why the play is named for them.
OSF Artistic Director Libby Appel has this thing for Chekhov in general and "The Cherry Orchard" in particular. She assembled a brilliant cast and worked with recrafting Allison Horsley's literal translation to find her own voice to bring the play to the OSF stage for the first time. Chekhov's three other plays: "Three Sisters," Uncle Vanya," and "The Seagull," have all had their moments on the OSF stage.
"We as directors are looking for ways to illuminate the play," Appel said at a press conference. She has done well in providing the lighting for Chekhov's portrait of a dying era: Russia at the turn of the last century. The tempo of the play is that of a long conversation during which people bring one another up to date, chat about this and that — and the weather, of course — while all the while the hours creep inexorably toward tomorrow, a tomorrow hardly anyone has been prepared to face.
Todd Barton's music and sound design helps maintain the mood of this moment in time, a time that is no more and a way of living that is disappearing right before the characters' closed eyes. In this superb production, we grow to care about these people in whose follies we find glimpses of our own.
The second act winds to its inevitable close much too languidly to sustain the tension the play requires, leaving the audience in their seats for two hours and 45 minutes (with one intermission). Perhaps "The Cherry Orchard" would have benefitted from some of the same judicious pruning that "As You Like It" needed.
There was just enough time left in the afternoon for a quick nap before heading back for the Saturday evening show. Visions of trees, Depression-era hobos, Russian serfs, and talk of love and the weather swirled around my head.
I'm sure I was smiling.
