Only 2,500 Miles From Broadway
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III
What is America's biggest regional repertory company, employing as many as 63 actors to mount a dozen productions for a total of 676 performances a year? What company features three spaces ranging from a stripped-down, experimental "black box" and a handsome conventional auditorium to a 1,173-seat outdoor Elizabethan playhouse, closely modeled on the Fortune Theater built in London in 1600? What company annually attracts more than 300,000 playgoers, 90% of them from more than 150 miles away? What company won a 1983 Tony Award and drew the American Theater Critics Association convention to view its 50th anniversary season in 1985?
The answer in each case is the Oregon Shakespearean Festival, which unfolds where it started, within the ivy-covered remnant walls of a onetime Chautauqua dome in the folksy college town of Ashland (pop. 15,000). The first season, three performances, was accompanied by boxing matches to defray costs. The fights lost money. The theater made a profit. Today the Ashland operation, revered on the West Coast but largely unknown elsewhere, has an annual budget of $5.5 million and sells more than 90% of capacity.
The main attraction is a summer outdoor repertory of three Shakespeare plays, usually unburdened by arty directorial concepts. The costumes are velvety, embroidered and heraldic. The lighting is simple. The three-story stage, with its doors and windows and stairs and balcony, serves as the set. The actors do not divert the apparent meaning of the text. This season's As You Like It does not put its actors in clown face or rely on a piece of white cloth to stand for everything from snowflakes to a marriage tent, as the Royal Shakespeare Company has done. Nor does Ashland's Measure for Measure turn the chaste novice nun Isabella into a marriage-minded maiden, winking at having got her man, as New York Shakespeare Festival Director Joseph Papp did last summer in Central Park. The result is that Ashland's interpretations are rarely revelatory -- but just as rarely misguided.
Yet the directors do not hesitate to point up themes, nor do they shy away from the unpleasant. Measure, As You Like It and the third outdoor production, the infrequently seen Titus Andronicus, all emphasize the savagery that befalls well-governed states when just men fail to hold on to power. Titus features three hands chopped off, one tongue cut out, two doses of unknowing cannibalism, plus gang rape, and murders by sword, starvation and bleeding to death. Director Pat Patton represents the gore in Japanese fashion, with streamers of red ribbon, but audiences still titter as bodies heap up on the stage. Titus, a great general defied by his children and betrayed by his country, is often regarded as a forerunner of King Lear, lacking only the self-realization. Actor Henry Woronicz finds in the role such majesty, pathos, rage and ruin that he seems ready to take on Lear himself.
The production of As You Like It is engaging, but its soppy lovesickness remains a bit earthbound, reaching real delirium only in Dan Kremer's laid- back version of melancholy Jaques. By contrast, James Edmondson's staging of Measure is an exquisite balance of tonally varied scenes in court, monastery, convent and red-light district. Woronicz makes psychological sense of the duke who retreats into disguise rather than crack down on his realm's licentiousness. John Castellanos shrewdly mutes the hypocrisy and heightens the righteousness of the sex-starved puritan who takes his place. Dante DiLoreto and Kamella Tate throb with youthful passions, profane and sacred, as a young man facing death for having premarital sex and his sister who finds that yielding her own virginity is the only way to save him. Larry Paulsen, who displays range as the clownish Touchstone in As You Like It and as Titus' loyal brother, brings off an even trickier feat in Measure: allowing a modern audience to enjoy as fully as Elizabethan groundlings must have the dimwit puns and malapropisms of the hapless constable Elbow.
Indoors, Ashland's shows range from Brecht's Threepenny Opera to a contemporary American comedy, Eric Overmyer's On the Verge, which has never been staged in New York City but has been taken up by a dozen or so regional theaters. This puckish story of three 19th century women explorers who find themselves jolted forward to the 1950s needs a more eventful second act and a quicker ending, but it muses beguilingly about culture shock, imperialism and the meaning, or meaninglessness, of language.
The happiest find indoors is George Abbott's first hit, the 1926 Broadway, which invented what have since become the cliches of backstage sagas and gangster melodramas. Pat Patton's staging abounds with campy cabaret numbers, menacing slapstick and chorus-girl goofiness, and centers on a superbly acted struggle for the heroine between a sinuous mobster (Castellanos) and a cheery hoofer (Brian Tyrrell). Broadway celebrates the gutsy traditions and restorative powers of the theater. Some 2,500 miles off Broadway, Ashland does the same, season after season.