Artistic Director Bill Rauch announced the 2013 playbill to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival company today.
“Next season OSF deepens our ongoing commitment to classics, as well as offering some dynamic new work,” Rauch said. “We’ve been listening to our audiences and are thrilled to be producing American classics by two writers from the ‘most wanted’ list: August Wilson and Tennessee Williams. We will run one of the most beloved American musicals of all time and two of Shakespeare’s most popular titles all season long. I am delighted to be directing KING LEAR in the intimacy of the New Theater, as well as his moving romance CYMBELINE on the outdoor stage, centering on Imogen, one of Shakespeare’s most compelling heroines. It is in fact a season of extraordinarily strong female characters; several of our 2013 shows examine gender dynamics in provocative and entertaining ways. Our new work includes a wildly theatrical new musical, an unforgettably fierce American Revolutions commission, and a surprising comic drama set in a Mexican nunnery. In an innovative new move, we are running three plays together in repertory in the New Theatre, to give audiences even more opportunities to see some of our most eagerly anticipated productions.”
In the Angus Bowmer Theatre
For the first time in 78 years, OSF will produce Shakespeare’s comedy THE TAMING OF THE SHREW indoors—the previous 13 productions were all presented on the Elizabethan Stage. SHREW will run throughout the season under the direction of David Ivers, co-artistic director at Utah Shakespeare Festival. Mr. Ivers’ presence in Ashland and at OSF is something of a homecoming, as he received his BFA at Southern Oregon University and worked as an actor at OSF in 1991.
Running all season in repertory with SHREW is the Tony Award-winning musical MY FAIR LADY, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, about the fiercely determined flower girl Eliza Doolittle who goes head to head with the equally irascible Professor Higgins. Amanda Dehnert (All’s Well that Ends Well, Julius Caesar) will direct this engaging and enduring story about class, language, love and independence. For this intimate production, two grand pianos will grace the stage and provide orchestration.
Also opening at the top of the season and playing through early July is August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning drama TWO TRAINS RUNNING, directed by Lou Bellamy, one of the premier interpreters of Wilson’s work, and the founder and artistic director of Penumbra Theatre Company. TWO TRAINS is set in 1969, in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, PA, a year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Memphis, a restaurant owner, fights the city for a fair price on his building, and the waitress and denizens of the diner, along with Memphis, find their personal battles for respect and fairness echoing in a national conversation about equality.
Opening in April, Tennessee Williams’ powerful drama A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE will be directed by Christopher Liam Moore. Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning landmark play opened its Broadway run in 1947. This sizzling drama with its raw emotions and sexuality focuses on a fragile Southern belle, Blanche DuBois, who visits her sister Stella and her working-class husband, Stanley, in New Orleans. Blanche, who hides a past she’s unwilling to acknowledge, complicates matters immediately. Moore and other members of the team who brought OSF audiences one of the hottest tickets in 2009, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, will reunite to create another gripping theatrical experience that will reveal the heart of this American masterpiece in surprising ways.
