Oregon Shakespeare Festival Announces 2013 Season

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.

The final show to open in the Bowmer is a world premiere by Tanya Saracho, DREAMS OF THE MUSE (Working Title). The play is set in 1715, in a convent in New Spain (Mexico), where the nun and writer Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz had lived—and died only 20 years before. This engaging comic drama focuses on the arrival of three young women at the convent and their discovery of the works of Sor Juana in a locked and off-limits wardrobe. Intrigued by Sor Juana’s play, The House of Desires, the girls begin secretive evening rehearsals, hoping to perform it at an impending feast for visiting dignitaries, little knowing the upheaval their activities will cause. (Director to be announced.)

In the New Theatre

In an exciting scheduling change in the New Theatre, OSF will now run three plays in repertory. The first show to perform in the New Theatre is KING LEAR, directed by Bill Rauch, which will open in February and run all season, along with the Angus Bowmer Theatre’s SHREW and MY FAIR LADY. In this way, audiences will be able to see one of Shakespeare’s most winning comedies and most celebrated tragedies at any time during the season. LEAR will be set in the round, and Rauch will again bring his dynamic vision to illuminate this portrait of a kingdom and two families in chaos. This is the first time in Festival history that Shakespeare’s towering tale will be interpreted in our most intimate space.

Opening in March is a world premiere musical, THE UNFORTUNATES, with book, music, and lyrics by 3 Blind Mice (Jon Beavers, Ian Merrigan, Ramiz Monsef) and Casey Hurt. The play has been workshopped over the last two years at OSF, and Monsef has been a member of the OSF Acting Company for five seasons. The production will be directed by Ashland native Shana Cooper (Love’s Labor’s Lost). The original musical follows a group of condemned soldiers in an enemy prison who sing the “St. James Infirmary Blues” to steel themselves against their fates. The song transports them into a dark dream world inspired by American folklore, as well as the history and evolution of American musical styles, from gospel to Americana, blues to hip hop. Visually, THE UNFORTUNATES lives in a comic book world reminiscent of old Charles Fleischer animation, Erik Powell’s comic book The Goon, and the stop motion films of Tim Burton.

And in July, OSF will stage internationally-acclaimed playwright Naomi Wallace’s newest work, THE LIQUID PLAIN, a world premiere production commissioned through OSF’s American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle. The play will be directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, British actor, playwright and director, and artistic director at Baltimore’s CENTERSTAGE. Told with great emotion, lyricism, and power, THE LIQUID PLAIN brings to life a group of people whose stories have been lost in history. Set in 18^th-century Providence, Rhode Island, two runaway slaves find love and a near-drowned sailor. As the mysteries of their identities come to light, painful truths about the past and present collide and flow into the next generation. Wallace was in OSF’s first class of American Revolutions commissions in 2008. 

On the Elizabethan Stage

In 2013 OSF will take audiences into the woods for fabulous outdoor adventures when the Elizabethan Stage is transformed into a forest setting that all three productions will share. This bold design conceit will allow for more thematic interplay between the plays outdoors, and will give OSF’s designers and artisans a chance to create with a different level of detail. 

First up is CYMBELINE, Shakespeare’s rarely staged romance, directed by Bill Rauch.Long overdue for OSF audiences, it was last produced in 1998. Rauch confesses that he has a special love of Shakespeare’s last plays, in which the improbable logic of fairy tales allows impossibly tragic situations to bloom into gloriously happy endings. The mélange of styles that is CYMBELINE is relentlessly entertaining, and a perfect way to launch the 2013 Elizabethan season. 

The second production is David Farr’s THE HEART OF ROBIN HOOD, a witty revisionist version that premiered last year at the Royal Shakespeare Company to rave reviews. Putting Marian at the center of the action, this piece of family-friendly swashbuckling entertainment includes some nasty villains who commit truly foul deeds, as well as heroic, lovable and comic characters trying to survive in a world of economic injustice. This U.S. premiere will be directed by Joel Sass, an innovative Twin Cities director and winner of Theatre Communication Group’s 2007 Alan Schneider Award honoring an outstanding freelance director. 

The final show to open outside is Shakespeare’s hit comedy A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, also directed by Christopher Liam Moore (Dead Man’s Cell Phone, August: Osage County), who will bring his ingenious, theatrical imaginings to this production. MIDSUMMER was last produced outside in 2003 (indoors in 2008), and its tales of lovers, fairies and working class actors ignite artists’ and audience’s imaginations with each new production. According to Artistic Director Rauch, “a new rendition of what is arguably Shakespeare’s most perfectly balanced and exquisite pieces of writing, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM is the ideal final piece of the puzzle in this 2013 season that celebrates the Festival’s core classical commitment, including a few new classics of tomorrow.”

The 2013 season will begin previews on February 15 and open the weekend of February 22-24.  The previews for performances on the Elizabethan Stage will begin June 4 and opening weekend is June 14-16. The season will run through November 3.