introducing the 2015 season - Oregon Shakespeare Festival

prologue
magazine for members fall 2014
Inside
American Revolutions
Commissions
Lynn Nottage:
When the Jobs Leave Town
Stan Lai: Utopia,
Martial Law and
Chinese History
introducing the 2015 season
1
2015 Season
Angus Bowmer Theatre
Much Ado about Nothing
William Shakespeare
Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz
Guys and Dolls
Music and lyrics by Frank Loesser;
book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows
Directed by Mary Zimmerman
Fingersmith World Premiere
Adapted by Alexa Junge
from the book by Sarah Waters
Directed by Bill Rauch
Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land U.S. Premiere
Stan Lai
Directed by Stan Lai
Sweat World Premiere, American Revolutions
A co-commission with Arena Stage
Lynn Nottage
Directed by Kate Whoriskey
Thomas Theatre
Pericles
William Shakespeare
Directed by Joseph Haj
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Christopher Liam Moore
The Happiest Song Plays Last
Quiara Alegría Hudes
Directed by Shishir Kurup
Allen Elizabethan Theatre
Antony and Cleopatra
William Shakespeare
Directed by Bill Rauch
Head Over Heels World Premiere
Script by Jeff Whitty;
music and lyrics by the Go-Go’s
Directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas,
adapted by Charles Fechter
Directed by Marcela Lorca
Prologue
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s
magazine for members
Fall 2014
Editor
Catherine Foster
Design
Craig Stewart
Contributing Writers
Catherine Foster, Senior Editor
Judith Rosen, Freelance Writer and Dramaturg
Eddie Wallace, Membership and Sales Manager
Rob Weinert-Kendt, Freelance Writer
Mark Dundas Wood, Freelance Writer
Production Associate
Beth Bardossi
Proofreaders
Pat Brewer
Amy Miller
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Artistic Director: Bill Rauch
Executive Director: Cynthia Rider
P.O. Box 158
Ashland, OR 97520
Administration 541-482-2111
Box Office/Membership 800-219-8161;
541-482-4331
Box Office/Membership fax 541-482-8045
Membership email:
membership@osfashland.org
www.osfashland.org
Mission Statement
Inspired by Shakespeare’s work
and the cultural richness of the
United States, we reveal our
collective humanity through
illuminating interpretations
of new and classic plays,
deepened by the kaleidoscope
of rotating repertory.
2015 opening weekend:
February 27–March 1.
©2014 Oregon Shakespeare Festival
2
Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Contents
4
Voices of Revolution
American Revolutions uses a
multitude of voices to tell America’s
story onstage—and it’s showing
the theatre world that it’s possible
to dream big.
By Catherine Foster
8
When the Jobs Leave Town
Lynn Nottage’s latest play takes
a searing look at the de-industrial
revolution in a struggling town.
By Catherine Foster
10 Utopia and Martial Law Onstage
How a crazy theatrical combo of a
farce and a tragedy became one of
the best-known plays in the
modern Chinese language.
By Stan Lai
12 The Musical Travels of Pericles
Like Pericles, composer Jack
Herrick’s score will take a journey
from folksy to techno, with a little
Celtic thrown in.
By Rob Weinert-Kendt
13 A Victorian Play with a Modern Heart
Alexa Junge’s challenge in adapting
Fingersmith was to trim down the
huge book while still staying true
to the characters’ needs and wants.
By Judith Rosen
From the Membership and Sales Manager
Eddie Wallace
Still Risking
Welcome to the upcoming 2015 season, the 80th anniversary of the Oregon Shakespeare
Festival!
With every anniversary, we remember our founder, Angus Bowmer, and what a creative
and bold risk-taker he was. “Gus” was brave and ambitious enough to envision a
Shakespeare festival in a small Southern Oregon town that could, in time, become a
treasured cultural destination for theatre lovers from all over the country. One also
wonders about the resistance he encountered when he presented OSF’s first nonShakespeare plays. (For you history buffs, it was You Can’t Take It with You in 1939 at
the Holly Theatre in Medford.) No doubt more than a few letters crossed his desk
complaining that he’d lost his way.
That sense of risk and opportunity continues to inform our work today. No one could
have known when Bill Rauch and Alison Carey announced the American Revolutions:
the U.S. History Cycle commissioning project in 2008 that one of its early successes,
Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way, would go on to win the first Tony Award for Best Play
in OSF’s history.
14 Wishes Do Come True . . .
Director Mary Zimmerman,
used to transforming ancient tales,
now takes on Guys and Dolls—
a different kind of enchantment.
By Mark Dundas Wood
In the 2015 season, we’ll be inspired by stories of people who risk it all with no hope of
knowing the outcome. It may be the risk of truly exposing oneself to the possibility of
love, as we see with Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing, Sky Masterson
and Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls and the young lovers of Fingersmith and Head Over
Heels. Risk proves tragic for the title characters in Antony and Cleopatra, while a broken
family finds that love is not enough to save them in Long Day’s Journey into Night.
15 Shake Your Booty
Head Over Heels is an exuberant
new musical mash-up that
expresses director Ed Sylvanus
Iskandar’s motto: “Where the play
is the party.”
By Eddie Wallace
Edmund Dantès risks his life to avenge his false imprisonment in The Count of Monte
Cristo. The title character of Pericles travels the world to simply survive and protect
the lives of those he loves. Yazmin risks opening her home to her Philadelphia
neighborhood residents, and opening her heart to a lover, in The Happiest Song Plays
Last. The characters in Sweat and Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land find that the violent
fluctuations of the worlds around them force them into actions that will alter their
lives forever.
Thank you for your support, your generosity and your willingness to travel with us on the
perilous, hilarious, tuneful, thrilling and tragic adventures of the 2015 season. Let us be
inspired to be brave, adventurous and bold in our own journeys.
This Prologue is printed on recycled paper.
All photos by Jenny Graham
unless otherwise credited.
3
American Night (2010): René Millán and Stephanie Beatriz
American Revolutions uses a multitude of voices to
tell America’s story onstage—and it’s showing the
theatre world that it’s possible to dream big.
By Catherine Foster
A
merican Revolutions: the United States History Cycle is
making waves. Big ones.
Since 2008, OSF’s ambitious 10-year program of commissioning
37 plays (the same number in OSF’s Shakespeare canon) has
made two dozen commissions. OSF has produced five of them:
American Night (by Richard Montoya and Culture Clash, 2010),
Ghost Light (Tony Taccone, with Jonathan Moscone, 2011), Party
People (UNIVERSES, 2012), All the Way (Robert Schenkkan, 2012)
Caption caption caption
and The Liquid Plain (Naomi Wallace, 2013). Lynn Nottage’s Sweat
will run in 2015.
The Liquid Plain (2013): June Carryl and Kimberly Scott
then a limited four-month engagement on Broadway this year.
It was a huge success, winning numerous awards, including
Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Actor, and recouping its $3.9
million investment just days after its 100th performance. It made
history by breaking all box office records for a straight (nonmusical) play on Broadway.
Not bad for a dream
In 2006, Bill Rauch was sitting in his house in Los Angeles,
contemplating what he might do as OSF’s new artistic director,
were he lucky enough to get the job. He wondered, what would
Shakespeare do?
And the regional theatre world is paying attention. American
Night has had four productions around the country. Ghost Light
played at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2012 and Party People
will run there this fall. The Liquid Plain is scheduled for OffBroadway’s Signature Theatre next spring.
“Shakespeare addressed the anxieties of his age—about who
would replace the childless monarch, Elizabeth—by dramatizing
past episodes of the transfer of power in his country’s history,”
Rauch says. “How could we address the anxieties of our age
and create new paths to the future by dramatizing moments
of change in our own country’s history? The United States was
started by an act of revolution. What are the other moments of
explicit or implicit revolution that we need to remind ourselves
of as we continue to engage in the difficult and beautiful experiment that is our nation?”
But perhaps the most heralded of all is All the Way, which is OSF’s
first appearance on Broadway. Bill Rauch directed the play, with
a different cast that starred Bryan Cranston, for its pre-Broadway
tryout at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge and
At the time, he and Alison Carey were working at Cornerstone
Theater Company, which they’d co-founded in 1986. Rauch and
Carey were used to bringing together different groups of people
to have conversations about big topics, like faith, and then
4
Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Ghost Light (2011): Tyler James Myers
writing plays from what emerged from those conversations. So
this felt like a logical next step. They had many conversations
with artists, historians, producers and OSF audiences about the
program’s shape and design. Others told them that producing
historical plays—which by definition require a lot of exposition—
can be challenging. Rauch found, however, that “most people
loved the idea from the get-go.”
“The only thing that matters is that we
get good plays.”
— Alison Carey
When Rauch was hired at OSF, Carey came up from LA to
establish American Revolutions. In the early days of determining
a thematic structure for the program, the idea of setting one
play during the term of each president was first explored, then
discarded. So was the idea of one play for each decade. They
found that whenever they tried to make the assignment too
specific, playwrights tended to write to those exact parameters,
rather than about what moved them. The call to writers became
something both specific and loose: Write about a moment of
change in American history.
“The only thing that matters is that we get good plays,” says
Carey. “We came up with a frame that left the decision-making
about what the art should be to the playwright. They could
follow their passions. And that has seemed to work.”
Party People (2012): Steven Sapp
In conceiving the program, however, Carey left room for OSF
to gently steer writers to areas of special interest to the
company. This year’s class will be writing three of these focused
commissions: Dominique Morisseau about African Americans
during the Civil War; Dan O’Brien about Americans’ relationship
with guns; and an as-yet-unnamed writer on how the choices we
have made in the past affected our natural world.
In 2010, Carey hired Julie Felise Dubiner, a dramaturg with a
degree in history and knowledge of the regional theatre world
as associate director. Dubiner says she doesn’t know any other
program in the country that is as large as OSF’s, or as successful.
“I think part of the reason why we are getting more producible
plays out of our program,” Dubiner says, “is because we are
directing passion instead of just saying, ‘Go off and write
something and tell me how it worked out for you.’ The writers
we’ve had so far have really cottoned to that idea and built on it
in magnificent ways.”
What do they look for in choosing writers? Diversity of style, life
experience, subject matter and voice. “We look for people who
seem comfortable in delivering exposition, because it’s hard,”
says Carey. “Generally, a lot of our writers have already written
plays about history, like Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel, 2006,
and Ruined, 2010). Or you look at someone like Quiara Alegría
Hudes (Water by the Spoonful, 2014; The Happiest Song Plays Last,
2015), who has not written a lot of strictly history plays, but she
has a specific voice and such a very specific storytelling style
that you can imagine her doing it easily.”
5
All the Way (2012): President Lyndon Johnson (Jack Willis) gives Sen. Hubert
Humphrey (Peter Frechette) the legendary “Johnson treatment.”
Supporting writers
OSF gives playwrights as much time as they need to write their
plays and provides a variety of support. “Some say, ‘I want to
come here for two weeks and just sit in the apartment and look
at the trees,’ and we can do that,” says Carey. “Rhiana Yazzie
was sent on a research trip to Virginia and Massachusetts,
because that’s what she needed. UNIVERSES toured the country
interviewing surviving members of the Black Panthers and Young
Lords. Lisa Loomer spent some time at the University of Texas
because it connected with the content of her play.”
Writers are also allowed to have as large a cast as they need for
their play—something unheard of in regional theatre. “I think a
lot of playwrights, especially the younger ones, will probably tell
you that in recent years they have had plays passed on that were
more than five people, more than four people, more than three
people,” says Dubiner. “So for us to specifically commission them
and say, 9 doesn’t scare us, or 17 is possible, is really inspiring to
the artists.”
6
All the playwrights so far have had a relationship with either a
professional historian or somebody knowledgeable about the
historical period they’re writing about. Naomi Wallace used two
for The Liquid Plain. “Working with such brilliant historians as
Marcus Rediker and Robin D. G. Kelley was invaluable for me in
my writing process. Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History
contains a story about a murder that becomes central to my
play. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
was inspirational in thinking about how our limited democratic
processes have been dreamed into something more truly just by
people who have the least.”
American Revolutions also provides an annual retreat, American
Conversations, that usually convenes in New York. Playwrights
who’ve already had their work produced at OSF can enlighten the
newcomers. Writers are also encouraged to visit Ashland and see
shows and meet the company. Being on the OSF campus helps
the artists learn more about what makes the company tick, see
the shows in rep and meet as many people as possible before
they start writing.
Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival
“I think it helps that the playwrights are able to really talk to
one another and have a joint sense of ownership of the program
and to take care of each other as they go through the process of
meeting an institution as specific as OSF,” says Carey.
When the play is fairly far along, it’s given a workshop. OSF
supplies actors, dramaturgs, rehearsal time and theatre space to
bring the script to the next level.
The playwrights acknowledge the benefits of American
Revolutions’ largesse. “I’ve now been working with OSF and Bill
for a decade,” says Robert Schenkkan. “I remain so appreciative of
this relationship and so grateful to the staff and the artists and
the audience and the Board of OSF that has made this possible.
It’s hard to see how this work would have happened otherwise.”
“We are going to encounter plays that
we love that we cannot produce. But
if they have other artistic homes, then
that’s great.”
—Alison Carey
Lynn Nottage says she doesn’t think she ever would have taken
the journey of exploring the lives of laid-off industrial workers in
Pennsylvania if she hadn’t had the commission for Sweat. “Alison
Carey has been integral to that process,” she says. “She’s been a
wonderful presence and dramaturg and producer of the project
from its inception. American Revolutions gave me the frame to
really pursue this story.”
Co-commissions and co-productions
From the beginning, the design of the program was to involve
other theatres, says Carey. “We know we cannot produce 37 plays
in a timely fashion. And we have no desire to take someone’s
beautiful play and stick it in a drawer in case we can fit it in five
years from now. We are going to encounter plays that we love
that we cannot produce. But if they have other artistic homes,
then that’s great.”
Sweat is a co-commission with Arena Stage. The March, by
Frank Galati (adapted from the novel by E. L. Doctorow), was a
co-commission with Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago,
which premiered it in 2012. When another theatre decides to
co-commission a play, OSF pays the entire commission cost and
the co-commissioning theatre pays for the development that
happens within its walls. Different rules apply if the play is a
co-production.“The March was not a co-production,” Carey says,
“so we did not contribute to the production. Whereas when we did
Ghost Light, we commissioned it and did all the development, then
it became a co-production between us and Berkeley Rep later.”
together many of the great scholars of this time period. OSF and
Penumbra are jointly sponsoring a symposium.”
For the two LBJ plays, OSF commissioned All the Way and
Seattle Repertory Theatre, with which Robert Schenkkan has
a relationship, commissioned The Great Society. Seattle Rep is
co-producing both plays, which will run in repertory there—
All The Way from November 14 to January 4, 2015, and The Great
Society from December 5 to January 4, 2015. Bill Rauch will
direct both.
Funding
As the saying goes, “none of this would have been possible
without the support of. . .” That American Revolutions exists at all
is one of those strokes of amazing theatre luck. Soon after OSF
submitted the initial grant application to The Collins Foundation
in late 2007, the global financial meltdown struck. OSF did get
its funding, Carey says, but if The Collins Foundation had waited
even a month, “American Revolutions simply would not have
happened. Every foundation in America was dramatically cut.”
Since then, numerous funders have stepped up to support this
endeavor, including The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the
Edgerton Foundation’s 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 New Play Awards;
The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation; National Endowment for
the Arts; New England Foundation for the Arts; The Kinsman
Foundation and The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust.
(For a complete list, please visit
www://osfashland.org/american-revolutions)
“American Revolutions is groundbreaking theatre and an
important addition to the American repertoire of plays,” says
Dr. Brad Edgerton, president of the Edgerton Foundation. “The
Edgerton Foundation is proud to have supported four of the
productions, and we commend OSF for continuing to produce
world premiere plays in these trying economic times.”
“We’re a very stable program at this point,” says Carey. “I can see
us needing to expand just because of the number of plays we
have to support, but so far, it’s good.”
She marvels at the program’s success. “A straight play about
American political and legislative history was on Broadway,
setting a record for highest ticket sales for a new play in its last
week and outselling the musicals. It’s fantastic! This is a play that
reminds audiences of what people are capable of in this world;
that change is possible, that progress is the legacy of the best
part of our country. And it says to people—theatre people and
not—you can do this. This is what we are capable of as a field, so
don’t back down and don’t stop imagining, and don’t make your
world smaller, because you can make it really big. That’s what all
American Revolutions plays, and the program itself, can do.”
The playwrights can choose which theatres to be co-commission
partners. Dominique Morisseau, for example, has a relationship
with the Penumbra Theatre, in St. Paul, so OSF approached
Penumbra’s co-director Lou Bellamy to co-produce her play.
“This topic [African Americans in the Civil War] is one of the
great passions of Lou’s life,” Carey says, “and he is bringing
7
When the Jobs
Leave Town
city that symbolized what was happening in America, a city that
had gone from industrial powerhouse to abject poverty. That city,
she found, was Reading, Pennsylvania, the home of the Reading
Railroad, once one of the most powerful railroads in
the country.
Lynn Nottage’s latest play takes a searing look at the
de-industrial revolution in a struggling town.
By Catherine Foster
S
weat, an American Revolutions commission, got its start with
a late-night email from Lynn Nottage’s close friend, a single
mother of two.
“She said she was completely broke; she was having a very
difficult time making ends meet and had reached a level of
desperation,” Nottage recounts in an interview at OSF. Her friend
wasn’t asking for a handout, but said she wanted her close
friends to understand her circumstances. “ ‘I just need some
guidance. I need a shoulder to lean on just because I’m going
through a very, very hard time.’ ”
The email broke Nottage’s heart. “I’d known this woman
extremely well, and I had no idea the depths of her despair.
She lives two doors down from me, and it made me realize that
probably most of us are living two to three doors away from
someone who is either in poverty or on the verge of poverty,
and that’s the nature of the culture we’re living in right now.”
The Occupy Wall Street movement was just beginning. “We had
no sense of what this was. All we knew was that there were
these people in Zuccotti Park sitting there and saying, ‘99 percent
of us are suffering while the 1 percent are continuing to get
richer and richer.’ So my friend said, ‘Let’s go over there.’ ”
The two walked in circles and chanted. Later, her friend said,
“I actually feel a little better. Nothing has happened, but I feel
better to know that at least there is a voice to what I’m feeling,
and I’m not by myself.”
The collapse of Reading
The incident prompted Nottage to think deeply about how
poverty was shifting the American narrative that hard work
is all it takes to become successful. She wanted to write about a
8
“I think we’re undergoing one of the greatest revolutions in our
history,” she says. “In 50 years we’ll look back on this time and
understand that fully.”
Reading began to go through a precipitous decline in the 1970s,
which began with the collapse of the railroad. In the mid-’80s,
several key sectors in manufacturing began to falter. In the
1990s and early 2000s, in the wake of the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the steel and textile industries began
to significantly erode and jobs were sent overseas. States also
started to adopt “right-to-work” laws that inhibited union power.
Currently, 40 percent of the people in Reading live below the
poverty line, which is considerably above the national average. It
has a 50 percent high school graduation rate. Though the city is
beginning to see some economic growth, the 2011 census singled
out Reading as “the poorest city in America.”
“I wanted to find out how could this happen so quickly,”
Nottage said. “And how could the revolution I’m looking at—the
de-industrial revolution—change America so absolutely that you
have people stuck in the towns, trapped, simply because they
don’t even have enough money to move.”
Nottage began visiting Reading in early 2012. With assistant
Travis Ballenger and an army of interns, she conducted a wide
range of interviews over two years, starting with Reading’s first
African-American mayor, who had been recently elected. Then
they included the police department, the United Way and people
living in shelters. They spoke to a dozen workers at union offices
and found more on the picket sites. “I think workers just want to
go on record to say that there are so many folks like them who
are struggling,” she says, “and the fact that anyone is willing to
listen gives them a sense of hope.”
She was most touched by a session with some workers who had
been locked out of their factory for 93 weeks. “They were largely
middle-aged men who had been working up to 40 years. It was
their entire identity. They were making metal tubing. When they
were 18 or 19 years old, they began probably at minimum wage,
and in some cases had worked themselves up to $45 an hour.”
Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Then, one Monday, the men arrived to find half the equipment had been shipped out
overnight. In that moment, half those jobs were gone. It soon got worse. Management
slashed workers’ pay to $15 an hour, cut benefit packages and increased work days. Even
that wasn’t enough: Management locked them out. The workers picketed for 93 weeks,
knowing they would never set foot back into that plant but determined to make a
symbolic gesture. “I was really quite moved,” Nottage recalls, “because these are people—
white, middle-class, blue-collar men—who had traditionally been on the opposite side of
the divide from me, this African-American artist living in Brooklyn, and I thought, for the
first time, we’re standing eye to eye. They understood what it meant to be marginalized
by your own culture. They spoke quite compassionately about their fellow workers and
eloquently about their situations and about directions they felt America should be going.”
“I know it’s not a new story, but I feel like it is very much
the narrative of today.”
—Lynn Nottage
When the workers stayed on strike, management brought in replacement workers—
young Latinos and men from the surrounding counties who for years had wanted to
get hired but were shut out because of the union and nepotism. The deal those workers
got was even worse: no contracts, no benefits. “They can work these guys to death for
six months and then say ‘Bye-bye,’ ” Nottage says. “It’s really cruel out there, what these
factories are doing.”
Severed friendships
Those events are mirrored in Sweat. A group of longtime co-workers and friends meet
in a bar to complain, rant and commiserate about the rapidly declining situation in the
factory. Because of the strike, Oscar, the bar’s Dominican busboy, has an opportunity to
finally work at the plant—as a scab. For him, it’s an immigrant’s dream of getting ahead.
But the locals who have been working at the plant for so long regard his crossing the
picket line as tantamount to treason, and the tension spreads to violence.
“I know it’s not a new story, but I feel like it is very much the narrative of today,” Nottage
says. “It’s not just the narrative of steelworkers, it’s the narrative of people in white-collar
jobs, who had this assumption that they had taken all the necessary steps to assure their
job security, and then one day they wake up and everything they know is gone. I know
many people like that. We live with a level of uncertainty in America that we haven’t
known, at least in my lifetime.”
In the world of Sweat, the co-workers are a racial mix of black, white and Latino. “I’m just
representing what I saw,” Nottage says. “In Reading, there are people who have worked
in those factories who had relationships and friendships that crossed color lines. The play
isn’t about race, but the conversation isn’t absent. It’s part of the subtext of the piece.
But it is a play about class.”
Nottage’s last play for OSF was Ruined, in 2010, which was based on interviews with
Congolese women in refugee camps who had been raped during ongoing military
conflicts. A play with that subject matter could have been a grim slog to sit through,
but Ruined was leavened with humor, humanity and hope and has since gone on to be
performed around the country.
“What I’m trying to do is get at the heart of the story, because as a playwright I’m
interested in healing,” she says. “I hope when you leave my plays, somehow the spirit has
gone through some subtle transformation. I think it’s true of Ruined. I think it’s true of
Intimate Apparel (2006). There’s a spiritual alchemy that goes on, that when you leave,
you’re not quite sure what you’ve experienced, but you have a different relationship to
the community.”
Creating Social Sculpture
“When we were interviewing people
in Reading, I began to feel like a carpetbagger who was feeding off their
misery and then leaving and capitalizing on it. It’s not going to do the economically strapped city a lot of good if I
create a piece of work that talks about
them from a distance, but doesn’t
directly engage the community. So, we
came up with this idea of doing a social
sculpture—a piece of performance art
that combines activism, community
and art, something that can live in the
heart of Reading. It will be a piece of
art that puts the people who most
need to be in dialogue into the same
space. This way they can directly experience and explore what’s happening
to their neighbors in a visceral way.
Reading is a fragmented city with
a great racial and economic divide;
people live in close proximity, but
in very different communities. We
thought, what if we can create this
installation that invites people into the
same space so that they can bear witness to what’s happening to the entire
town and recognize that their narrative
is a communal one, not just about their
small insular community but about
a larger Reading community that is
collectively experiencing the impact of
the economic downturn.
In October, we’re going to bring a
creative team to Reading for four days,
where we will collaborate with the
community, and begin to discuss how
to create a piece of art that not only
reflects community, but is also a vital
part of the community. We’re hoping
we can build a model for art-making
that you can then be used in other cities, where we invite a team of diverse
filmmakers, visual artists, theatre
artists and trans-media artists to immerse themselves in a community and
then create a collaborative piece of art
that helps bring the community into
dialogue.
The goal is to leave the city with this
piece of art that would continue to exist and reflect the story of the community as it evolves. Reading still thinks
of itself in the past tense, and we very
much want to help the community find
a present-tense narrative.”
9
—Lynn Nottage
Li Yan
Utopia and Martial Law
Onstage
How a crazy theatrical combo of a farce and a tragedy became
one of the best-known plays in the modern Chinese language.
P
rominent Taiwanese director and playwright Stan Lai wrote
Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land for his theatre company in
1986. In the play, the casts of two very different plays accidentally
show up on the same stage for their dress rehearsals. One, Secret
Love, is a tragedy set in 1949 and the 1980s, and the other, The
Peach Blossom Land, a farcical historical play. Lai recently came
to OSF to talk about his play, which he will also direct. An edited
transcript of that discussion follows.
The history of the production
Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land was the second play of our
then-new theatre group, Performance Workshop, which will be
30 years old next year. Many people call our group the catalyst for
modern theatre in Taiwan, which also makes it a catalyst for all of
Chinese-speaking theatre. The first play we did we thought was
a highly experimental two-man show about a dying tradition of
stand-up comedy in Chinese, but it turned out to be a hit. The
audiotape of that performance sold 2 million copies in Taiwan,
which only had 20 million people. Immediately, our theatre group
was on the map.
In 1986, we came up with Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. The
inspiration for writing this play came when we were attending
the dress rehearsal with a friend who was an avant-garde theatre
artist. She was trying to finish her dress rehearsal at about 5:00
in the afternoon. Suddenly, we saw these people who weren’t
part of her cast come onstage and go about their business. They
moved the piano on and put up a banner that announced the
10
Blossom (Xie Na), Tao (Yu Entai) and Master Yuan (He Jiong) in the 2006
Beijing production, directed by Stan Lai.
graduation ceremony of some kindergarten! We’re sitting in the
audience, wondering what is going on, and our friend is going
nuts on the stage. She is shouting, “This place is mine, this is my
time.” The parents and kids start coming in and we are watching
all of this. This is what happened and still can happen in our part
of the world.
If you had asked me in 1986 if we would still be doing this play
in 2014, I would say, “You’re crazy!” The play has endured, and
through many quirks of history it has become probably the
best-known play in the modern Chinese language. We toured it
in America in Mandarin Chinese in 1991. In 1992, we made a film
with that cast and added a Mandarin film superstar so that the
film crossed over into popular culture. The one copy of that film
was shown at a film festival in China. Many of my friends from
China, like movie stars, etc., saw the film through that print. The
Chinese government confiscated our print, but then somehow it
was shown, and everybody made videos of it and distributed it
everywhere and people bought them. It was like an underground
thing to be able to see Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land in China
in the 1990s.
For almost 30 years now, people have been performing this play.
The film version has been going around everywhere. We started
performing in China in 2006 with some known stars in the cast
who loved the play and wanted to do it. That production is still
being performed. Every year, we come together to do a 10-city
tour of it. In Taiwan, it has iconic status.
Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival
My parents and the parents of all of our
cast went through 1949, which is for
Chinese people in Taiwan deeply affecting, hugely significant. About two million
people—including my father, who was a
diplomat—crossed the Taiwan Straits in
that year to run away from the war, which,
basically, they lost. The slogans were:
“We’re going to have a military maneuver
and the U.S. is going to help us fight back
and we are going to take over because
we need to drive out the Commies.” Of
course, it never happened and those
people got old.
The story of Secret Love is like a lot of
stories that I know from my father’s
generation. Families and lovers who were
separated in 1949 didn’t get to see each
other for the rest of their lives, or until
1986, when people started saying, “The
two sides aren’t talking and what the
hell, I am going to go back myself.” This is
something very difficult for an Ashland
audience to understand. You couldn’t call,
and a letter would never be delivered. You
just didn’t know what happened to your
family or loved ones. In 1988, Taiwan lifted
martial law and people could officially
start traveling from China to Taiwan. To
this day, I can leave my home at 7 in the
morning and be in Shanghai rehearsing
with actors at 10. It has been a long journey, but we are here now.
The second thing you should know is that
A Chronicle of the Peach Blossom Spring is
one of the most famous pieces of classical
Chinese literature. It is a beautiful short
piece written more than 1,000 years ago
by the poet Tao Yuanming. Tao wrote
about a fisherman who finds this idyllic
land. The residents there tell him not to
Tsai Cheng-tai
The story behind the play
We wrote it at a very delicate time in our
history when martial law had not been
lifted. I often think, what does a foreign
audience need to know to be able to
understand this play? When I made the
film, which went around to international
film festivals, I had two pieces of introduction at the top of the show. One of them
explained 1949. This is when the Chinese
civil war ended and the Communists took
over China and the Nationalists moved
to the island of Taiwan. If you don’t know
that, the play doesn’t mean that much.
let anyone know about their place. Of
course, he does. Then people all go to look
for it, and they can’t find it. All of us in
Taiwan and China memorized this piece as
schoolkids. When I was thinking about using it in Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land,
I revisited it for the first time since junior
high school. You can memorize it, but you
don’t see the nuances until you grow up. I
was questioning what actually is “utopia”
and what is so special about Peach Blossom Land. The way the poet describes it is
that it is very normal—with fields, chickens and dogs. The people were refugees
from a previous war centuries before
they came into this place. The fisherman
tells them stories of this dynasty and
that one and they sigh, “Wow, so much
has happened that we don’t know.” To
me, to say that utopia is no knowledge
of history, that is a pretty scathing representation of Chinese history, which was
brutal 1,000 years ago and more brutal
today.
On mixing comedy and tragedy
Shakespeare was the master at putting
comedy and tragedy together. That’s why
I thought if I had a chance I would try to
put a comedy and a tragedy onstage at
the same time and see what happens. I
would not have ever written just Secret
Love. That would be a very corny, sentimental sort of thing. With a comedy or
farce next to it, you have a frame that is
interesting for our times, which were very
disjointed. Our experience in Taiwan was a
time of modernizing buildings, arts and
theatre. You are seeing the city rebuilt into
Yun (Brigette Lin) and Jiang (Chin Shi-chieh) in the 1992 film
version of The Peach Blossom Land.
Stan Lai
high-rises, and you are losing all of
these things you don’t even know about.
For this production, we’ve changed the
location to Ashland. The in-joke among
us would be that the Peach Blossom Land
actors weren’t supposed to go to the Bowmer but maybe they were supposed to be
part of the Green Show or something like
that. The premise is that the Secret Love
director has been commissioned by OSF to
do this semi-autobiographical work about
himself and he is given a mixed-race cast,
which he doesn’t know how to handle. He
thinks everyone should be Asian. These
are the things we are adapting to the
environment here.
11
The Musical Travels
of Pericles
Like Pericles, composer Jack Herrick’s score will take a journey from folksy to techno, with a little Celtic thrown in.
By Rob Weinert-Kendt
A
casual theatregoer wandering into a production of
Shakespeare’s Pericles without a playbill or prior knowledge
might think it was a forgotten Homeric epic. That’s not too far off:
Shakespeare harked back to the Greeks with this fantastical
picaresque narrated by a chorus. And the best productions of
Pericles make a case for it as a kind of timeless epic theatre that
echoes down through the centuries, to the beginning of storytelling and song, and right back up to the present.
Director Joseph Haj’s upcoming production of Pericles, which opens in the Thomas Theatre in late February, brings its own
history with it. It will be partly based on a
2008 staging Haj did at PlayMakers
Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, North
Carolina, where he’s producing artistic
director. The OSF production will have
a new cast and some new designers,
but Haj plans to bring along a few key
PlayMakers associates to help recreate
their original vision: scenic designer Jan
Chambers, video designer Francesca
Talenti and, perhaps most significantly,
composer Jack Herrick, who is refashioning his earthy/ethereal score for the new
production.
Herrick will be on hand through most of the rehearsal process,
as his score is no mere press-play prerecorded underscoring but
a song-heavy and very present character in the staging. Indeed,
Herrick himself performed the score live in the North Carolina
run, along with some cast members as singers and instrumentalists. Part of his job in the coming rehearsal/re-composing process
will be to teach the score to an onstage musician and some
cast members.
“About 50 percent of the previous score we really like, and the
rest we’ll work on,” Herrick says. “We tend to want to increase the
amount of music in it; we’ve even given some thought to making
it a musical, but I guess we backed up to a ‘playsical’—a play
with songs.”
Those songs include settings of the opening invocation and other
bits of narration by Gower, the play’s conveniently omniscient
chorus, as well as an interpolated Shakespeare sonnet and a
12
fisherman’s chanty with lyrics that are largely Herrick’s invention.
“I grazed freely over the material,” says Herrick, who has done
scores for Haj’s Hamlet at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and who, with his old-time string band the Red Clay
Ramblers, has scored shows by Sam Shepard and Bill Irwin.
A play made for song
Pericles all but mandates a musical element: Its opening words
are “To sing a song that old was sung.” For Haj, this framing
suggested “the troubadour tradition, the
Homeric tradition, a folk tradition. The
sea is in the ears of all the characters in
this play.” Though the play’s action spans
the Mediterranean, with the title character hurled over decades from Antioch to
North Africa and back, and the play’s visual design evokes a “pan-Mediterranean
style,” Haj says. “What didn’t seem right
to Jack and me was to make some pseudoMediterranean soundtrack.”
Indeed, Herrick’s Pericles score, he says,
ended up “fairly eclectic, somewhat folksy,
somewhat techno,” employing sampled
music alongside live instruments. His own
deep background in Americana and AppaJack Herrick
lachian folk surfaces in some Celtic-sounding passages. Explains Herrick, “Those styles are perfectly modern
and current, but they sound antique—or at least emotionally take
us back through the years.”
This suggestive, non-exotic approach fits with Haj’s mandate.
“We leaned rather intentionally away from anything that felt
heroic or chivalric,” Haj says, instead interpreting the wild, Odyssean journey of the title character as the story of “an Everyman,
an ordinary person, trying to move his way through a life.”
Though Herrick says he much prefers the specificity and purpose
of writing music for the theatre as opposed to “just writing a
song,” not every marriage of theatre and music is foreordained.
“You can’t just take a play and throw the band onstage,” he says.
“You have to have a reason. But with Pericles, it’s a no-brainer.”
Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival
A Victorian Play with a
Modern Heart
Alexa Junge’s challenge in adapting Fingersmith was to trim down the huge book while still staying true to the
characters’ needs and wants.
By Judith Rosen
riter Alexa Junge picked up Fingersmith when a friend recommended it and then—propelled into its startling, vivid
world of Victorian con artists and thieves—barely put it down
until its 500 pages were done.
She knew right away that she had to turn Sarah Waters’ Man
Booker Prize–nominated novel into a play. The stage version of
Fingersmith will have its world premiere at OSF in 2015.
“The characters were so alive,
I could see them and hear them
all speak,” Junge said during a
recent interview at OSF. “Their
needs were urgent, life or death.
And the many different points
of view, so mesmerizing in the
book, felt innately theatrical.
Every scene felt like a seduction.”
Adapting a book that betrays
as well as seduces, and contains
several dramatic plot twists was
a challenge that she delighted
in. Not only are we being told a
story, we’re being directly spoken
to by the characters, so that we
think we’re part of that story. We have to shift our thinking and
shift our hearts, but we can’t disengage; the characters are standing there in front of us, working to win us to their perspective.
They need us. They live and breathe because we’re there. And as
we give to them and the story, we take from them in turn.”
Junge delighted in making the story’s romance part of this active
engagement. Seeing a forbidden love grow opens our eyes to lives
we don’t know we’ve been blind to, she says. “Waters reclaimed
the Victorian novel by creating a narrative within it that could
never exist in its day. Now I get to make theatrically present
something that was forbidden, unnamed, while still being true
to the time and the roles people had to play. You may think you
know what this story is, but you don’t. It’s much more interesting
than you think. It’s much more complicated as well.”
First, you cut. But what?
After pitching her project to OSF and getting stage rights to the
book, Junge faced her first creative hurdle in deciding what to
cut. “That’s any adapter’s dilemma,” she notes: “How do I want
to spend my time on the stage? What scenes do I want to see?
Can I serve the plot as it is, or do I have to simplify?” Fingersmith,
with its intricate, twisting story and its large cast of characters,
posed a particular challenge.
Elisabeth Caren
W
Alexa Junge
significant beats in the action.”
She wondered briefly if she
could do what the Royal
Shakespeare Company did with
Nicholas Nickleby in 1980:
capture the work’s richness in a
massive, six-hour, two-day
production. She gave up that
idea quickly; “Everyone I
proposed it to blanched.”
Instead she set priorities by
focusing first on the emotional
needs of the characters. “When
I write, I have to connect emotionally with each character’s
story, to feel its every beat,”
she says. “Then I focus on the
She was aware that staying true to the novel—its spirit and
aims—might mean changing it. “You can’t sit with characters for
ages, the way you can do in the book,” says Junge. “So to articulate their stories, you sometimes have to reframe them in a way
that an audience can more immediately understand and feel.”
But as she built in or fleshed out motivations for selected characters, she aimed to make them an outgrowth of what was in
the book, not a wholesale change. She saw signs that she was on
the right track when, watching auditions, she couldn’t remember
whether the scene being read was in the book or not.
“It’s that thing an adaptation does,” she says. “It’s different, but
it feels of a piece with the original work and its world. It keeps
essential what’s essential, but it also makes the work new.”
13
Do Come True...
Director Mary Zimmerman, used to transforming ancient tales, now takes on Guys and Dolls—
a different kind of enchantment.
By Mark Dundas Wood
U
rban missionary Sarah Brown from Guys and Dolls—the
1950 musical based on stories by Damon Runyon—believes
steadfastly that true love is out there, fated for her, and that
she’ll recognize her white knight instantly when he arrives. “I’ll
know when my love comes along . . .” she sings. “I’ll know, as I run
to his arms, that at last I’ve come home safe and sound.”
The sentiments of Frank Loesser’s song “I’ll
Know” are nearly interchangeable with
those in ballads written for Walt Disney’s
Snow White (“Someday my prince will come
. . .”) and Sleeping Beauty (“I know you! I
walked with you once upon a dream. . .”).
But that shouldn’t be surprising. Guys and
Dolls is in good company with a number of
mid-20th-century American stage musicals
with a fairy-tale sensibility. My Fair Lady is
based on George Bernard Shaw’s take on
the myth of “Pygmalion and Galatea,” but
also calls to mind “Cinderella.” Funny Girl
gives us the Ugly Duckling transformed to a
Ziegfeld Follies swan. Once Upon a Mattress,
meanwhile, goes directly to Hans Christian
Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea” for its
libretto.
Gangsters with heart
In an interview at OSF in June, Director Mary Zimmerman said
she recognizes Guys and Dolls’ connection with the worlds of
storytellers like Andersen. “For all its milieu of Damon Runyon
and the back-alley world of New York City, Guys and Dolls is, in the
end, a sort of brilliant, complex fairy tale,” she said. “It’s a world in
which the gangsters aren’t particularly dangerous, and the ‘doll’
Adelaide—the burlesque performer—wants nothing more than a
house full of children and a white picket fence. A great deal of its
charm resides in how essentially sweet these rough-and-tumble
characters and story turn out to be in the end.”
The reformation of Guys and Dolls’ gamblers Sky Masterson
(Sarah’s love interest) and Nathan Detroit (Adelaide’s guy) is
familiar territory for Zimmerman: “Radical transformation or
transfiguration is a big theme in a lot of what I’ve done. This is
that in more human and realistic terms. There is radical
transformation and transfiguration of these two characters,
Nathan and Sky, away from their gambling ways.”
14
Chicago-based Zimmerman has repeatedly turned to storybook
worlds, often with “presto-change-o” plot points, throughout
her career. In 2012 she directed The White Snake, an adaptation
of an ancient Chinese legend, for OSF. Her most famous work,
Metamorphoses, was a stage adaptation of Ovid’s myths.
Developed at Northwestern University and the Lookingglass
Theatre Company, of which she is a longtime member, the play
opened on Broadway in 2002 and earned
Zimmerman a Tony Award for direction.
She also developed stage versions of “The
Arabian Nights,” Homer’s “Odyssey” and—
more recently—Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle
Book” stories (for Disney Theatricals).
Although she has directed opera and
revamped Leonard Bernstein’s Candide,
Zimmerman has never directed a
classic American musical—until now.
Unsurprisingly, she’s begun the process by
examining the original Runyon stories used
by writers Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows
for the show’s book. Guys and Dolls is
customarily presented in a post-World War
II setting, but Zimmerman is rethinking
Mary Zimmerman
that: “The stories on which Guys and Dolls is
based were written and set squarely in the 1930s—the heyday of
gangsters and ‘dolls.’ The OSF production will push more toward
that era.”
Music director Doug Peck is concocting an effervescent, early-jazz
orchestration of the Loesser score. Wrote Peck, in an email: “Many
of the songs of Guys and Dolls have become jazz standards
in their own right—“If I Were a Bell,” “I’ve Never Been In Love
Before,” “Luck Be a Lady,” “My Time of Day,” etc.—and it’s exciting
to be able to acknowledge the double life these classic tunes
have led when scoring them in the context of the show.”
Zimmerman emphasized that the original stories and the show
both have a “defiantly exuberant” energy. Theatregoers need not
worry about being enshrouded in Hooverville gloom. “You know,
gangsters and showgirls do very well during the Depression,” she
said. “The spirit of the stories and the show is very, very high.”
Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Shake
Your Booty
Head Over Heels is an exuberant new musical mash-up that expresses director Ed Sylvanus Iskandar’s motto:
“Where the play is the party.”
By Eddie Wallace
D
ust off your dancing shoes, because you are cordially invited
to Head Over Heels, a deliciously inventive musical-literary
mash-up in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre in summer 2015. Head
Over Heels is the unlikely pairing of Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century
tragicomedy Arcadia (freely adapted by playwright Jeff Whitty with
a decided emphasis on the comedy) with the music of 1980s pop
icons the Go-Go’s, creators of such hits as “Our Lips Are Sealed,”
“Vacation” and “We Got the Beat.”
If a mash-up is defined as “a mixture or
fusion of disparate elements,” then the
marriage of Sidney’s Renaissance prose
to the soundtrack of an all-female band
that rose out of the 1970s Los Angeles
punk scene to become a chart-topping
pop band might be considered a mash-up
on steroids. What makes it work is Oregon
native Whitty’s intense love of both halves
of the artistic equation.
disguises to win those they love, and—just maybe—everything
will work out fine in the end.
A party aesthetic
Whitty wrote the piece with only one director in mind—Ed
Sylvanus Iskandar. An OSF directing fellow for two seasons,
Iskandar is a fast-rising New York–based director making a
name for himself with what he terms
“inclusive” productions. His latest
triumph is The Mysteries, a five-and-ahalf-hour dramatization of the Bible
featuring a cast of 54 and written by a
cadre of 48 playwrights, including Whitty.
TheaterMania praised The Flea Theater
production as “breathtaking in its scope
. . . a radical reclamation that can be
appreciated by believers and nonbelievers
alike.”
Food, drink and a convivial party
atmosphere are part of any Iskandar
“I remember reading Arcadia in grad
production—what he has called his
school at the University of Oregon and
“socially inclusive party aesthetic.” In his
thinking this would be a wonderful
New York shows, the actors and crew greet
story to put onstage,” Whitty, the Tony
Jeff Whitty and Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
you at the door, tear your ticket and serve
Award–winning author of Avenue Q and
you
a
cocktail
before
transforming
seamlessly into their roles, only
The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler (OSF, 2008), said in an OSF
to
return
again
at
intermission
with
your dinner. “I create theatre
interview. “I kept waiting for someone to do an adaptation of it,
from
the
fundamental
belief
that
the
story is rendered more
and no one did.”
profoundly by the recognition and empathy for the human effort
behind the piece of art,” says the director.
Meanwhile, Whitty’s agent told him the Go-Go’s catalog had
become available and would be an ideal vehicle for a Broadway
How Iskandar’s aesthetic will translate to the 1,200-seat
jukebox musical—and that Whitty should write the book. In a
Allen Elizabethan Theatre is an exciting challenge involving
light-bulb moment that perhaps could only occur in Whitty’s
OSF departments from Artistic to House Management to the
irreverent and creative mind, Head Over Heels was born.
Green Show. Audiences may come from a themed Green Show
performance and be welcomed by an actor who escorts them to
“One day, I put together a three-page document saying this is
hear the pre-show concert being performed by the house band. A
what the show could be,” Whitty said. “Use the Go-Go’s catalog,
longer-than-usual intermission may feature a bit of disco dancing
but set it to my version of Arcadia. People got excited, I got
in the Bill Patton Garden, or karaoke singing in the balcony or
committed, and a 15-page treatment became a 55-page treatment
maybe just conversations with actors and crew who are strolling
because I got so into writing the dialogue in meter and mashing it
through the theatre.
up with the songs.”
For Shakespeare lovers, the plot of Arcadia will feel familiar. A visit
to an oracle results in dire predictions, a worried duke fears he will
be cuckolded and his throne usurped, young lovers resort to
Iskandar’s foremost goal is for everyone to have a delightful,
engaged, utterly unique experience in the theatre. “What I imagine
is that you are walking into a party that’s in full swing, and you get
to choose your own adventure over the course of the entire night.”
15
Shakespeare
at Sea IV
Come sail away with us to
the Canary Islands on the
Queen Mary 2 in 2015!
T
ravel with OSF to the Canary Islands, a place of geologic
splendor, rich history and great cultural charm. Our
journey also takes us to the island of Madeira, with its
UNESCO-reserve forests, and we’ll sample some of Lisbon’s
big-city fun as well.
We invite you to join Dr. Lue Morgan Douthit and company
members Rex Young and Miriam Laube aboard the Cunard
Line’s Queen Mary 2 for this 12-day excursion! Bookings for
the cruise and program start at $6,000 per person.
Won’t you join us?
December 3–15, 2015
Departing from Southampton, traveling to Portugal and
Spain and returning to Southampton.
For booking information, please call Neil Bauman
at 650-787-5665, or email Neil@InsightCruises.com.
For program details please email doreeno@osfashland.org.
We look forward to traveling with you for Shakespeare
at Sea IV!
Top: Tenerife
Bottom: Canary Islands
16