A stage for all the kingdom

For several years the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in Ashland, Ore., has been working to diversify its acting company and its offerings. As a result, it’s been able to mount several productions of plays written by and cast with black, Latino and Asian writers and actors.

OSF also has cast more actors of color in productions of plays that, like Shakespeare’s, originally had no parts for them. OSF’s directors have challenged audiences to suspend their disbelief when they see, for example, a couple of black actors in the current production of Sense and Sensibility.

Shakespeare’s Othello, now on stage in the Bowmer Theatre, is a special case because it’s specifically about race. Othello (Chris Butler) is described as a “black man” and a “Moor,” and his racial difference from the Venetians and Cypriots who surround him makes him an isolated outlier and contributes to his sense of being wronged by his wife’s supposed infidelity. Butler is excellent. He’s especially effective during the battle scenes, where he emerges as a brilliant and charismatic leader. His scenes with Desdemona (Alejandra Escalanteare) are problematic, however—or so they seemed to this reviewer.

Director Bill Rauch has set the production in modern times, more than 400 years after the play was written, and attitudes have changed. Othello’s response to his adoring wife’s protestations of innocence seem over-the-top, even for a man with a weak ego. Others in the audience on the night I saw the play didn’t seem to agree with me, however. They gave the production a standing ovation.

I saw two other plays during the season’s opening week (Feb. 24-26), Shakespeare’s Henry V and a theatrical version of Jane Austen’s famous novel Sense and Sensibility, written by Kate Hamill.

Henry V is the last of Shakespeare’s history plays. Gone are Falstaff and the other bawdy tavern dwellers of Henry IV, Parts One and Two, replaced by a focus on the young Henry’s new life as king. Immature but full of promise, Henry is eager to prove himself and so decides to go to war with France to reclaim land and wealth he believes is rightfully England’s. His venture culminates in the great Battle of Agincourt, in which the English prevailed against superior numbers.

The play is being staged in the Thomas Theatre, the smallest of OSF’s three venues and its most intimate. Director Rosa Joshi has opted for a minimalist set, and overall it works well, though some of the battle scenes almost overwhelm the space.

Holding it all together is the young actor who plays Henry, Daniel José Molina. He’s at once the hapless boy of the earlier plays and the fiercely charismatic warrior king who fights alongside his soldiers. He lit up the stage.

I highly recommend this production, especially if you’ve never seen a staging of Henry V.

Sense and Sensibility—showing in Bowmer—is a lighthearted respite from Shakespeare’s intensity. But this tale of the genteel Dashwood sisters, whose lives are disrupted when their father dies and his money and the family home go by law to their male cousin, has a serious thread: Lacking incomes of their own, the sisters are forced to seek monied husbands to survive.

This dilemma animates the production, which otherwise is more comedy than drama. If you like Austen, you’ll love this play.

Altogether, OSF is presenting 11 plays this season, several of which are freshly written and innovative—including Destiny of Desire, “an unapologetic telenovela in two acts,” and Manahatta, a drama about a Native American securities trader dealing with the consequences of the country’s history of attempting to destroy her people’s culture.