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  • Theater ChronicleLove and Wonder at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
  • Pamela Royston Macfie (bio)

Wonder defined the 2012 Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Founded in 1935 by Angus Bowmer, who imagined how the ruins of a Chautauqua building in Ashland's Litha Park might be incorporated in a replica of the Globe, this residential company realized mystery in Henry V, Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet, and As You Like It. Each production created a distinctive spell. Henry V asked us to bear witness to Henry's reverent cradling of a criminal's corpse. Troilus revealed paradise within a wilderness of war. Romeo and Juliet summoned a dream. As You Like It presented four Graces whose songs invoked time and eternity. Uniting the mundane and the otherworldly, each of these inventions achieved transcendence.

Though Henry V opened in cold rain on Ashland's Elizabethan stage, its players were undaunted. When Henry moves among his troops as "Harry le Roy," John Tufts used both the theater's artificial rain and the evening's downpour to underscore transformative energy. Thrusting his hand from his cloak, Tufts lit a quaking soldier's cigarette, quieting frustration and forging a connection. This brief unexpected flash spoke to his larger-than-life-king, who, this night, roused the wet audience to heroic fellowship. Tufts's performance, however, did not deflect the burden of Henry's sway. Directed by Joseph Haj, Henry did not merely condemn but personally executed Bardolph, whose errors he had condoned in his own rascally youth. Tufts seized Bardolph, wrestled him to the floor, and choked his thrashing body. Then, kneeling in grief, he embraced the lifeless flesh that his hands had stilled. Here the Oregon Shakespeare Festival created a new Pietà.

The festival's second study of war, Rob Melrose's Troilus and Cressida, translated its audience not to "the vasty fields of France" (Henry V, Prologue 1.0.12) but to the Greek encampment outside of Troy. Seeing these productions back to back, I appreciated that where Henry V directed attention to the sky beyond its half-timbered set, Troilus created claustrophobia in the New Theatre's black box, in which metal ladders and catwalks suggested a prison. On this stage soldiers brawled with one another, snorted cocaine, and discharged automatic weapons to no apparent purpose. When the company grunted the prologue, punctuating it with lewd curses and stamping feet, the theater filled with cacophony. After Mark Murphey snarled Ulysses's speech on degree (1.3.75-137), noise assumed apocalyptic meaning. [End Page 234]

Countering this chaos Troilus and Cressida's love consecrated a tableau that haunted the rest of the play. The beautiful Raffi Barsoumian and Tala Ashe met at a blue octagonal fountain, kissed, and exchanged oaths. Flowers drifted upon them. The sky turned azure and cerise. Inhabiting a private Eden, these actors conveyed serenity. Though manic hysteria would characterize their parting, their initial calm foiled the dominant clamor assaulting the audience.

In his final scene, placing an octagonal funerary platform in the exact location of the tiled fountain, Melrose asked the audience to remember the lovers' still point. Complementing a tableau of corpses with one of love, Melrose determined that his Troilus and Cressida would do more than derogate war; it would mourn love's fragility. Insisting that his audience remember the Eden from which it had been forced, Melrose made love's hush speak.

Troilus and Cressida is far removed from Romeo and Juliet. With the Trojan lovers Shakespeare exposes a love that breaks faith; with Romeo and Juliet he celebrates a love stronger than death. Seeing Laird Williamson's Romeo and Juliet immediately after Melrose's Troilus, I noted, however, one parallel between these tragedies: each casts love as a force that cannot be sustained on earth. Together Williamson and Melrose enforced this message in effects suggesting dreams.

Williamson staged Romeo and Juliet in the Angus Bowmer Theatre as a dream remembered by an "ill-divining soul." That spirit was not Juliet, who spoke these words in act 3, scene 5, line 54, but was her nurse. Appearing first as a soothsayer, the nurse (played powerfully by Isabell Monk O'Connor) told a dark fable. Her deep...

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