The 2009 Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Shurgot, Michael W.

As Bill Rauch, Artistic Director, and Paul Nicholson, Executive Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, note in their introduction to the Festival's Souvenir Program, 2009 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the current Elizabethan Stage and the fifty-third season for Richard L. Hay, the Festival's principal scenic and theatre designer. Mr. Hay designed the Elizabethan Theatre, the Angus Bowmer Theatre, and the New Theatre that replaced the Black Swan in 2002. He has also designed two hundred twenty productions at OSF, and Rauch and Nicholson have dedicated the OSF 2009 season to this remarkable theatre artist. Jerry Turner, OSF Artistic Director from 1971-1991, said of Hay that he is a designer "whose work serves the play and the production." (1) Given the diverse scenic elements of the four Shakespeare plays in the 2009 season Much Ado About Nothing, Henry VIII, Macbeth, and All's Well That Ends Well--Mr. Hay's artistic legacy provides a fulcrum for reviewing this season's productions.

Equally compelling were several auditory features of the four productions. Much Ado features several scenes of "over-hearing," one of which (2.3) director Kate Buckley ensured would make quite a splash. As befitting its pageantry, palaces, and cathedrals, Henry VIII featured numerous musical riffs of organ, bells, trumpets, and drums. Crackling thunder during the witches' scenes and electronic screeches--a thousand finger nails on blackboards--during the gruesome battle scenes assaulted spectators' ears in Macbeth. Conversely, in All's Well a compelling silence was crucial to many lovely scenes. The visual and auditory features were integral to all four productions, although they varied in subtlety and effectiveness.

Buckley set her Much Ado in Messina in 1945. She notes that after Italy's armistice in 1943 Italian citizens fought the Fascist forces until their fall in 1945, and her production "celebrates this time." (2) The setting, presumably the garden of Leonato's villa, also resembled a festive cafe: an elegant stone facade, metal chairs, tables inlaid with brightly colored tiles, chandeliers dangling from the posts and upper staircases, and multi-colored awnings adorning the windows on the second and third levels of the stage. Upstage right was a phonograph on which characters played 40s big band hits. Downstage center was a large, rectangular reflecting / wading pool, and on the back edge of the pool was a typewriter that Beatrice and Benedick used for writing their love poems. Assuming that this setting was part of Leonato's estate--perhaps a garden cafe?--the pool still seemed a gimmick; it was there because obviously someone--Benedick? Beatrice?--was going to fall into it. One wondered why Buckley and scenic designer Todd Rosenthal did not just hang a sign high above the set proclaiming: "Watch how cleverly we use this pool...." Thus were spectators banged over the head.

Buckley cast Beatrice (Robynn Rodriguez) and Benedick (David Kelly) as midlife former lovers too proud to admit that they still loved each other. Wearing his pressed and pleated khaki dress uniform, holster, and high black boots--he had seen little actual combat, as Beatrice suspects--Benedick pranced around the edge of the pool in 1.1, telegraphing to spectators that his romantic fate might require swimming lessons, while Beatrice, in a classy bright green dress, stalked him around the pool pretending not to mark him. Her stinging "You always end with a jade's trick. I know you of old" (3) was an angry riposte; she grabbed his uniform and shook him. She was sick of his evasions, and angry that she had spoken first to him again! Benedick affirmed in his dialogue with Claudio that he was a genuinely "professed tyrant" (1.1.162) to the female sex, thus establishing clearly just how far both he and Beatrice would have to fall by the end of Act 4.

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Claudio, the handsome Juan Rivera LeBron, and Hero, the lovely Sarah Rutan, were much younger than Benedick and Beatrice, thus creating generational as well as procedural differences between the play's romantic couples. Claudio's agreeing to allow Don Pedro to woo for him seemed odd in a play set in 1945, but presumably Leonato wanted to follow Italian traditions regarding the wooing and marriage of his only child. Claudio was only too pleased to hear that Leonato had no son; like Petruchio, he hoped to wive it wealthily and thus happily.

In 2.1 Buckley and Rodriguez made several strong choices. Beatrice showed a hint of melancholy as she narrated her destined place in heaven with the bachelors, living "as merry as the day is long," yet she performed deliberately the three dances of "wooing, wedding, and repenting" (46, 68). The cinquepace was frantic, as if Beatrice were exorcising any lingering desire for Benedick, especially after her fierce response to his "jade's trick" (1.1.139). Here was a resolute, yet lonely woman, perhaps wishing she could ignore rather than mark Signor Benedick. In the masked ball, after Benedick and Beatrice danced downstage and sat on the front edge of the pool, Beatrice removed her mask but Benedick did not, so that he knew that she was the one calling him the "Prince's jester" (2.1.131), but one could not say whether or not she recognized him as the target for her jests. (I suspect we were meant to think that she did, especially given the vehemence of her jibes; she enjoyed the cover of the mask.) Thus when Benedick sat on the front edge of the pool speaking to Don Pedro (229-49), Benedick believed that she would lambaste him to anybody and that she really did detest him. This choice also reinforced Benedick's professed distaste for women and marriage; why pursue a woman who will ridicule him to (supposed) strangers on a dance floor? For this he came home from the wars? Kelly's high-pitched voice rose in a hilarious crescendo until he spat out "so indeed all disquiet, horror, and perturbation follows her" (2.1.248-49). Buckley thus set up cleverly the fall that Benedick and Beatrice were about to take.

Benedick entered 2.3 in casual clothes and sat on the downstage side of the pool. The boy left to get Benedick's book, and then Benedick decried Claudio's sorry metamorphosis into a lover, in a rant that morphs into his own ironic blazon about the qualities in one woman that just might convince him to marry. As he concluded "and her hair shall be of what color it please God" (33), Don Pedro, Leonato, and Claudio entered, and Benedick hid by lying down in front of the pool, facing the audience. As Balthasar began singing, the boy reentered, looked around for Benedick, and spotting him prone in front of the pool, handed him the book. Although the boy's re-entrance is not scripted, here it created a hilarious moment that blew Benedick's cover completely. Realizing this, he raised the book high above the rim of the pool as if he were absorbed in reading and not listening to the conspirators. Wanting to hear more and searching for cover, Benedick then crawled from behind the pool and darted upstage left, hiding first behind the pillar and then the phonograph. He circled back stage left as the men briefly looked upstage, and on Don Pedro's "He doth indeed show some sparks that are like wit" (185-86) Benedick crouched at the front edge of the pool, vainly wanting now to hear more. Then with brilliant timing, on Claudio's "And I take him to be valiant" (188), the men turned in unison downstage and Benedick, bereft of cover, plunged into the pool, book and all, splashing water all over spectators in the front rows. Although everyone in the theatre knew this dunk was coming, nonetheless Buckley's comic blend of visual and auditory features was absolutely hilarious.

While spectators roared, Benedick lay still in the pool, suggesting that he was drowning because he was afraid to lift his head. The longer Benedick lay in the pool the more difficult it was for the other actors to refrain from laughing. This was one of those wonderfully pregnant silences that one imagines could last many seconds on those nights when spectators truly appreciate the acting and the timing they are seeing. Don Pedro's "As Hector, I assure you" (189) was a hilarious anti-climax.

As the men left for dinner, Benedick, like a creature from the black lagoon, slowly curled his right hand over the edge of the pool, and then cautiously--as if from the dead--raised his head. For several seconds he stared blankly at the howling multitude, stunned, one assumes, that he had made himself "such a fool" (2.3.25). Sitting there in the pool, sopping wet, his "This can be no trick" (217) was hysterical. As one listened to him renouncing his pride--chief of the seven deadly sins and a sworn enemy to love--and pledging to be "horribly" in love with Beatrice, one realized that his plunge into the pool had been a symbolic baptism and that now he really could spy "some marks of love" (241) in Beatrice. To appear nonchalant as she entered, he sat back in the pool "reading" his drowned book. Beatrice really did not like having been "sent" to call him for dinner, and so Benedick's insistence on a "double meaning" (2.3.253) in her speech was preposterous. As he rose from his bath and sloshed offstage to get her picture, spectators applauded the metamorphosis that love had wrought in poor Benedick.

Beatrice's fall from pride to love was neither so dramatic nor so funny. Wearing sunglasses--a deliberately feeble disguise?--she overheard Hero and company from the upper stage, and then disappeared as very loud stomping filled the theatre. These were Beatrice's footsteps as she entered stage left dashing for cover behind the post. While the ladies schemed center stage Beatrice stood behind them stuffing her mouth with grapes, here a harbinger not only of wine but also of fertility. Beatrice was discovering late in her life the fruits of love in this "pleached bower" where honeysuckles "advance their pride / Against the power that bred it" (3.1.10-11).

In his red-trimmed blue pants and waist coat, white epaulets and sash, and red-feathered hat, Tony DeBruno's Dogberry was sufficiently over-dressed, and Verges, Hugh Oatcake, and George Seacole sufficiently under-qualified, to emphasize that Don John's plot was not dangerous. Never before in all of Italy have such auspicious persons and their lechery been so easily comprehended. In the marriage scene Buckley again made several notable choices. Claudio's "Beauty is a witch" (2.1.173) was vehement, suggesting a young man all too ready to believe his mates, and at the wedding Benedick, Claudio, Don Pedro, and Don John wore their military uniforms. Thus did Mars enter the temple of Venus. This surprising clothing choice signaled that Claudio was not yet ready for wedding rites and that, like Benedick, he required further cleansing. Bill Geisslinger as Leonato was initially furious at Hero and had to be restrained by Antonio, Balthasar, and Friar Francis. However, as befitting the play's setting in 1945, not 1595, after hearing the Friar's plan Leonato embraced Hero, who was sprawled on the floor being comforted by Beatrice. Thus Buckley acknowledged the play's patriarchal heritage while softening Leonato's anger towards, let us recall, his only child. Leonato's embrace of the shaken Hero signaled his willingness to trust her word and to hope for renewal.

Beatrice sat center stage playing with the discarded flowers when Benedick saw her and turned back. Their words of love were soft, their embrace tender, and Beatrice's "Kill Claudio" (4.1.288) a thunderbolt. Benedick reeled; one recalled that earlier Beatrice had promised to eat all that he had killed, so presumably, despite her promise to requite his love, Beatrice did not expect Benedick to carry out her order. While Beatrice railed at men's perfidy Benedick knelt and then crawled on his knees trying to keep up with her. Benedick's puttering around the stage in his military uniform was funny and also symbolized visually not only his begging her to believe him but also his subservience to her will. In 5.2 Beatrice was not about to kiss Benedick if only "foul words" (48) had passed between him and Claudio.

In 5.3 Buckley's concessions to her 1945 setting were again clear. Bells tolled on the darkened stage as Claudio, Balthasar, Don Pedro and others gathered around Hero's tomb. As Claudio knelt before the pool where Benedick had been "cleansed" of his pride, Benedick, Leonato, Antonio, and others hid behind a screen to sing Balthasar's song. Above stage left, both literally and symbolically, stood Hero, as if she had been sent there by Leonato to observe Claudio's penitence. Her presence at this cleansing ritual, in which Claudio reads from a scroll that has presumably been prepared by Leonato and / or the Friar, thus provided some motivation for Hero's acceptance of Claudio as her husband at the second wedding where "wonder seem[s] familiar" (5.4.69). Further, in marrying him she now appeared more self-motivated and less a puppet handed over to Claudio to preserve her father's honor and the patriarchal rituals of the late Renaissance. As all of the women entered the church wearing white veils, and Leonato emphatically refused Claudio's request to see his new wife's face before he wed her, one sensed in Claudio's acquiescence at this strange ritual a willingness, like Leonato in 4.1, to embrace hope.

Sitting--where else?--at the edge of the pool after their ceremony, Claudio and Hero handed to Beatrice and Benedick the notes that the two reluctant lovers had typed earlier. Beatrice was thoroughly amused by Benedick's rhyme "baby," and one sensed that after all these many years they wouldn't waste time chatting. Sitting alone at the edge of the pool was Don Pedro, the outsider in this otherwise joyous comedy, who had earnestly proposed to Beatrice earlier and been genuinely hurt by her rejection. Attired, like the other men, in his military uniform, he was for the wars, not for dancing measures.

Henry VIII was a grand spectacle of sight and sound on the Elizabethan Stage. Despite major cuts, including the Prologue and several characters, director John Sipes staged one of the last works on which Shakespeare collaborated (with John Fletcher) as both a celebration of the dawn of the Elizabethan era and a de casibus treatise on the fall of illustrious men and women. Lighting designer Alexander Nichols turned the facade and windows of the Elizabethan stage into the interiors of Henry's palace and medieval cathedrals. Attired in sumptuous Renaissance clothing, the men and women of Henry's reign strode across the outdoor stage amid pageants that dazzled the eye and trumpeted the work of scenic designer Michael Ganio and costume designer Susan E. Mickey. Along with appropriate musical accompaniment, here was theatre design work that served both the play and the production.

In place of the Prologue and Norfolk's description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Elijah Alexander as Henry entered standing in the stirrups of a large plaster horse decked in gold and red that moved briskly on a platform to downstage center. Henry wore a gold helmet with a large golden plume, gold breastplate, and gold leggings with gold boots in gold stirrups. Accompanying him were numerous fairies in bright red, waving green dragons over their heads. Behind and to either side stood lords and ladies of the realm, chanting his name as an organ and church bells pealed through the night. It was a picture worth a thousand words, whether Shakespeare's or Fletcher's, and an appropriate start to Sipes's staging of this play.

Given the play's inconsistencies and a structure that does not always follow historical events, Sipes chose to frame his production with spectacle and to emphasize the fall of its three protagonists: Buckingham, Queen Katharine, and Cardinal Wolsey. Many of the cuts were designed to focus this voluminous play, and excellent casting choices enabled Buckingham, Wolsey, and especially Queen Katharine to emerge clearly from the play's setting. As Henry's narcissistic pageant withdrew, Michael Elich as Buckingham pulled down the long golden banner that hung from the third level of the stage. Elich railed against Wolsey and angrily refused Norfolks offered advice to "read / The Cardinal's malice and his potency / Together" (1.1.104-06). He and Anthony Heald, as the stately Wolsey in Cardinal's red, leered at each other as Wolsey exited. Moments later, hurried by more cuts in Buckingham's dialogue with Norfolk, Elich spoke bitterly of the net that had fallen on him and would soon fall on others. During Buckingham's first monologue in 2.1, "All good people" (55-78), Elich, an accomplished actor in a minor role, spoke directly and passionately to spectators about his own "conscience" and the perils of political power in terms eerily resonant with our times. His reference to his father's fate in the service of Richard III only reified the power of kings over men's (and women's) lives.

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As Queen Katharine, Vilma Silva was magnificent. Though soliciting Henry in her initial appearance in 1.2, where Henry entered practicing his sword play, Silva nonetheless spoke firmly and confidently in his presence. Until her final, grieving moments onstage Silva maintained a regal, statuary dignity. Attired in a formal, but subdued white, black, and gray gown, white ruff, and black headdress, Katharine's clothing contrasted sharply with Henry's gold and red, and in their scenes together Silva's voice filled the distance between them. During Henry's and Wolsey's trial of Buckingham, Katharine stood stage right, obviously distraught by the accusers' words, and her "God mend all" (1.2.201) was a plea to the only power she now realized could save Buckingham's life. To stress Katharine's growing isolation within the court, Sipes placed her above stage left--where Hero had watched Claudio's memorial rite--while Henry, playfully costumed like a youthful, comedic lover, wooed and kissed Anne Bullen at the masked ball in 1.4.

Sipes included in 2.2 the Lord Chamberlains complaints, spoken eloquently by Derrick Lee Weeden, thus suggesting Henry's growing tyranny. Henry's enthusiastic embrace of Campeius signaled his welcome of the Pope's commission. Christine Albright as Anne Bullen, like Henry dressed mostly in red and gold and thus also in stark contrast to Katharine's darker grays and black, was genuinely distraught by her own conscience, and her "Would I had no being, if this salute my blood a jot" (2.3.103-04) resonated boldly, especially coming just seconds before the red-clad army of Archbishops strode center stage to banish Queen Katharine.

2.4 and 3.1 were the play's most compelling scenes. Amid resounding drums and trumpets Henry entered 2.4 wearing a black and gold embroidered cloak. Whereas the text calls for Katharine to "[come] to the King, and [kneel] at his feet" (s.d.), Katharine knelt center stage while Henry sat as far away from her as the Elizabethan Stage allowed: on the top edge of the covered stage-left vomitorium. This blocking indicated Henry's fear of Katharine's rectitude. Silva knelt during all of her long speeches in 2.4, and turned stage left to face Henry, who sat with his head resting on his right fist, an ironic replica of Rodin's Le Penseur. Never in her long speech "Sir, I desire you do me right and justice" (11ff) did Silva waver in her rigid posture or the strength of her voice, even when she wept. Indeed, on Wolsey's "Be patient yet" (71) Silva became stronger and more resolute, her voice filling the outdoor stage. Her "My lord, my lord, I am a simple woman, much too weak / T' oppose your cunning" (103-05) countered with crisp diction and precise rhythm Wolsey's insistence that she had ever "displayed th' effects / Of disposition gentle and of wisdom / O'ertopping woman's pow'r" (84-86). Henry's "Call her again" (123), though made from afar by a king who had wanted to minimize the power and justice of her plea, suggested the dilemma that Katharine had created for him. Her firm response, "What need you note it? Pray you, keep your way./ ... / I will not tarry" (126; 129) elicited spectators' spontaneous, sustained applause as she strode off stage right. Henry reached center stage before the applause had ended, and he had to wait before he could say "Go thy ways, Kate. / That man i' the world who shall report he has / A better wife, let him in naught be trusted / For speaking false in that" (131-34). Thus did spectators control the stage. Katharine's performance before the court and the bishops deeply affected Henry. Even as he spoke of his daughter's "legitimacy" and of proving his marriage "lawful," Henry choked on his words. At this moment he truly believed her to be "the primest creature / That's paragoned o' the world" (2.4.227-28). In a play replete with men's vicious and greedy exercise of power the voice of a self-proclaimed "simple woman" triumphed royally.

Silva was equally compelling in 3.1. Despite, or perhaps because of, her fury, Wolsey and John Pribyl as Cardinal Campeius showed real tenderness towards her. Given Wolsey's sincere efforts to comfort Katharine, his sudden fall from Henry's favor elicited some sympathy for his character. In 3.2.228ff, as Norfolk, Suffolk, Surrey, and especially Derrick Lee Weeden as Lord Chamberlain crowded around Wolsey, he suddenly seemed small indeed, shrunken like his power. Wolsey spoke his soliloquy "So farewell to the little good you bear me" (351-73) center stage under a glaring spotlight that emphasized his isolation on the otherwise darkened stage. He was indeed naked to his enemies.

Anne wore a royal bride's elegant white gown and was crowned on the upper stage, accompanied by ringing bells, the Court, and bishops. After the ceremony Katharine, now in a white smock and pale green robe, struggled onto the lower stage, then slept stage right from where she had delivered her magnificent speech to Henry in 2.4. During her vision the dancers placed garland crowns on her head, and though she left the stage uncrowned, Silva's command of Katharine's final speeches sealed for spectators the most compelling performance of this production.

Following Cranmer's "trial" and Henry's subsequent support of the man who voided Henry's marriage to Katharine, the birth of Elizabeth was royally celebrated. A font rose over the spot where Henry's horse had stood in the opening pageant, and Henry appeared most gaudily attired in an ermine-trimmed, gold and red brocade cape. As streamers fell from the upper stage, bells rang, and a white banner unfurled from above, Henry, surrounded by his full court and applauding bishops, proclaimed the Elizabethan era. As the child was held aloft by her father, who would soon behead her mother, one perhaps forgot amid the scenic splendor the precarious position of women in Henry's England.

For their production of Macbeth, Director Gale Edwards, Sound Designer Todd Barton, Lighting Designer Mark McCullough, and Scenic Director Scott Bradley employed the full technological wizardry of the Angus Bowmer Theatre. (4) Sound Designer Todd Barton created several compelling auditory effects: ominous rumbling greeted spectators as they took their seats; screeching, unnerving electronic sound accompanied the battle scenes; and crackling thunder heralded the witches. Blue strobe lights danced eerily around the fiends and their font in 4.1 boiled ominously while fog, seemingly from everywhere, shrouded their scenes. Macduff's thunderous pounding at Macbeth's castle in 2.3 also enveloped the entire theatre, as if spectators too slept in Macbeth's murderous chambers. Edwards and her production team thus created a sensuous production that thoroughly engaged spectators' eyes and ears, but at times the rich poetry of the play seemed less important than the designers' abilities to maximize the visual and audible equivalents of the terror that resides within that poetry. The very complexity and power of these production features ironically emphasized the principal weakness of this production: Peter Macon's physically powerful but vocally monochromatic portrayal of Macbeth. Unfortunately, the productions technology did not compensate for its poetic weakness.

Scott Bradley's complex set had two principal features. At the back of the stage was a long steel staircase that rose steeply from stage left to stage right. The railings were bent, and hanging from the bottom were twisted steel rods. Beneath and behind the rods were piled several large, jagged concrete blocks. Edwards explains in her introductory note that this set was meant to suggest a bombed building in a ruined city (she mentioned Sarajevo, Bosnia, Baghdad), and that the play--which moved from soldiers in medieval armor butchering each other in 1.1 to officers in the coats of World War II Fascists and then back to hand-to-hand combat in Act 5--is Shakespeare's essay on recurring human barbarity. (5) Blending time periods is used frequently in staging Shakespeare's plays, especially the tragedies, and seeing this approach again may strike some reviewers as unoriginal, perhaps even stunted. Yet as Edwards says about Macbeth: "If theatre holds a mirror up to life, then" this is indeed a play for our times." (6) Fair enough; but one wonders if a play with such astonishing poetry, especially Macbeth's soliloquies, is well served by so large and obtrusive a set design.

However, given Edwards's approach, Bradley's set served well as the locale for several actions. Lady Macbeth walked down the staircase in 1.5 reading Macbeth's letter and Duncan walked up the stairs to his deathbed. After Macbeth's beheading, Malcolm walked down the staircase to proclaim his kingdom, thus repeating the steps taken first by Lady Macbeth and then by Macbeth after he killed Duncan, suggesting a murderous cycle. Beneath the concrete slabs a reddish glow emerged from a cave. From here troglodytic soldiers emerged to fight, as if from hell.

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Scattered downstage were bronzed casts of numerous dead bodies, some of them children and some missing body parts. Here was a horrid image of the costs of war, from Troy to Scotland to Bosnia to Baghdad: a battlefield of bones. (7) Again, Bradley's set evoked the barbarism of the production, especially given the butchering of Macduff's family--one of the murderers poured gasoline down Lady Macduff's throat and then ignited his lighter--and the beheading of a soldier in 1.1 and then finally of Macbeth. While some might consider the dead bodies overdone, one can argue that they externalized not only Macbeth's slaughter of the innocents but also Lady Macbeth's threat to bash the brains of her suckling child.

There were six witches, not three--each of them had a young apprentice--and they were omnipresent. They dressed variously in dark blue coats and grey rags, with long entangled snake-like hair, and their constant presence, spying on all the principal characters, suggested the ubiquity of evil in the play. Peter Macon's Macbeth, who was immensely bloody in 1.3, started suddenly at the witches' calling him Cawdor and then King, indicating clearly that his murderous thoughts preceded the witches' initial appearance. When Duncan established his state upon Malcolm, Macbeth angrily turned away for his aside, and after his final lines in 1.4 raced towards his castle.

As Lady Macbeth, Robin Goodrin Nordli was superb. She descended the staircase in 1.5 wearing a sleek, backless red gown. (One of my students, Molly Pritchard, observed that Nordli's red gowns "married stylish elegance with bloodiness.") She thrilled at Macbeth's promotions, and, as a genuinely beautiful woman, her fierce plea to the witches to unsex her became ironic. Nordli pulled Macon to her and kissed him hard on "Leave all the rest to me" (73) as she moved his hands to her naked back, thus persuading with the sexuality that she has urged the spirits to take. She fingered gently the necklace that Duncan gave her, and laughed as she and he exited hand-in-hand.

The sequence from 1.7, Macbeth's soliloquy, through 2.2, the knocking that wakes the Porter, was genuinely compelling. However, Macon regrettably spoke Macbeth's first soliloquy in 1.7 quickly and ignored its complex, interwoven images, a performance choice that robbed spectators of grasping how Macbeth's imagination rouses his fear. Surely such profound poetry deserves more effort from an actor? Nordli immediately increased the tension; she was furious that Macbeth had left the chamber, and she delivered Lady Macbeth's image of killing a child with fierce conviction and full awareness of its terrifying power. Like the broken children scattered downstage, her suckling child was but a trifling obstacle to power. Caressing Macon's face, wearing another low-cut, sparkling red evening gown, Nordli's overt sensuality convinced Macbeth to but mock the time. What man would not clutch her; not believe her that killing a sleeping king would be a simple deed?

Macon was far more convincing with Macbeth's soliloquy in 2.1. After Banquo's wary exit, the witches surrounded Macbeth center stage as he spoke and offered him several daggers. Macon was indeed shaken by the "gouts of blood" that his imagination conjured at 1.47 ff," and he showed a more profound understanding of how Macbeth's fervid imagination was beginning to affect him. Macon's physical shock and his stumbling delivery conveyed far more emotional depth than at any previous moment in the production.

Both Macon and Nordli were superb in 2.2, among the most genuinely terrifying enactments of this sequence I have ever seen. Nordli was already unnerved by the ringing bellman, and shrieked "who's there? What ho!" (8) loudly enough to wake the dead. Although Lady Macbeth had carefully drugged the grooms and "lai[n] their daggers ready" (11), in the stichomythia that ensued after Macbeth descended the stairs with the bloody daggers their mutual fear exploded. Lady Macbeth was utterly furious at Macbeth, her anger masking more fear of their deed than I have ever seen at this moment. (Nordli's performance made perfect sense of her line "Th' attempt and not the deed / Confounds us" [10-11]). She shook with rage as she screamed at Macbeth, who at "There's one did laugh in's sleep, and cried 'Murder'" (26) stood paralyzed, glaring at the blood dripping from his sleeves onto his hands; he had plunged the knives deeply into Duncan. Unable to look again at what he had done, Macbeth seemed possessed by the nightmare vision he had conjured. Lady Macbeth yelled "Infirm of purpose" (56) and grabbed the daggers, only to be suddenly appalled as blood now covered her hands as well. The loudly amplified knocking that suggested an invasion of their castle terrified them, and as Lady Macbeth led Macbeth offstage to get a little water, Nordli's frantic speech conveyed vividly their mutual panic.

Josiah Phillips as the Porter in his striped jacket, black pants, spats, and top hat provided some comic relief, suggesting a modern vaudeville entertainer. Macbeth descended from the upper chamber covered in blood, as did Malcolm and Donalbain at the end of 2.3. Macbeth's measured "Who can be wise, amazed, temp'rate and furious" (110-20) indicated a return to composure, but Lady Macbeth's sudden fainting conveyed overwhelming terror at Macbeth's having killed the grooms. These two murders were not in their (i.e., her) plans, and Nordli's crumbling at the bottom of the fatal stairs complemented her fury at Macbeth's earlier indecision. From one who feared to kill, Macbeth had become one who killed too rashly. Dressed in floor-length black capes with red trim, Macbeth as king and his queen also descended from this upper chamber in 3.1. Bradley's set thus came to symbolize the origin of Macbeth's kingship in a place of slaughter.

Presumably playing Macbeth as descending into madness, Macon resorted in Acts 3 and 4 to loud declarations often delivered more to the audience than to other characters, including Lady Macbeth. This feature of his performance became not just annoying but also silly; why would Macbeth yell at spectators instead of at characters in the play? In 3.2 Macbeth spoke feverishly of the scorched snake and the need for sleep, frightening Lady Macbeth who tried vainly to calm him, suggesting her fears that her sensual appeal to his "manhood" had become ineffectual. In the banquet scene Macbeth was unhinged. The three adult witches, who apparently were not seen by anyone onstage, moved a long ceremonial table to center stage, as if this gathering of the new king's guests were their doing. (And in a sense, it is.) They remained throughout the scene, and at times took seats around the table, including Macbeth's when Banquo's ghost had temporarily left. A bowl of red roses decorated the table as the guests took their seats. Banquo's extremely bloodied ghost, with forty mortal gashes, entered first from stage right and took Macbeth's seat at the head of the table stage left. During his visions of the ghost, which left and then reentered from different parts of the stage, Macbeth became increasingly violent, spilling wine and hurling chairs as he screamed and tried to vanquish the apparition. With each successive vision isolated in glaring red spotlights, Macon's rage increased, until screaming madly he climbed onto the table to challenge the ghost, as if trying to resurrect the furious butcher of Act 1 and the manhood that Lady Macbeth had extolled. It was a thrilling sequence, as it established the pattern that Macbeth would follow for the rest of the play. So shattered was he that his assertion "Why, so; being gone I am a man again" (3.4.108-09) was comical. Macbeth's many images of blood at the end of the scene became the ranting of a mind terrified by what he had done and had feared to look at. As the guests left, Lady Macbeth collapsed at the foot of the stairs. Nordli's frantic efforts to maintain calm and order during the scene and her screaming at the knights to "Stand not upon the order of your going" (120) brilliantly evoked Lady Macbeth's crumbling mind.

The apparitions in 4.1 were children with hideously bloated heads, and the line of kings was composed of similarly tortured figures. As the macabre children climbed up from the bubbling cauldron, Hecate tied a necklace of teeth--human, animal?--around Macbeth's neck, an ironic reversal of the diamond-studded necklace that Duncan had placed around Lady Macbeth's neck in 1.6 and another visual reminder of the broken bones littering the proscenium. Macbeth fell to his knees and crawled to a small pool where he sipped water, perhaps now symbolizing the unnatural, subhuman creature he had become. As he knelt the witches painted his face with white streaks that suggested animal markings, perhaps a tiger's. Looking into the glass at what he had become, Macbeth resolved to surprise Macduff's castle, where his butchers strangled Macduff's daughter and then incinerated his wife.

Wearing a ragged, bloodied white gown, her beautiful blonde hair now tangled like the witches', Lady Macbeth descended from the upper level into complete madness. Bradley's set again became highly symbolic, for the place of the murder, to which Lady Macbeth returns with the bloody daggers in 2.2, now became the source of her madness, The three young witches, here images of Macduff's slaughtered "pretty ones" as well as of the suckling child that Lady Macbeth had sworn to kill, surrounded her center stage as she frantically wiped her hands. While one could not tell if she was supposed to see them, as one could not tell if Macbeth had seen the witches at the banquet, the constant appearance of the adult and young witches throughout the play emphasized their role as, at least, tempters of the murderous king and queen. Sending the young witches to claim Lady Macbeth was visually stunning.

Macbeth raged wildly at Seyton about his armor, and after Seyton pulled it off Macbeth stood bare-chested to face his enemies. The trees of Birnam Wood were green phosphorous lights that soldiers carried from the hell-mouth center stage, as if nature were trampling diabolical evil. When Seyton announced the queen's death, Macon froze. As he spoke Macbeth's final, agonizing soliloquy he slowly crumbled to the ground, exactly over the spot where the witches' cauldron had poured forth its distorted children. Macon here evoked superbly the dreadful emptiness of Macbeth's images; would that he had taken equal care with all of Macbeth's soliloquies. Macduff raced down the staircase to face Macbeth, and their long, mano a mano combat, which evoked the earlier medieval setting, was brilliantly choreographed. At one point Macbeth disarmed Macduff and held two swords to Macduff's head but then released him rather than cut his throat. Given Macbeth's earlier butchery this was an odd choice but perhaps was meant to suggest Macbeth's fatalism. Moments later Macduff held the dead butcher as other soldiers, repeating the opening battle scene, decapitated him.

As Macbeth's head was held aloft, Malcolm descended from the upper chamber to proclaim his kingship. Fleance, whose reappearance here is unscripted, stood silently downstage holding a sword. The witches had apparently brought him back, and one of the apprentices offered him her hand. As in Roman Polanski's 1971 film version, here the cycle of violence seemed doomed to continue.

For All's Well That Ends Well in the intimate New Theatre, director Amanda Dehnert and scenic designer Christopher Acebo reached back to Shakespeare's source in Boccaccio's Decameron, to Shakespeare's sonnets, to Renaissance theatrical traditions, to American vaudeville conventions, possibly to Samuel Beckett's Waiting far Godot, and to the home movies of the early twentieth century to create a charming and inventive production. Acebo's three-sided stage was a series of long planks of varying lengths with an uneven border downstage; while upstage, behind a naked tree, were a wooden fence also of uneven boards; a cruciform grave marker; and a swinging gate, the planks curled upwards, suggesting perhaps the rough-hewn, ad-hoc stages that traveling Renaissance theatre companies might have constructed or found in a small town. Given the First Lord's remark in 4.3, "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, / good and ill together. Our virtues would be proud if ! our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would / despair if they were not cherished by our virtues" (70-73), the large, naked tree suggested the Biblical Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and / or the barren tree of Beckett's Godot: "A country road. A tree." It was also just a tree with a ladder at the back and a swing where young Helena played while still at Rossillion. To the left of the tree was a rod tied at one end to a tree limb and at the other to a steel pole that stood further stage left. Suspended from the rod was a curtain which became the screen for the movie intervals that Armando Duran's character the Clown used frequently during the performance to narrate his story to his twenty-first century spectators.

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Two large trunks, one upstage center-right and the other downstage left, contained costumes and paraphernalia that the various characters used throughout the play. Given the overtly theatrical nature of Dehnert's production, the two trunks certainly recalled Elizabethan traveling companies. (9) Dehnert also re-created Boccaccio's narrator, or as she calls him, "storyteller," in the figure of the Clown, played brilliantly by Duran, an amazingly versatile actor. Wearing black shoes, baggy pants, a white shirt, black tie, vest, loose-fitting jacket, and cone-shaped hat, he suggested at once Harlequin of the commedia dell'arte (minus the mask), the improvising Elizabethan clowns Richard Tarlton and Will Kempe, the conventional vaudeville down of early twentieth-century America, Charlie Chaplin's enduring down, and Vladimir in Godot. As the Clown, Duran moved about the stage constantly, often playing different characters and pulling different costumes out of one of the trunks or out of the suitcase he carried with him, suggesting also the lone, itinerant player making his living on the road. (10) As Dee Maaske, who played the Countess, explained in a discussion with my students, Duran was supposed to be invisible when as the storyteller he wore his hat.

In a silent prologue recalling an Elizabethan dumb show, Duran walked onto the stage through the gate carrying his suitcase, from which he took a roll of film that he inserted into an old movie projector that was set into the floor downstage right. He then walked upstage, pulled the curtain across, walked back to the projector, and turned it on. Projected onto the screen, in the large script of older films, were the words "All's Well That Ends Well." Thus did the play begin with its imaginative combination of medieval, Renaissance, and modern narrative forms, aided by the Clown as both a Renaissance storyteller and a twentieth-century home movie maker. Throughout the play Duran would stop the action momentarily to show "film clips" explaining the location of the action or providing spectators with some necessary information from the omitted scenes. As we were to learn at play's end, the Clown had good reasons for wanting to tell (t)his story and show (t)his movie.

In another nod to the Shakespearean stage, Dehnert employed inventive doubling. As dramaturge Lezlie Cross explained in a note to me, Duran is a "mash-up of Rinaldo, Lavatch, servants and lords of the French court, one of the Lords Dumaine and the stranger [Shakespeare's 'A Gentleman']." G. Valmont Thomas, a robust actor with marvelous comic timing, played Lafew and the other Lord Dumaine. Given these actors' rapid assumption of different characters, the action moved seamlessly among its many locales. Every element of the set blended effortlessly with the telling of Shakespeare's story, not only because of Duran's and Thomas's fluid movements among their several characters, but also because the conventions of storytelling as both literary narration and as home movie freed the actors to maximize the charming theatricality of their production.

After a few seconds of showing the play's title on his impromptu screen, Duran stopped the projector, dosed his movie screen, walked backstage, and then reemerged carrying one of his many suitcases. He opened the suitcase center stage and plastic flowers popped up, a visual hint of springtime and renewal. Then, as he often did, the Clown stood backstage and watched intently as the play proper began, as if he were watching his own story unfold. Danforth Comins was a handsome Bertram that any young woman might fancy, especially in his full-dress military uniform, while Kjerstine Rose Anderson, as Helena, was dressed initially in dull peasant garb. By contrast Dee Maaske appeared initially as the stately Countess in a royal red gown, while John Tufts as Parolles dressed in the dark suit, white shirt, and striped tie commonly associated with the English public schools. After Bertram left court, Helena climbed the tree to discuss virginity with Parolles, suggesting a young Eve wanting to know how women may barricade their virginity against its enemy: man.

Anderson played Helena as a marvelously self-confident and energetic young woman. Kneeling before James Edmondson as the King of France, who wore a white gown that resembled a shroud as Lafew pushed him onstage in a wooden wheelchair, Helena pleaded earnestly while opening another of the set's many suitcases. Inside were the medical instruments she would use to cure him, and in her pilgrim's cloak and hat she suggested a peddler selling wares on a country road. Streamlining Shakespeare's script, Dehnert had the King rise immediately after drinking Helena's magical potion, thus emphasizing the play's fairy-tale element. Bertram initially laughed off Helena's choice, and left the stage utterly dejected as he took Helena's hand. Lafew's belittling of the much smaller Parolles, who created his own mismatched soldier's uniform with far too many of his public school ties wound around his sleeves and ankles, comically set up the ridicule of Parolles that the French soldiers later staged for Bertram. As he exited 2.5, Bertram gave Helena a peck on her cheek as, with Parolles's ironic coraggio, he set off eagerly for the Italian wars, thus abandoning Venus for Mars. Carrying another small suitcase from which popped up a pen with a red flower tied to its top, Duran took down the Countess's letter in 3.4 that is intended to tell Bertram of his wife's pilgrimage and to pry him from Parolles's juvenile influence.

The scenes in Italy were wonderfully theatrical. Kate Mulligan as the Widow and Emily Sophia Knapp as her daughter were classic 1950s American tourists. The Widow, chewing gum incessantly and speaking with a Jersey accent, wore a wide brim red hat, sunglasses, a red halter top, white polka-dot dress, and six inch heels! Her daughter, a carefully coiffed blonde, sported red shoes, white slacks, and a red blouse. They were silly military groupies who squealed as the soldiers passed by. The "soldiers" were brightly painted wooden figures strung on a long rope that Duran and Thomas carried horizontally across the stage, perhaps suggesting the uniformity of soldiers while comically "playing" at war upon a stage. Dehnert's mixing of eras and her total embrace of her theatrical medium, including the frequent use of film, challenged spectators to accept the improbability of the multimedia fairy tale her actors were staging. This approach enabled Dehnert to glide over the infamous bed trick; if one could believe that the wooden puppets were soldiers marching in full-dress parade, one could believe that the Widow and her daughter could buy a pilgrim's story that she was Bertram's true wife who could--as if magically--both guard the daughter's

virtue and enlarge their coffers.

The unmasking of Parolles was hysterical. Bound with his own school ties to a chair and blindfolded, he trembled as Duran and Thomas stood upon chairs and shouted the gobbledygook that terrifies him. Bertram was deeply hurt and angry as he moved away from Parolles's infantile praise of war towards Helena's forgiveness in Act 5. Once the blindfold was removed, but with his hat still over his eyes, Parolles in his disgust ran furiously around the stage and twice ran smack into the tree where earlier he had ridiculed virginity. The moment served as a comic metaphor for the exorcism of Bertram's puerile, misdirected nature.

In 5.1 Duran was a runner in a marathon, his uniform #21, who promised to deliver Helena's petition to the French King. Here Duran's "character" neatly symbolized the various journeys that other characters had taken in the play. Parolles entered in muddy rags, and Lafew's "Though you are a knave and a fool, you shall eat" (5.2.55) prepared spectators for the larger images of forgiveness and acceptance. Amid the formality of the Court, the riddle of the rings resolved in a simple, extremely moving tableau. Helena, again in her bride's white gown and quite pregnant, approached Bertram; he, afraid to look at her, moved backward as his entire body shrank and finally crumbled to the floor. Helena knelt before him, and as the King concluded the scene, Bertram gently stroked Helena's stomach, simultaneously caressing both his wife and his child. After Bertram's final words, "If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, / I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly" (16-17), the Countess spoke a line from Sonnet 96: "Thou mak'st faults graces that to thee resort" (4). While the end of this play remains difficult to accept, especially for contemporary women, Comins's ability to portray extreme guilt and humility in just a few seconds suggested a man now worthy of forgiveness. Lafew's "Mine eyes smell opinions; I shall weep anon" (5.3.321) spoke for spectators throughout the theatre. It was a wonderfully powerful moment of that "rarer action" that fairy tales--and theatre--re-create for us.

During her post-play discussion Dee Maaske stated that Amanda Dehnert was a "complete romantic" in her approach to this play. That is, for Dehnert, despite its difficulties and its reputation as a "problem play," All's Well had to end happily. Thus in place of the King's epilogue, after the other actors had left the stage, Duran spoke from upstage center Sonnet 17, which ends: "But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme." Duran then showed his last home movie, featuring Bertram and Helena as a happy young couple with their child. As the movie progressed and the child in later frames grew, one realized that the child was the Clown in his younger years: his story--this play / film--is the story of his parents. In the final frames we see the young man at his parents' gravesite; they have died young, and we see him place flowers at their graves. Hence the cruciform marker on stage. Finally, we see the Clown leaving home carrying the suitcase full of props that he will use to tell his parents' story to different people in the theatre every night. In the end is his beginning. Thus the play / film artifact, while including death, has a happy ending, and we know why the Clown travels about telling (t)his story: he wants us to know that despite his father's initial refusal of his saintly mother, his parents were happy and their story deserves to be told. (11)

Notes

(1.) Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2009, Souvenir Program, 49.

(2.) Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2009, Playbill, 44.

(3.) 2.1.46. All textual references are to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).

(4.) I suspect that Edwards's production of Macbeth will be hotly debated among reviewers. While all reviewers strive to be fair and objective, nonetheless a personal element is always present. See Peter Holland's incisive "It's all about me. Deal with it," in Shakespeare Bulletin 25 (2007): 27-39. Given some conversations with my Ashland students and email exchanges with colleagues, I suspect that I may be more generally fond of this production than other reviewers.

(5.) Gale Edwards's notes about her production are available from Amy Richards of the OSF publicity department and in a book on the play in the members' lounge in Ashland.

(6.) Playbill, 8.

(7.) The mutilated bodies reminded me of Mark Twain's "The War Prayer," available online and in Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race, ed. Janet Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), 64-68, esp. 67.

(8.) On the poetic richness of Macbeth's soliloquies, see especially Lawrence Danson, Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 122-41; and Frank Kermode, Shakespeare's Language (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000), 201-16.

(9.) Recall the printin The Riverside Shakespeare, 1st ed, from Scarron's Comical Romance of a Company of Stage Players (plate 14 between 494 and 495) that includes trunks in which traveling Renaissance players carried their costumes and props. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974).

(10.) Given the extensive use of film, Duran's Clown also recalled both Fellini's La Strada and Bergman's The Seventh Seal. In both films wandering entertainers, one on a motorcycle and the other in a horse-drawn wagon, eke out a living performing at improvised venues in the countryside.

(11.) Taken together, Dehnert's production choices evoked brilliantly the salient features of what Peter Brook calls "The Rough Theatre." Brook writes: "The Rough Theatre has apparently no style, no conventions, no limitations--in practice, it has all three," 71. The rough, or popular theatre, "... freed of unity of style, actually speaks a very sophisticated and stylish language: a popular audience usually has no difficulty in accepting inconsistencies of accent and dress, or in darting between mime and dialogue, realism and suggestion," 67. Even given the generally sophisticated theatrical tastes of most OSF spectators, Dehnert's production relied on her spectators' ability to become Brook's popular audience. Judging by their sustained applause at play's end, audience members certainly grasped how well the disparate elements of the production told its story. See Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1978).

Michael W. Shurgot, Seattle, WA