The 2008 Oregon Shakespeare Festival Season.

Shurgot, Michael W.

For reviewers concerned with the omnipresent phenomenon of "director's Shakespeare," 2008 was a difficult season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The Festival mounted two early comedies and two mature tragedies: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Angus Bowmer Theatre; Coriolanus in the New Theatre; and Comedy of Errors and Othello on the Elizabethan Stage. Both comedies were heavily "conceptualized"; Penny Metropulos's Errors was set in the old west, and just barely followed Shakespeare's plot; Mark Rucker's Dream adhered closely to Shakespeare's script, but was so over-laden with multiple settings, especially its futuristic dream-forest, that one's sense of the poetic nuances of the play and its overarching vision of romantic harmony was confused. Conversely, Lisa Peterson's Renaissance Othello was an incisive study in black and white of corrosive sexual jealousy, while Laird Williamson's Fascist era setting brilliantly enhanced Coriolanus.

One sensed in new Artistic Director Bill Rauch's selection of plays and directorial approaches a desire to attract younger spectators. Like other festivals, OSF is attempting to counter the aging of its audience, and Rauch and Executive Director Paul Nicholson realize that OSF simply must attract new spectators if it is going to remain economically and artistically viable. The Festival's operating budget for 2008 was $25,900,000, and amazingly 78% of that figure came from earned income. During the 2007 season the Festival had a financial impact on southern Oregon of $163,123,808, and still employs approximately 450 theatre professionals for eleven plays during its eight month season. (1) These statistics are amazing, and emphasize the Festival's overall economic and artistic health. However, they also emphasize how hard the Festival must work to maintain current audience levels. Hence, perhaps, the directorial choices of Penny Metropulos in Errors and Mark Rucker in Dream: way over-simplify an early comedy by setting it on "the western frontier," an icon of Americana; or blast spectators into a mind-bending journey to a futuristic fairy-world populated by gay fairies and a Captain Oberon whose love potion #9 ignites human sexual desire and leaves young couples nearly naked on stage. Great fun, to be sure. And while such "concepts" may lure younger spectators to the OSF, seasoned playgoers, and reviewers, might genuinely wonder at what cost to Shakespeare's poetry and even his plots.

Sheryl Harmon, a student in my OSF class, remarked after seeing Comedy of Errors that the production was "60% Blazing Saddles and 40% Shakespeare." Indeed, the playbill lists Errors as "Adapted by," not "Directed by," Penny Metropulos. Ms. Harmon's observation was astute: the set was the multi-level Shady Pine Saloon in "A town west of the Pecos," complete with a hanging pole, rope, and pulley suggesting that lynching occurred frequently at Shady Pine. The town was inhabited by a rambling assortment of folks one might expect to find in such a locale, either shifted from Shakespeare's Ephesus to the wild west or added for local color. Thus Shakespeare's Duke Solinus became the town's sheriff; Emilia, Shakespeare's Lady Abbess, became the "proprietress of the saloon" and the "Madame" for several sleazy "dancehall gals" (named Starr and Grace) who "worked" upstairs; Doctor Pinch, Shakespeare's schoolmaster, became the "snake-oil" salesman Doctor Antonio Pitch; and Angelo the goldsmith became Li Wei, a Chinese merchant played by Cristofer Jean with surprisingly stereotyped diction and gestures. Other denizens included several cowboys, a mine owner, a sheriff's deputy, and Jose Luis, played by Rene Millan, a troubadour in Spanish leather and splendid sombrero who strummed his guitar as he crossed the stage singing love songs in English and Spanish and narrating the twists of the plot even when they had little to do with Shakespeare's play. The entire production was highly farcical, with numerous beatings of the bewildered Dromios; cowboys pursuing the dancehall gals up and down the stairs; Nell, wide as a VW Bug, lurking everywhere and lustily chasing Dromio of Syracuse all over the set; Jake, the sheriff's deputy, lassoing them thar bad uns whenever necessary, including both Dromios and in 4.4 Antipholus of Ephesus; and a ludicrous riot with everyone, guns a-blazing, chasing as noisily as possible everyone else all over the saloon for no discernable reason connected to either Shakespeare's plot or Metropulos's adaptation thereof.

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The 60% of the script that was cut was replaced by songs and additional dialogue, written by Metropulos and her assistants Sterling Tinsley and Linda Alper, that had no connection to Shakespeare's Ephesus. Millan also sang several songs popularly associated with the American west, such as "Oh My Darling, Clementine," as well as some lovely Spanish ballads. Egeus gambled upstairs next to the hanging pole with three locals trying to save his neck as coyotes howled in the background, and Adriana and her sister Luciana debated husbands' loyalty and the shrewishness of wives in calico dresses, cowgirls' riding boots, and leather skirts. In the midst of this bizarre cacophony some of the play's deeper concerns with self-knowledge and identity, including Antipholus of Syracuse's "I to the world am like a drop of water" and "Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?" (2) were lost. David Bevington is right that "In such a mad world, the characters assume a license to embark on Saturnalian holiday," (3) and while the sense of maddening confusion in Shakespeare's plot may have inspired Metropulos's adaptation, nonetheless her concept overwhelmed rather than served the play.

Metropulos's setting in a town "west of the Pecos" suggested a metaphor that the production might have intended. The Pecos River runs southeast from central New Mexico to meet the Rio Grande in west Texas, and according to Wikipedia, the phrase "West of the Pecos" referred to the "rugged frontiers" of the American West. (4) West suggests, of course, a journey towards death, which is where Egeus is headed until the nearly miraculous discoveries in Act 5. Perhaps the "frontier" setting suggested a border situation in one's life, or within one's mind, where one can feel lost on a journey that defies reason. Perhaps. But the wholesale abandonment of so much of Shakespeare's language in the raucous saloon hindered rather than helped spectators grasp this potentially engaging metaphoric link to Shakespeare's comedy.

Walt Spangler's set for Mark Rucker's 1970s era A Midsummer Night's Dream utilized thoroughly the multiple technical resources of the Bowmer Theatre. Spanning the stage was a huge arc attached to which were different sized circles of light that illuminated the opening and closing scenes in Athens. The "green world" of the fairy kingdom was a psychedelic fantasy realm where androgynous fairies frolicked under large metallic stars that dangled from the ceiling and reflected shimmering lights around the entire theatre. Giant, hollow steel "trees" sprouted and curled upwards, suggesting rocket ships that might take one to a distant world but also resembled erect phalli. An erotic garden, indeed. Here, amid the brilliant, dancing lights, the lovers chased each other and their romantic fantasies, while Oberon and Titania feuded and later danced voluptuously.

Act 1 opened in the garishly lit, blue-tiled living room of Theseus and Hippolyta, a don and his lady straight from the Sopranos. They sat stiffly in white leather chairs as if posing for a production photograph, afraid to disturb a hair. Theseus, dressed in formal, spangled white dinner jacket, black silk pants, and sporting heavy, black-rimmed glasses, spoke with a pronounced and stylized Italian accent that suggested a caricature rather than a character. Buxom Hippolyta, wearing a classy evening gown and adorned with diamonds and pearls, sat equally still, moving only her lips as she spoke, her body rigid with formality if not fear of her betrothed, who brusquely reminded her that he had won her doing her injuries. Hippolyta shivered slightly at this reminder of their violent past. Linda Alper's Egeus was an "Athenian citizen," and the mother, not father, of Hermia. The play thus established three, and with Titania four, different female attitudes to human sexual relations. Egeus wanted to control Hermia's marital destiny, while Hermia, here a younger version of Egeus, insisted that with her eyes she saw only Lysander, who himself provoked laughter when he comically insisted that since Demetrius has her [i.e., Hermia's] "[mother's] love," Demetrius should marry "her," i.e., Hermia's mother. Casting Egeus as a mother created a sexually complex moment and recalled OSF's production of The Tempest in 2001, in which Demetra Pittman played Prospera, Miranda's mother, and created an enduring, tender image of a woman trying to teach her only daughter the treacheries of male sexuality amid a violent Italian court. Though Egeus was quite severe, nonetheless her care for her daughter's sexual future seemed genuine, especially given the extreme eroticism of the fairy world. Likewise Hippolyta; when Theseus condemned Hermia to "death or to a vow of single life" (1.1.121), Hippolyta stormed offstage well before her scripted exit at 126, leaving the autocratic Theseus floundering, arms akimbo, at "Come, my Hippolyta. What cheer, my love?" (122) that he spoke to her back. It was a hilarious moment.

The mechanicals, led by the marvelously hairy and round-bellied Ray Porter as Bottom, were hippies in workmen's hand-me-downs who drove onstage in the same star-splattered VW Bus that Porter as Autolycus had used in OSF's 2006 Winter's Tale. Bottom, of course, drove the bus, which stopped in the midst of the large metallic shapes that would be awash in swirling lights during the central scenes in fairy land. Bottom thus drove the actors into the dream world of the confused lovers where he would "play" Titania's lover. Dressed in red bell-bottom pants and yellow paisley shirt, he completely dominated his fellow thespians, who stepped aside every time Bottom pranced mightily to center stage to deliver yet another imposing impersonation.

The rambling monotones of the mechanicals' rehearsal yielded to the sparkling dialogues of John Tufts's Puck, Kevin Kenerly's muscular Oberon, and the wild gyrations of the gay fairies whose vivacious dancing to thumping 70s disco music exuded sexuality. Now in blue bodysuits, leather boots, and grass skirts as they dissed Bottom, now naked to the waist as they danced with and stroked the seductive Titania, the fairies embodied the vibrant eroticism of the play's dream world that included both jealousy of Titania's attention to Bottom and the sexual prurience of adolescence. As the four young lovers careened around the enchanted dream-forest outside the rigorous law of Athens, the fairies gradually stripped them of their clothing, until by the end of Act 4 they lay together wearing only underwear, suggesting the lovers' surrender to the desires of the flesh. Combined with the giant space-ships/phallic symbols and the dazzling lights that reflected crazily from the metallic stars that hung from the "sky," the entire theatre became a throbbing image of human lovers trapped in a dream become nightmare that stripped them of not only their clothing but also their identity. As the lovers chased each other about, wearing less and less, Oberon, the denizen of this entangled dream, perched inside one of the forest's strange metallic trees, grinning.

The most enduring image of the production was Bottom perched giddily on top of a giant metal platform, strewn with purple and orange pillows, that moved up and down and served as Titania's bower. Here she escaped to avoid Oberon's anger and cuddled her hairy lover. This was a dream indeed: a mere mortal "raised up" to the skies in a fairy kingdom and beloved of a very sexy queen in a tight black bodice, stroking his chubby body and winding him in her arms. Surely this dream was past the wit of mortal man to say what dream it was. Though Bottom's journey to a lover's meeting is whimsical, and he is not a wise man's son, still his goofy, grinning face reminds us that we journey repeatedly to see this play because for a few brief moments it tells us that men's and women's romantic dreams can indeed become--or at least seem--true, despite our faulty vision.

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For the final scene, Rucker separated the men and women as they watched Bottom's fumbling company perform Pyramus and Thisbe: Hippolyta, Hermia, and Helena sat atop the stage right vomitorium, while Theseus, Lysander, and Demetrius sat atop the stage left vomitorium. Like the theatre patrons, they faced the stage, and so became part of us. When they laughed at the silly performance--Moon balancing a large chunk of cheesecake on his head and Bottom roaring more than any lion could as he died, died, died, thus, thus, thus--so did we. This blocking isolated and emphasized the somewhat cruel remarks of the men and implicated us in their responses. We too, if we are to deserve the fairies' blessings at play's end, must show patience and tolerance for those who labor at festivals such as OSF to "make new" productions of Shakespearean plays that have been performed frequently.5 For the final tableau the three couples walked to center stage, turned toward the audience, and hoisted their champagne glasses, as much a toast to their weddings as to us. Egeus, whose matriarchal rule had been overturned by Theseus in 4.1 as he hears of strange metamorphoses from the young lovers, stood far upstage, drinking alone from a bottle.

Puck's farewell includes four variations of "amend": "mended" at 419; "mend" at 425; and "amends" at 429 and 433, the last word of the play. Unlike Metropulos's Errors, Rucker's Dream deserved our own amends. Whereas Metropulos bent Errors into an unrecognizable shape and cut heavily to make what was left fit her concept, Rucker used an evocative set to enliven his characters' erotic dreams. While both directors aimed to please, and both were trying to appeal to younger spectators, Errors was ultimately more about the director than the play. The OSF will appeal to younger spectators only with productions that respect Shakespeare's scripts and challenge spectators to appreciate his dramatic poetry. Metropulos's Errors obscured that poetry; Rucker's Dream enhanced it.

Lisa Peterson's Othello was a stunning dissection in black and white of sexual jealousy. Rachel Hauck's set was brilliant in its simplicity. The expansive Elizabethan stage was divided into three rectangles painted white: two large squares downstage were divided by a thick black stripe, with a smaller, slightly raised rectangle further upstage. Two white doors upstage led into various interiors, both in Venice and on Cyprus. White steps led to the dark interior of the upper stage, from which Desdemona appeared to elope with Othello. Attached to the posts of both the lower and upper stages were powerful tubular lights that glowed during several scenes, including the council scene in Act 1 and the celebration on Cyprus in Act 2. The black stripe down the middle of the white platforms was wonderfully symbolic. It symbolized Othello himself, who had literally entered into and split white Venetian society by marrying Desdemona; and also the divide within him as he struggled to resist his growing conviction that his wife is unfaithful. During several scenes the black stripe symbolized the actual divisions emerging in the play: Othello stood on the stripe as he delivered his tale to the council of his adventures and wooing of Desdemona, and Desdemona strode from one side of the divide to the other as she moved from her father to her husband in 1.3. Othello and Desdemona danced across the symbolic divide as they celebrated their reunion on Cyprus, and Iago and Othello exercised on either side of the divide at the beginning of 3.3. During his soliloquies, especially his first, Iago stood right on the stripe as he explained his hatred for the Moor and his plot to destroy him. Because there were very few props, the simple black and white of the set was a constant reminder of the racial dichotomies and blistering hate at the center--literally and metaphorically--of this play. The black and white of the set also highlighted the lush colors of Christopher Acebo's Renaissance clothing.

Desdemona emerged from the dark interior of Brabantio's house in a simple white smock at the top of the white stairs, holding a candle to the darkness, a visual image of white and black. Othello whistled from the vomitorium stage right, and she hurried down the stairs and across the black stripe towards her black lover; they embraced, then exited laughing. This silent, passionate moment--what need love for words?--was shattered by the loud, angry voices of Iago and Roderigo who, throughout the play and in stark contrast to Othello and Desdemona, dressed solely in black leather. From his first words, Dan Donohue, an exceptionally gifted actor, announced clearly that his Iago was driven by hate and sexual jealousy that Donohue made palpable. He spat out Iago's lines with a high-pitched, almost quaking tension in his voice, as if unable to draw sufficient breath to speak all that he felt. Monosyllables like "zounds" and "hate" split the air, and his vocal power enabled him to speak Iago's sentences with no end stops, thus building the urgency of Iago's cascading anger as he articulates why he hates the Moor. Especially during Iago's soliloquies, one appreciated how a brilliant actor, alone on the stage, could amaze spectators' eyes and ears with his command of Shakespeare's verse. The defining moment for Donohue's Iago was his second soliloquy, 2.1.287-313: "That Cassio loves her, I do well believe 't," where he says he suspects the "lusty Moor" has leaped into his seat. At 298--"Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my innards"--Donohue grabbed his gut and suddenly bent over for several poignant seconds. Sexual jealousy thus clearly motivated his revenge. Although some of Iago's misogynistic lines in 2.1 that might indicate his latent homosexuality were cut, nonetheless Donohue chose a clear path to the enormously complex question of Iago's motivation: he feared two other men with his nightcap, and he had to destroy them both.

Peter Macon as Othello and Sarah Rutan as Desdemona were obviously deeply in love. Macon--bald, muscular, and commanding--stood before the senators in 1.3 in a flowing gold robe that boldly proclaimed his self-confidence. Macon told Othello's tales of wooing and adventure in measured, balanced phrases that captured Othello's sense of his own nobility; surely Macon understood Othello's insistence that he came from "men of royal siege" who demanded respect. Desdemona, in a floor-length green dress, stood exactly on the black stripe as she explained emphatically and joyfully to Brabantio why she loved the Moor and wanted to enjoy the "rites" for which she married him. Their reunion on Cyprus was visually and emotionally compelling; Desdemona leaped into Othello's arms as he hurried onstage, as if eager to make "love's quick pants" (2.1.82). As Othello proclaimed the celebration after the destruction of the Turkish fleet, he and Desdemona in matching black and gold--she in a low-cut, vivid red dress with gold sleeves, he in black pants, white shirt, and a floor length robe of sparkling gold with criss-crossed red embroidery--danced on and then across the black dividing stripe, obliterating the color differences that would soon poison Othello's imagination.

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Iago engineered the fight between Cassio and Roderigo very quickly after Othello and Desdemona exited in 2.3 to savor the "fruits" of their marriage: "That profit's yet to come 'tween me and you" (10). This line may be interpreted to mean that they have not yet consummated their marriage, and Peterson emphasized this interpretation when, after the fight, Othello and later Desdemona emerged still wearing the clothes they had worn during their dance moments before. As Othello says that he will be Montano's surgeon, one can speculate that this line again suggests that Desdemona and Othello do not now have time, or leisure, given Othello's rage at the altercation, to be alone together. Although one can certainly speculate on their having consummated their marriage at the Sagittary in 1.1, Peterson's staging here strongly suggested that the love for Desdemona that Othello abandons so quickly in 3.3 has never been physically shared.

Othello surveyed the battlements from the upper stage that in 1.1 was Brabantio's house and that was now Othello's last place of power. Desdemona, again in red and gold, pleaded earnestly and playfully with Othello about Cassio's reinstatement; she danced around him as if pleading while also teasing him, so that when Othello fervently cried: "Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul / But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again" (3.3.98-100), one sensed not only the absolute dichotomies that characterize Othello's mind, but also the depth of his love that when destroyed would herald the terrible chaos yet to come. During 3.3 Othello and Iago cast black shadows on the white rectangles as they too danced about each other, sparring with long pikes in a mock combat that soon became psychologically all too real. As in Iago's earlier soliloquies, so in this scene Iago's destruction of Othello's self-confidence moved in noticeable stages, marked by the rapid increases in the rhythm and intensity of Iago's speech as his quarry weakened. The verbal and physical sparring escalated quickly, as the increasingly loud clashes of their pikes symbolized the increasing tension of the scene. At 178ff, Iago's "O, beware, my lord, of jealousy," he and Othello stood face to face across the black stripe as Iago spat out the word whose thought had bent him in half in his second soliloquy and gnawed at him still. At 224, where Iago reminds Othello of Desdemona's "seeming" that sealed "her father's eyes up close as oak," Iago grabbed Othello's pike, symbolically taking from him a symbol of his manly (and possibly sexual) power and his "occupation." When Iago returned a moment later, on "My lord, I would I might entreat your honor / To scan this thing no farther" (260-61), Iago touched Othello's shoulder from behind, as if gently counseling him, then smirked as he walked slowly offstage. Othello spoke the following soliloquy: "This fellow's of exceeding honesty," where he laments being black, "having not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have," and being "declined / Into the vale of years" (274-95) while straddling the black stripe that now symbolized the rift between him and Desdemona.

The remainder of 3.3 and 3.4 complicated Iago's character and his relation to Emilia, and again featured several clear directorial choices. Desdemona, wearing a black and white embroidered dress and smiling broadly, more bounced than walked towards Othello at 3.3.295: "How now, my dear Othello?" When he complained of a headache and she offered him her handkerchief, he, not she, dropped it, so that he was partly at fault for not knowing how it was lost. Vilma Silva as Emilia, as attractive a woman as Rutan's Desdemona, was very pleased with finding the handkerchief and certainly saw it as a way to garner her wayward husband's favor, Iago treated Emilia gently, despite the cynicism of "common thing," taking the handkerchief from her as he stood behind her and gently stroked her breasts. While his language hints at misogyny, his gestures suggested either a genuine care for Emilia or, perhaps in keeping with the gnawing pain of sexual jealousy, a willingness to tease Emilia with caring because he knows that approach will work on her. To the extent that one sees Othello as the tragedy of Emilia, Silva's performance indicated a gentle woman desperate for her husband's love but also, until the final scene, completely unaware of his evil. Iago's narration of lying with Cassio, in which many critics find significant evidence of Iago's deeply suppressed homosexuality, seemed for Donohue more a sordid tale of women's infidelity than Iago's desperate cry of homoerotic desire for Othello and/or Cassio. Yet as they knelt together in the mock marriage that ends 3.3, Iago grasped lovingly Othello's hands and proclaimed loudly: "I am your own forever" (495) while centered above the black stripe, as if obliterating the racial differences between them. Conversely, the differences between Othello and Desdemona became painfully evident in 3.4, as her innocent pleading for Cassio and her attempt to substitute another handkerchief for the one with "magic in the web" (3.4.71) clashed with Othello's sudden anger that now emphasized his powerful physique. Here Macon hinted at the terrifying violence that his rage would ultimately produce.

Iago and Othello entered 4.1 wearing, respectively, long black and white coats, yet another image of the racial divide of the play. As Othello collapsed into a trance, Macon's superb command of his body signified his fall into a frightening, brutish being, hardly the supremely commanding figure of 1.3 and 2.2. After the eavesdropping on Bianca and Cassio, which Othello observed ironically from above, the place from which Desdemona had descended and from where he had confidently surveyed the battlements in 3.2, Macon unleashed a physical and verbal violence that led to a terrifying finale. His slap of Desdemona at 4.1.243, "Devil!," sent her sprawling to the ground. His questioning of Emilia in 4.2 was so furious that Othello seemed liable to strike Desdemona even before they spoke. Again, Peterson's direction and actors' choices created a profoundly terrifying scene. On Othello's "Ah, Desdemon! Away, away, away" (4.2.43), which includes an affectionate abbreviation of her name, Desdemona, still wearing the black and white embroidered dress, rose and gently kissed his cheek even as he wept at the impossibility churning within him: "If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself" (3.3.294). For a moment one sensed that Desdemona and Othello might rewrite their script, so powerful was Desdemona's gentleness. Yet even as he wept, Othello's rage returned, and in his probable reference to Desdemona's genitals as a "cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in!" (4.2.63-64) one realized that Othello had fully imbibed Iago's poison; the probable sexual pun on "cunning whore" only sealed her fate.

The willow scene was unusually poignant because of the huge chasm now open between the jocular Emilia and the dazed Desdemona. They were attended by a small boy, perhaps symbolizing the child Othello and Desdemona might have had, until Emilia shooed him away as Desdemona sang Barbary's tale of "couching" with more men. Emilia enjoyed being naughty, seeming to relish committing a small vice for a "great price" and making her husband a monarch, thus hinting perhaps at there being some justification for Iago's jealousy, despite her sternly denying it to him in 4.2. She spoke her lines about husbands' and wives' infidelity standing behind Desdemona and thus addressing spectators, as if lecturing us about why women "fall." This Emilia would have walked a long way for a touch of Lodovico's nether lip.

Desdemona's bed, framed by four posts, rose from below; flute music drifted over the stage. Othello entered from the stage left vomitorium, which meant that he had a long walk to the bed. Wearing a white shirt that matched Desdemona's smock he spoke of putting out lights as he unsheathed his sword and approached the bed. He bent painfully, again evidently crying, over "that whiter skin of hers than snow"(5.2.4), an image suddenly reified because of the production's constant emphasis on the play's black/white dichotomy. Upon Desdemona's awakening, it was a terrifyingly brief moment between her gentle "Will you come to bed, my lord?" (25) that she speaks lying on her wedding sheets and her furious struggle to save her life. Othello finally picked her up, flung her upon the bed like a "cunning whore," and suffocated her. As Emilia knocked and screamed at the door, Othello covered Desdemona's body, as if covering his crime. Iago first tried to quiet Emilia with a kiss, and then, as his latent misogyny finally exploded at calling Emilia "filth," he stabbed her, becoming, like Othello, a man who has killed his wife. Emilia crawled painfully to Desdemona's bed, dying with the woman whom she could have saved had she but told her of the handkerchief's journey. In yet another stunning visual image, Cassio entered carrying the magical handkerchief. (Why does it simply disappear from so many productions after Bianca's exit at 4.1.1617) Having lost his sword moments before, Othello pulled from under Desdemona's bed a small knife which he wrapped in the handkerchief that Cassio, Desdemona's supposed lover, now gave back to Othello in a striking reversal of Othello's having given the handkerchief to Desdemona. Thus, the handkerchief, which makes the play turn on the slightest of circumstances, (6) traveled ironically back to Othello from the man who so fervently hoped in 2.1 that Othello would "Make love's quick pants in Desdemona's arms" (82). Othello stood at the head of the bed, narrating yet another version of his heroic self in the balanced tones of his council speech in 1.3, and then stabbed himself. Wanting desperately to "die upon a kiss" (370), and terrifyingly aware of his folly, Othello struggled agonizingly to get onto the bed. Shedding his blood on the weeding sheets that in this production we apparently were to assume were never spotted with Desdemona's virginal blood, Othello embraced Desdemona. Macon's physical agony made words useless. "All that is spoke is marred" (5.2.368).

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Director Laird Williamson and set designer Richard L. Hay, both OSF veterans, combined to produce a stunning production of Coriolanus that maximized the acting space and technical features of the New Theatre. 1-he circular seating focused the action on the center stage. The actors used four different entrances, creating a sense of rapidly developing political and military action. During the battle scenes, soldiers also emerged from "below" through trap doors to deliver weapons, suggesting both the Elizabethan theatre's symbolic location of hell and the eternal hellishness of war. Political banners hung from the rafters and above two upper doors, from which several characters, including Coriolanus, Menenius, Brutus, Volumnia, and Aufidius, emerged to speak. The circular seating also implicated spectators in the play's actions, especially the violent battle scenes but also scenes of political manipulation, as in 2.3 and 3.1. As the generals, soldiers, thugs, enraged citizens, and politicians emerged onto the circular stage, they came from among us, the spectators, to do our bidding and to fight our wars; as Pogo remarked, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Though ostensibly set in fascist Europe of the 1940s, the production transcended both its classical origins and its modern setting while also unavoidably reminding spectators of the war in Iraq, especially when a group of citizens emerged after the peace with Corioles carrying shopping bags full of stuff they had bought at the mall. One recalled President Bush's cynical response to the American people after 9/11: "Go shopping."

Shakespeare's "mutinous Citizens," modern "insurgents" of Rome dressed in battle fatigues, carried banners, baseball bats, pole axes, shovels, and guns; here was a rabble every bit as unruly as the professional soldiers of Coriolanus or Aufidius. Into this mob walked Richard Elmore as the stately Menenius in a dark suit, white shirt and tie, black overcoat, and fedora, a peripatetic philosopher explaining confidently the tale of the belly as he strode amid the hungry. The visual contrast was stunning: The overturned benches and chairs, weapons, and trash littering the stage suggested that reasonable arguments, however nobly expressed, matter little when deprivation has driven people into mobs willing to bash heads for food. Accompanied by soldiers in Nazi-era uniforms and jack-boots and speaking into cell phones, Danforth Comins as Coriolanus vented his contempt for the "fragments" and "rats" (1.1.223, 250) of Rome, thus establishing the enormous pride that animates his character and the enmity that would propel Coriolanus towards his fatal alliance with Aufidius.

In 1.3 Williamson brilliantly focused the central place of war in this play. At opposite entrances to the stage stood cardboard human figures full of holes that soldiers and policemen use in target practice. At the base of the targets were several trophies that adults or children might today win at sporting events. These were presumably shooting trophies won by Coriolanus. However, as Volumnia, Virgilia, and later Valeria spoke, Williamson introduced Virgilia's son, dressed in his own Nazi uniform, holding a machine gun and pointing at the targets, as if practicing shooting; perhaps then these were his trophies, awarded for his young marksmanship. In raising this boy, Volumnia's lust for yet another Hector in the family had obviously dominated. From the boy's shooting practice to the sights and sounds of war in 1.4 was but a short step; the child is father to the man. Sounds of machine guns and choppers filled the theatre; soldiers, screaming violently, poured onto the stage from all directions, including hell's mouth; one thought of Francis Ford Coppola's battle scenes in Apocalypse Now (1979). Facing Michael Elich's Aufidius in 1.8, Comins raged with bestial glee at the battle. While the mano a mano fight is certainly necessary for the play, it suddenly seemed anachronistic in a battle filled with machine guns and helicopter gunships. Reporters using laptops and cell phones, in the style of NPR, relayed Caius Martius Coriolanus's victory to the tribunes and citizens of Rome, again suggesting a contemporary connection. Volumnia's "Oh, he is wounded, I thank the gods for 't" (2.1.120), while celebrating her son's physical war wounds, also suggests the deep psychological wound in his character.

Coriolanus's attempt at humility and then his surrender to the wound of self-destructive pride were superb. Comins commanded well the range of emotions through which Coriolanus travels in the middle of the play, and his excellent diction articulated clearly Coriolanus's complex arguments for why he apparently wishes to serve the citizens of Rome even as his own insolence betrays him. He appeared genuinely humble in 2.2, his injured arm in a sling, not wishing to show his wounds. Appearing in 2.3 in a torn gown tattooed with maps and names of revolutionary guerilla leaders such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Comins's voice and gestures yet evinced contempt for those whose favor he claimed to court. As political chaos threatened in 3.1, again suggesting a populace unable to govern itself, the contemporary clothing suggested the urban riots of the late 1960s in American cities, and emphasized the play's questioning of the possibility of citizens' self-rule and the dilemma caused by leaders more interested in their own power than in the well-being of their citizens. Comins and Robynn Rodriguez as Volumnia brilliantly captured this dilemma in their confrontation in 3.2. In a floor-length, blood-red dress, Rodriguez urged her son towards a compromise with himself that she knew he could not sustain. Turning her back on Coriolanus as she spoke, she deftly forced him to follow her across the stage, as if he were falling into the vacuum she created by moving away. Coriolanus's resignation, head bowed, in "Well, I must do 't" (3.2.112) signaled his fatal capitulation not only to Volumnia's power over him, but also to the cynical manipulation of his appearance at the marketplace by Sicinius and Brutus. In 3.3, standing center stage behind a podium, Coriolanus condemned us, the spectators, as he ripped the military medals from his uniform and finally banished us to our ignorance, too easily manipulated by the very forces that Coriolanus despises yet sought to control. As from us came the soldiers that made hideous war, so now from us also came the ignorance that drove away the one man who could have saved the city.

Wearing rags, Coriolanus crawled to Aufidius's house in Antium. Michael Elich as Aufidius clasped him heartily, emphasizing visually the eroticism of their shared love of violence. Here the wolf loved, not the lamb, but another wolf. (7) The presumed peace afforded by Coriolanus's departure from Rome prompted construction workers in hard hats and their wives to go shopping, and citizens greeted Sicinius and Brutus with popcorn on their way home. The news of the Volscians' advance upon Rome came via cell phone messages, and the sense of panic in Menenius and Cominius caused by news of Coriolanus's league with Aufidius heralded Williamson's brilliant conclusion to the play.

Barbed wire, suggesting the confines of a military compound, stretched across the stage, separating the combined armies of Coriolanus and Aufidius from Rome's citizens. Menenius, who had approached the mob in 1.1 to quell them with rhetoric, now wore the same clothing as he walked nimbly towards the wire, only to be greeted by thugs with machine guns. Coriolanus and Aufidius emerged above, wrapped in insolence. As he knelt, Menenius's passionate plea to Coriolanus as "O My son, my son" (5.2.72) elicited only anger from Coriolanus, and Menenius wept as he struggled to his feet, only to be kicked before he stumbled away. When Volumnia, Virgilia, Valeria, and the young Marcius (released from target practice?) entered in clothes soiled by war to plead for Rome, Williamson added a powerful stage image: Virgilia was visibly pregnant. Thus, were Coriolanus to destroy Rome, he would destroy not only his son and wife, but also his unborn child. Standing now with Virgilia in front of the hideous wire, his kiss was passionate and long, suggesting the final irony of Coriolanus's character: his fatal, human susceptibility to claims of "nature" in what he calls an "unnatural scene" (5.3.184). Rodriguez's delivery of Volumnia's final speech was brilliant, a finely balanced appeal during which she maintained excellent control of her rhythm and diction even as the poignancy of the imagery and urgency of her appeal constantly increased. Comins cried as he fell to his knees on "O Mother, Mother! / What have you done?" (5.3.183-84). Volumnia ironically welcomed her son back into his family even as she certainly knew, given the culture of the play's world, the consequences of her son's capitulation; he could not tread upon her womb, or his wife's.

Coriolanus's death was cannibalistic. In the supreme irony of the play, the code of honor into which Coriolanus is born and which his mother nurtured in him demands his death: "I am glad thou hast set thy mercy and thy honor / At difference in thee. Out of that I'll work / Myself a former fortune" (Aufidius, 5.3.200-02). As if seeking satanic resolve to murder Coriolanus, Aufidius stared into the hellish light beneath the stage as he debated with the conspirators in 5.6. The Second Lord's appeal to Coriolanus's nobility could not save him from mob violence; Aufidius's thugs stabbed him savagely.

At 4.5.232-34, the First Servingman asserts that "Peace is a very apoplexy, / lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of/more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men." One sensed that Williamson's contemporary staging of Shakespeare's classical play about a decorated general who tragically sought peace at the cost of military "honor" and bowed to the demands of love was uncomfortably accurate. The human community's appetite for war, and its savage violence, seems unlimited.

Michael W. Shurgot, Seattle, Washington

Notes

(1.) Production information courtesy of Amy Richard, Media Relations Manager, Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Reviewer's Packet, 2008. In the 2008 season, the OSF, reacting to the recession, cut about $5,000,000.00 from its overall budget.

(2.) 1.2.35-40; 2.2.211-15. All textual references are to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).

(3.) Bevington, Introduction, Comedy of Errors, in Complete Works, 4.

(4.) On this phrase, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecos_River

(5.) A Midsummer Night's Dream has been performed at OSF in 1949, 1955, 1961, 1966, 1971, 1979, 1987, 1993, 1998, 2003, and 2008.

(6.) On this aspect of Othello, see especially Bernard McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 89-144.

(7.) See Stanley Cavell, "Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics," in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 143-77. Cavell writes: "The circle of cannibalism, of the eater eaten by what he or she eats, keeps being stretched out, from the first to the last. You might call this the identification of narcissism as cannibalism," 152.