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prologuemagazine for members fall 2014

introducing the 2015 season

InsideAmerican Revolutions Commissions

Lynn Nottage:When the Jobs Leave Town

Stan Lai: Utopia, Martial Law andChinese History

2 Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival

PrologueThe Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s magazine for members Fall 2014

EditorCatherine Foster

DesignCraig Stewart

Contributing WritersCatherine Foster, Senior EditorJudith Rosen, Freelance Writer and DramaturgEddie Wallace, Membership and Sales ManagerRob Weinert-Kendt, Freelance WriterMark Dundas Wood, Freelance Writer

Production AssociateBeth Bardossi

ProofreadersPat BrewerAmy Miller Oregon Shakespeare FestivalArtistic Director: Bill RauchExecutive Director: Cynthia Rider

P.O. Box 158Ashland, OR 97520Administration 541-482-2111Box Office/Membership 800-219-8161; 541-482-4331Box Office/Membership fax 541-482-8045Membership email: membership@osfashland.org

www.osfashland.org

Mission Statement Inspired by Shakespeare’s work and the cultural richness of the United States, we reveal our collective humanity through illuminating interpretations of new and classic plays, deepened by the kaleidoscope of rotating repertory.

2015 Season

Angus Bowmer TheatreMuch Ado about Nothing

William Shakespeare Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

Guys and DollsMusic and lyrics by Frank Loesser;

book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows Directed by Mary Zimmerman

Fingersmith World Premiere Adapted by Alexa Junge from the book by Sarah Waters Directed by Bill Rauch

Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land U.S. Premiere Stan Lai Directed by Stan Lai Sweat World Premiere, American Revolutions A co-commission with Arena Stage Lynn Nottage Directed by Kate Whoriskey

Thomas TheatrePericles William Shakespeare Directed by Joseph Haj

Long Day’s Journey into Night Eugene O’Neill Directed by Christopher Liam Moore The Happiest Song Plays Last Quiara Alegría Hudes Directed by Shishir Kurup Allen Elizabethan TheatreAntony and Cleopatra William Shakespeare Directed by Bill Rauch

Head Over Heels World Premiere Script by Jeff Whitty; music and lyrics by the Go-Go’s Directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar

The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas, adapted by Charles Fechter Directed by Marcela Lorca

2015 opening weekend: February 27–March 1.

©2014 Oregon Shakespeare Festival

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PrologueThe Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s magazine for members Fall 2014

EditorCatherine Foster

DesignCraig Stewart

Contributing WritersCatherine Foster, Senior EditorJudith Rosen, Freelance Writer and DramaturgEddie Wallace, Membership and Sales ManagerRob Weinert-Kendt, Freelance WriterMark Dundas Wood, Freelance Writer

Production AssociateBeth Bardossi

ProofreadersPat BrewerAmy Miller Oregon Shakespeare FestivalArtistic Director: Bill RauchExecutive Director: Cynthia Rider

P.O. Box 158Ashland, OR 97520Administration 541-482-2111Box Office/Membership 800-219-8161; 541-482-4331Box Office/Membership fax 541-482-8045Membership email: membership@osfashland.org

www.osfashland.org

Mission Statement Inspired by Shakespeare’s work and the cultural richness of the United States, we reveal our collective humanity through illuminating interpretations of new and classic plays, deepened by the kaleidoscope of rotating repertory.

Contents

4 Voices of RevolutionAmerican Revolutions uses a

multitude of voices to tell America’s story onstage—and it’s showing the theatre world that it’s possible to dream big. By Catherine Foster

8 When the Jobs Leave Town Lynn Nottage’s latest play takes a searing look at the de-industrial revolution in a struggling town. By Catherine Foster

10 Utopia and Martial Law Onstage How a crazy theatrical combo of a farce and a tragedy became one of the best-known plays in the modern Chinese language. By Stan Lai

12 The Musical Travels of Pericles Like Pericles, composer Jack Herrick’s score will take a journey from folksy to techno, with a little Celtic thrown in. By Rob Weinert-Kendt

13 A Victorian Play with a Modern Heart Alexa Junge’s challenge in adapting Fingersmith was to trim down the huge book while still staying true to the characters’ needs and wants. By Judith Rosen

14 Wishes Do Come True . . . Director Mary Zimmerman, used to transforming ancient tales, now takes on Guys and Dolls— a different kind of enchantment. By Mark Dundas Wood

15 Shake Your Booty Head Over Heels is an exuberant new musical mash-up that expresses director Ed Sylvanus Iskandar’s motto: “Where the play is the party.” By Eddie Wallace

From the Membership and Sales ManagerEddie Wallace

Still Risking

This Prologue is printed on recycled paper.

All photos by Jenny Graham unless otherwise credited.

Welcome to the upcoming 2015 season, the 80th anniversary of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival!

With every anniversary, we remember our founder, Angus Bowmer, and what a creative and bold risk-taker he was. “Gus” was brave and ambitious enough to envision a Shakespeare festival in a small Southern Oregon town that could, in time, become a treasured cultural destination for theatre lovers from all over the country. One also wonders about the resistance he encountered when he presented OSF’s first non-Shakespeare plays. (For you history buffs, it was You Can’t Take It with You in 1939 at the Holly Theatre in Medford.) No doubt more than a few letters crossed his desk complaining that he’d lost his way.

That sense of risk and opportunity continues to inform our work today. No one could have known when Bill Rauch and Alison Carey announced the American Revolutions: the U.S. History Cycle commissioning project in 2008 that one of its early successes, Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way, would go on to win the first Tony Award for Best Play in OSF’s history.

In the 2015 season, we’ll be inspired by stories of people who risk it all with no hope of knowing the outcome. It may be the risk of truly exposing oneself to the possibility of love, as we see with Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing, Sky Masterson and Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls and the young lovers of Fingersmith and Head Over Heels. Risk proves tragic for the title characters in Antony and Cleopatra, while a broken family finds that love is not enough to save them in Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Edmund Dantès risks his life to avenge his false imprisonment in The Count of Monte Cristo. The title character of Pericles travels the world to simply survive and protect the lives of those he loves. Yazmin risks opening her home to her Philadelphia neighborhood residents, and opening her heart to a lover, in The Happiest Song Plays Last. The characters in Sweat and Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land find that the violent fluctuations of the worlds around them force them into actions that will alter their lives forever.

Thank you for your support, your generosity and your willingness to travel with us on the perilous, hilarious, tuneful, thrilling and tragic adventures of the 2015 season. Let us be inspired to be brave, adventurous and bold in our own journeys.

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Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival

American Revolutions uses a multitude of voices to tell America’s story onstage—and it’s showing the theatre world that it’s possible to dream big. By Catherine Foster

American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle is making waves. Big ones.

Since 2008, OSF’s ambitious 10-year program of commissioning 37 plays (the same number in OSF’s Shakespeare canon) has made two dozen commissions. OSF has produced five of them: American Night (by Richard Montoya and Culture Clash, 2010), Ghost Light (Tony Taccone, with Jonathan Moscone, 2011), Party People (UNIVERSES, 2012), All the Way (Robert Schenkkan, 2012) and The Liquid Plain (Naomi Wallace, 2013). Lynn Nottage’s Sweat will run in 2015.

And the regional theatre world is paying attention. American Night has had four productions around the country. Ghost Light played at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2012 and Party People will run there this fall. The Liquid Plain is scheduled for Off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre next spring.

But perhaps the most heralded of all is All the Way, which is OSF’s first appearance on Broadway. Bill Rauch directed the play, with a different cast that starred Bryan Cranston, for its pre-Broadway tryout at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge and

then a limited four-month engagement on Broadway this year. It was a huge success, winning numerous awards, including Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Actor, and recouping its $3.9 million investment just days after its 100th performance. It made history by breaking all box office records for a straight (non-musical) play on Broadway.

Not bad for a dream In 2006, Bill Rauch was sitting in his house in Los Angeles, contemplating what he might do as OSF’s new artistic director, were he lucky enough to get the job. He wondered, what would Shakespeare do?

“Shakespeare addressed the anxieties of his age—about who would replace the childless monarch, Elizabeth—by dramatizing past episodes of the transfer of power in his country’s history,” Rauch says. “How could we address the anxieties of our age and create new paths to the future by dramatizing moments of change in our own country’s history? The United States was started by an act of revolution. What are the other moments of explicit or implicit revolution that we need to remind ourselves of as we continue to engage in the difficult and beautiful experi-ment that is our nation?”

At the time, he and Alison Carey were working at Cornerstone Theater Company, which they’d co-founded in 1986. Rauch and Carey were used to bringing together different groups of people to have conversations about big topics, like faith, and then

American Night (2010): René Millán and Stephanie Beatriz The Liquid Plain (2013): June Carryl and Kimberly Scott

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writing plays from what emerged from those conversations. So this felt like a logical next step. They had many conversations with artists, historians, producers and OSF audiences about the program’s shape and design. Others told them that producing historical plays—which by definition require a lot of exposition—can be challenging. Rauch found, however, that “most people loved the idea from the get-go.”

When Rauch was hired at OSF, Carey came up from LA to establish American Revolutions. In the early days of determining a thematic structure for the program, the idea of setting one play during the term of each president was first explored, then discarded. So was the idea of one play for each decade. They found that whenever they tried to make the assignment too specific, playwrights tended to write to those exact parameters, rather than about what moved them. The call to writers became something both specific and loose: Write about a moment of change in American history.

“The only thing that matters is that we get good plays,” says Carey. “We came up with a frame that left the decision-making about what the art should be to the playwright. They could follow their passions. And that has seemed to work.”

In conceiving the program, however, Carey left room for OSF to gently steer writers to areas of special interest to the company. This year’s class will be writing three of these focused commissions: Dominique Morisseau about African Americans during the Civil War; Dan O’Brien about Americans’ relationship with guns; and an as-yet-unnamed writer on how the choices we have made in the past affected our natural world.

In 2010, Carey hired Julie Felise Dubiner, a dramaturg with a degree in history and knowledge of the regional theatre world as associate director. Dubiner says she doesn’t know any other program in the country that is as large as OSF’s, or as successful. “I think part of the reason why we are getting more producible plays out of our program,” Dubiner says, “is because we are directing passion instead of just saying, ‘Go off and write something and tell me how it worked out for you.’ The writers we’ve had so far have really cottoned to that idea and built on it in magnificent ways.”

What do they look for in choosing writers? Diversity of style, life experience, subject matter and voice. “We look for people who seem comfortable in delivering exposition, because it’s hard,” says Carey. “Generally, a lot of our writers have already written plays about history, like Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel, 2006, and Ruined, 2010). Or you look at someone like Quiara Alegría Hudes (Water by the Spoonful, 2014; The Happiest Song Plays Last, 2015), who has not written a lot of strictly history plays, but she has a specific voice and such a very specific storytelling style that you can imagine her doing it easily.”

“The only thing that matters is that we get good plays.”— Alison Carey

Ghost Light (2011): Tyler James Myers Party People (2012): Steven Sapp

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Supporting writers OSF gives playwrights as much time as they need to write their plays and provides a variety of support. “Some say, ‘I want to come here for two weeks and just sit in the apartment and look at the trees,’ and we can do that,” says Carey. “Rhiana Yazzie was sent on a research trip to Virginia and Massachusetts, because that’s what she needed. UNIVERSES toured the country interviewing surviving members of the Black Panthers and Young Lords. Lisa Loomer spent some time at the University of Texas because it connected with the content of her play.”

Writers are also allowed to have as large a cast as they need for their play—something unheard of in regional theatre. “I think a lot of playwrights, especially the younger ones, will probably tell you that in recent years they have had plays passed on that were more than five people, more than four people, more than three people,” says Dubiner. “So for us to specifically commission them and say, 9 doesn’t scare us, or 17 is possible, is really inspiring to the artists.”

All the playwrights so far have had a relationship with either a professional historian or somebody knowledgeable about the historical period they’re writing about. Naomi Wallace used two for The Liquid Plain. “Working with such brilliant historians as Marcus Rediker and Robin D. G. Kelley was invaluable for me in my writing process. Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History contains a story about a murder that becomes central to my play. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination was inspirational in thinking about how our limited democratic processes have been dreamed into something more truly just by people who have the least.”

American Revolutions also provides an annual retreat, American Conversations, that usually convenes in New York. Playwrights who’ve already had their work produced at OSF can enlighten the newcomers. Writers are also encouraged to visit Ashland and see shows and meet the company. Being on the OSF campus helps the artists learn more about what makes the company tick, see the shows in rep and meet as many people as possible before they start writing.

All the Way (2012): President Lyndon Johnson (Jack Willis) gives Sen. Hubert Humphrey (Peter Frechette) the legendary “Johnson treatment.”

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“I think it helps that the playwrights are able to really talk to one another and have a joint sense of ownership of the program and to take care of each other as they go through the process of meeting an institution as specific as OSF,” says Carey.

When the play is fairly far along, it’s given a workshop. OSF supplies actors, dramaturgs, rehearsal time and theatre space to bring the script to the next level.

The playwrights acknowledge the benefits of American Revolutions’ largesse. “I’ve now been working with OSF and Bill for a decade,” says Robert Schenkkan. “I remain so appreciative of this relationship and so grateful to the staff and the artists and the audience and the Board of OSF that has made this possible. It’s hard to see how this work would have happened otherwise.”

Lynn Nottage says she doesn’t think she ever would have taken the journey of exploring the lives of laid-off industrial workers in Pennsylvania if she hadn’t had the commission for Sweat. “Alison Carey has been integral to that process,” she says. “She’s been a wonderful presence and dramaturg and producer of the project from its inception. American Revolutions gave me the frame to really pursue this story.”

Co-commissions and co-productionsFrom the beginning, the design of the program was to involve other theatres, says Carey. “We know we cannot produce 37 plays in a timely fashion. And we have no desire to take someone’s beautiful play and stick it in a drawer in case we can fit it in five years from now. We are going to encounter plays that we love that we cannot produce. But if they have other artistic homes, then that’s great.”

Sweat is a co-commission with Arena Stage. The March, by Frank Galati (adapted from the novel by E. L. Doctorow), was a co-commission with Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, which premiered it in 2012. When another theatre decides to co-commission a play, OSF pays the entire commission cost and the co-commissioning theatre pays for the development that happens within its walls. Different rules apply if the play is a co-production.“The March was not a co-production,” Carey says, “so we did not contribute to the production. Whereas when we did Ghost Light, we commissioned it and did all the development, then it became a co-production between us and Berkeley Rep later.”

The playwrights can choose which theatres to be co-commission partners. Dominique Morisseau, for example, has a relationship with the Penumbra Theatre, in St. Paul, so OSF approached Penumbra’s co-director Lou Bellamy to co-produce her play. “This topic [African Americans in the Civil War] is one of the great passions of Lou’s life,” Carey says, “and he is bringing

together many of the great scholars of this time period. OSF and Penumbra are jointly sponsoring a symposium.”

For the two LBJ plays, OSF commissioned All the Way and Seattle Repertory Theatre, with which Robert Schenkkan has a relationship, commissioned The Great Society. Seattle Rep is co-producing both plays, which will run in repertory there— All The Way from November 14 to January 4, 2015, and The Great Society from December 5 to January 4, 2015. Bill Rauch will direct both.

Funding As the saying goes, “none of this would have been possible without the support of. . .” That American Revolutions exists at all is one of those strokes of amazing theatre luck. Soon after OSF submitted the initial grant application to The Collins Foundation in late 2007, the global financial meltdown struck. OSF did get its funding, Carey says, but if The Collins Foundation had waited even a month, “American Revolutions simply would not have happened. Every foundation in America was dramatically cut.”

Since then, numerous funders have stepped up to support this endeavor, including The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Edgerton Foundation’s 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 New Play Awards; The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; New England Foundation for the Arts; The Kinsman Foundation and The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust. (For a complete list, please visit www://osfashland.org/american-revolutions)

“American Revolutions is groundbreaking theatre and an important addition to the American repertoire of plays,” says Dr. Brad Edgerton, president of the Edgerton Foundation. “The Edgerton Foundation is proud to have supported four of the productions, and we commend OSF for continuing to produce world premiere plays in these trying economic times.” “We’re a very stable program at this point,” says Carey. “I can see us needing to expand just because of the number of plays we have to support, but so far, it’s good.”

She marvels at the program’s success. “A straight play about American political and legislative history was on Broadway, setting a record for highest ticket sales for a new play in its last week and outselling the musicals. It’s fantastic! This is a play that reminds audiences of what people are capable of in this world; that change is possible, that progress is the legacy of the best part of our country. And it says to people—theatre people and not—you can do this. This is what we are capable of as a field, so don’t back down and don’t stop imagining, and don’t make your world smaller, because you can make it really big. That’s what all American Revolutions plays, and the program itself, can do.”

“We are going to encounter plays that we love that we cannot produce. But if they have other artistic homes, then that’s great.”—Alison Carey

8 Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival8 Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Lynn Nottage’s latest play takes a searing look at the de-industrial revolution in a struggling town. By Catherine Foster

Sweat, an American Revolutions commission, got its start with a late-night email from Lynn Nottage’s close friend, a single

mother of two.

“She said she was completely broke; she was having a very difficult time making ends meet and had reached a level of desperation,” Nottage recounts in an interview at OSF. Her friend wasn’t asking for a handout, but said she wanted her close friends to understand her circumstances. “ ‘I just need some guidance. I need a shoulder to lean on just because I’m going through a very, very hard time.’ ”

The email broke Nottage’s heart. “I’d known this woman extremely well, and I had no idea the depths of her despair. She lives two doors down from me, and it made me realize that probably most of us are living two to three doors away from someone who is either in poverty or on the verge of poverty, and that’s the nature of the culture we’re living in right now.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement was just beginning. “We had no sense of what this was. All we knew was that there were these people in Zuccotti Park sitting there and saying, ‘99 percent of us are suffering while the 1 percent are continuing to get richer and richer.’ So my friend said, ‘Let’s go over there.’ ”

The two walked in circles and chanted. Later, her friend said, “I actually feel a little better. Nothing has happened, but I feel better to know that at least there is a voice to what I’m feeling, and I’m not by myself.”

The collapse of Reading The incident prompted Nottage to think deeply about how poverty was shifting the American narrative that hard work is all it takes to become successful. She wanted to write about a

city that symbolized what was happening in America, a city thathad gone from industrial powerhouse to abject poverty. That city, she found, was Reading, Pennsylvania, the home of the Reading Railroad, once one of the most powerful railroads in the country.

“I think we’re undergoing one of the greatest revolutions in our history,” she says. “In 50 years we’ll look back on this time and understand that fully.”

Reading began to go through a precipitous decline in the 1970s, which began with the collapse of the railroad. In the mid-’80s, several key sectors in manufacturing began to falter. In the 1990s and early 2000s, in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the steel and textile industries began to significantly erode and jobs were sent overseas. States also started to adopt “right-to-work” laws that inhibited union power. Currently, 40 percent of the people in Reading live below the poverty line, which is considerably above the national average. It has a 50 percent high school graduation rate. Though the city is beginning to see some economic growth, the 2011 census singled out Reading as “the poorest city in America.”

“I wanted to find out how could this happen so quickly,” Nottage said. “And how could the revolution I’m looking at—the de-industrial revolution—change America so absolutely that you have people stuck in the towns, trapped, simply because they don’t even have enough money to move.”

Nottage began visiting Reading in early 2012. With assistant Travis Ballenger and an army of interns, she conducted a wide range of interviews over two years, starting with Reading’s first African-American mayor, who had been recently elected. Then they included the police department, the United Way and people living in shelters. They spoke to a dozen workers at union offices and found more on the picket sites. “I think workers just want to go on record to say that there are so many folks like them who are struggling,” she says, “and the fact that anyone is willing to listen gives them a sense of hope.”

She was most touched by a session with some workers who had been locked out of their factory for 93 weeks. “They were largely middle-aged men who had been working up to 40 years. It was their entire identity. They were making metal tubing. When they were 18 or 19 years old, they began probably at minimum wage, and in some cases had worked themselves up to $45 an hour.”

When the Jobs Leave Town

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Then, one Monday, the men arrived to find half the equipment had been shipped out overnight. In that moment, half those jobs were gone. It soon got worse. Management slashed workers’ pay to $15 an hour, cut benefit packages and increased work days. Even that wasn’t enough: Management locked them out. The workers picketed for 93 weeks, knowing they would never set foot back into that plant but determined to make a symbolic gesture. “I was really quite moved,” Nottage recalls, “because these are people—white, middle-class, blue-collar men—who had traditionally been on the opposite side of the divide from me, this African-American artist living in Brooklyn, and I thought, for the first time, we’re standing eye to eye. They understood what it meant to be marginalized by your own culture. They spoke quite compassionately about their fellow workers and eloquently about their situations and about directions they felt America should be going.”

When the workers stayed on strike, management brought in replacement workers—young Latinos and men from the surrounding counties who for years had wanted to get hired but were shut out because of the union and nepotism. The deal those workers got was even worse: no contracts, no benefits. “They can work these guys to death for six months and then say ‘Bye-bye,’ ” Nottage says. “It’s really cruel out there, what these factories are doing.”

Severed friendshipsThose events are mirrored in Sweat. A group of longtime co-workers and friends meet in a bar to complain, rant and commiserate about the rapidly declining situation in the factory. Because of the strike, Oscar, the bar’s Dominican busboy, has an opportunity to finally work at the plant—as a scab. For him, it’s an immigrant’s dream of getting ahead. But the locals who have been working at the plant for so long regard his crossing the picket line as tantamount to treason, and the tension spreads to violence.

“I know it’s not a new story, but I feel like it is very much the narrative of today,” Nottage says. “It’s not just the narrative of steelworkers, it’s the narrative of people in white-collar jobs, who had this assumption that they had taken all the necessary steps to assure their job security, and then one day they wake up and everything they know is gone. I know many people like that. We live with a level of uncertainty in America that we haven’t known, at least in my lifetime.”

In the world of Sweat, the co-workers are a racial mix of black, white and Latino. “I’m just representing what I saw,” Nottage says. “In Reading, there are people who have worked in those factories who had relationships and friendships that crossed color lines. The play isn’t about race, but the conversation isn’t absent. It’s part of the subtext of the piece. But it is a play about class.”

Nottage’s last play for OSF was Ruined, in 2010, which was based on interviews with Congolese women in refugee camps who had been raped during ongoing military conflicts. A play with that subject matter could have been a grim slog to sit through, but Ruined was leavened with humor, humanity and hope and has since gone on to be performed around the country.

“What I’m trying to do is get at the heart of the story, because as a playwright I’m interested in healing,” she says. “I hope when you leave my plays, somehow the spirit has gone through some subtle transformation. I think it’s true of Ruined. I think it’s true of Intimate Apparel (2006). There’s a spiritual alchemy that goes on, that when you leave, you’re not quite sure what you’ve experienced, but you have a different relationship to the community.”

“I know it’s not a new story, but I feel like it is very much the narrative of today.”—Lynn Nottage

Creating Social Sculpture

“When we were interviewing people in Reading, I began to feel like a car-petbagger who was feeding off their misery and then leaving and capital-izing on it. It’s not going to do the eco-nomically strapped city a lot of good if I create a piece of work that talks about them from a distance, but doesn’t directly engage the community. So, we came up with this idea of doing a social sculpture—a piece of performance art that combines activism, community and art, something that can live in the heart of Reading. It will be a piece of art that puts the people who most need to be in dialogue into the same space. This way they can directly expe-rience and explore what’s happening to their neighbors in a visceral way.

Reading is a fragmented city with a great racial and economic divide; people live in close proximity, but in very different communities. We thought, what if we can create this installation that invites people into the same space so that they can bear wit-ness to what’s happening to the entire town and recognize that their narrative is a communal one, not just about their small insular community but about a larger Reading community that is collectively experiencing the impact of the economic downturn.

In October, we’re going to bring a creative team to Reading for four days, where we will collaborate with the community, and begin to discuss how to create a piece of art that not only reflects community, but is also a vital part of the community. We’re hoping we can build a model for art-making that you can then be used in other cit-ies, where we invite a team of diverse filmmakers, visual artists, theatre artists and trans-media artists to im-merse themselves in a community and then create a collaborative piece of art that helps bring the community into dialogue.

The goal is to leave the city with this piece of art that would continue to ex-ist and reflect the story of the commu-nity as it evolves. Reading still thinks of itself in the past tense, and we very much want to help the community find a present-tense narrative.” —Lynn Nottage

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Prominent Taiwanese director and playwright Stan Lai wrote Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land for his theatre company in

1986. In the play, the casts of two very different plays accidentally show up on the same stage for their dress rehearsals. One, Secret Love, is a tragedy set in 1949 and the 1980s, and the other, The Peach Blossom Land, a farcical historical play. Lai recently came to OSF to talk about his play, which he will also direct. An edited transcript of that discussion follows.

The history of the productionSecret Love in Peach Blossom Land was the second play of our then-new theatre group, Performance Workshop, which will be 30 years old next year. Many people call our group the catalyst for modern theatre in Taiwan, which also makes it a catalyst for all of Chinese-speaking theatre. The fi rst play we did we thought was a highly experimental two-man show about a dying tradition of stand-up comedy in Chinese, but it turned out to be a hit. The audiotape of that performance sold 2 million copies in Taiwan, which only had 20 million people. Immediately, our theatre group was on the map.

In 1986, we came up with Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. The inspiration for writing this play came when we were attending the dress rehearsal with a friend who was an avant-garde theatre artist. She was trying to fi nish her dress rehearsal at about 5:00 in the afternoon. Suddenly, we saw these people who weren’t part of her cast come onstage and go about their business. They moved the piano on and put up a banner that announced the

graduation ceremony of some kindergarten! We’re sitting in the audience, wondering what is going on, and our friend is going nuts on the stage. She is shouting, “This place is mine, this is my time.” The parents and kids start coming in and we are watching all of this. This is what happened and still can happen in our part of the world.

If you had asked me in 1986 if we would still be doing this play in 2014, I would say, “You’re crazy!” The play has endured, and through many quirks of history it has become probably the best-known play in the modern Chinese language. We toured it in America in Mandarin Chinese in 1991. In 1992, we made a fi lm with that cast and added a Mandarin fi lm superstar so that the fi lm crossed over into popular culture. The one copy of that fi lm was shown at a fi lm festival in China. Many of my friends from China, like movie stars, etc., saw the fi lm through that print. The Chinese government confi scated our print, but then somehow it was shown, and everybody made videos of it and distributed it everywhere and people bought them. It was like an underground thing to be able to see Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land in China in the 1990s.

For almost 30 years now, people have been performing this play. The fi lm version has been going around everywhere. We started performing in China in 2006 with some known stars in the cast who loved the play and wanted to do it. That production is still being performed. Every year, we come together to do a 10-city tour of it. In Taiwan, it has iconic status.

How a crazy theatrical combo of a farce and a tragedy became one of the best-known plays in the modern Chinese language.

Utopia and Martial Law OnstageBlossom (Xie Na), Tao (Yu Entai) and Master Yuan (He Jiong) in the 2006

Beijing production, directed by Stan Lai.

Li Ya

n

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The story behind the play We wrote it at a very delicate time in our history when martial law had not been lifted. I often think, what does a foreign audience need to know to be able to understand this play? When I made the film, which went around to international film festivals, I had two pieces of introduc-tion at the top of the show. One of them explained 1949. This is when the Chinese civil war ended and the Communists took over China and the Nationalists moved to the island of Taiwan. If you don’t know that, the play doesn’t mean that much.

My parents and the parents of all of our cast went through 1949, which is for Chinese people in Taiwan deeply affect-ing, hugely significant. About two million people—including my father, who was a diplomat—crossed the Taiwan Straits in that year to run away from the war, which, basically, they lost. The slogans were: “We’re going to have a military maneuver and the U.S. is going to help us fight back and we are going to take over because we need to drive out the Commies.” Of course, it never happened and those people got old.

The story of Secret Love is like a lot of stories that I know from my father’s generation. Families and lovers who were separated in 1949 didn’t get to see each other for the rest of their lives, or until 1986, when people started saying, “The two sides aren’t talking and what the hell, I am going to go back myself.” This is something very difficult for an Ashland audience to understand. You couldn’t call, and a letter would never be delivered. You just didn’t know what happened to your family or loved ones. In 1988, Taiwan lifted martial law and people could officially start traveling from China to Taiwan. To this day, I can leave my home at 7 in the morning and be in Shanghai rehearsing with actors at 10. It has been a long jour-ney, but we are here now.

The second thing you should know is that A Chronicle of the Peach Blossom Spring is one of the most famous pieces of classical Chinese literature. It is a beautiful short piece written more than 1,000 years ago by the poet Tao Yuanming. Tao wrote about a fisherman who finds this idyllic land. The residents there tell him not to

let anyone know about their place. Of course, he does. Then people all go to look for it, and they can’t find it. All of us in Taiwan and China memorized this piece as schoolkids. When I was thinking about us-ing it in Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, I revisited it for the first time since junior high school. You can memorize it, but you don’t see the nuances until you grow up. I was questioning what actually is “utopia” and what is so special about Peach Blos-som Land. The way the poet describes it is that it is very normal—with fields, chick-ens and dogs. The people were refugees from a previous war centuries before they came into this place. The fisherman tells them stories of this dynasty and that one and they sigh, “Wow, so much has happened that we don’t know.” To me, to say that utopia is no knowledge of history, that is a pretty scathing repre-sentation of Chinese history, which was brutal 1,000 years ago and more brutal today.

On mixing comedy and tragedyShakespeare was the master at putting comedy and tragedy together. That’s why I thought if I had a chance I would try to put a comedy and a tragedy onstage at the same time and see what happens. I would not have ever written just Secret Love. That would be a very corny, senti-mental sort of thing. With a comedy or farce next to it, you have a frame that is interesting for our times, which were very disjointed. Our experience in Taiwan was a time of modernizing buildings, arts and theatre. You are seeing the city rebuilt into

high-rises, and you are losing all of these things you don’t even know about. For this production, we’ve changed the location to Ashland. The in-joke among us would be that the Peach Blossom Land actors weren’t supposed to go to the Bow-mer but maybe they were supposed to be part of the Green Show or something like that. The premise is that the Secret Love director has been commissioned by OSF to do this semi-autobiographical work about himself and he is given a mixed-race cast, which he doesn’t know how to handle. He thinks everyone should be Asian. These are the things we are adapting to the environment here.

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Yun (Brigette Lin) and Jiang (Chin Shi-chieh) in the 1992 film version of The Peach Blossom Land.

Stan Lai

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12 Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival12 Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival

A casual theatregoer wandering into a production of Shakespeare’s Pericles without a playbill or prior knowledge

might think it was a forgotten Homeric epic. That’s not too far off: Shakespeare harked back to the Greeks with this fantastical picaresque narrated by a chorus. And the best productions of Pericles make a case for it as a kind of timeless epic theatre that echoes down through the centuries, to the beginning of storytell-ing and song, and right back up to the present.

Director Joseph Haj’s upcoming produc-tion of Pericles, which opens in the Thom-as Theatre in late February, brings its own history with it. It will be partly based on a 2008 staging Haj did at PlayMakersRepertory Company in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he’s producing artistic director. The OSF production will have a new cast and some new designers, but Haj plans to bring along a few key PlayMakers associates to help recreate their original vision: scenic designer Jan Chambers, video designer Francesca Talenti and, perhaps most significantly, composer Jack Herrick, who is refashion-ing his earthy/ethereal score for the new production.

Herrick will be on hand through most of the rehearsal process, as his score is no mere press-play prerecorded underscoring but a song-heavy and very present character in the staging. Indeed, Herrick himself performed the score live in the North Carolina run, along with some cast members as singers and instrumental-ists. Part of his job in the coming rehearsal/re-composing process will be to teach the score to an onstage musician and some cast members.

“About 50 percent of the previous score we really like, and the rest we’ll work on,” Herrick says. “We tend to want to increase the amount of music in it; we’ve even given some thought to making it a musical, but I guess we backed up to a ‘playsical’—a play with songs.”

Those songs include settings of the opening invocation and other bits of narration by Gower, the play’s conveniently omniscient chorus, as well as an interpolated Shakespeare sonnet and a

fisherman’s chanty with lyrics that are largely Herrick’s invention. “I grazed freely over the material,” says Herrick, who has done scores for Haj’s Hamlet at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Wash-ington, D.C., and who, with his old-time string band the Red Clay Ramblers, has scored shows by Sam Shepard and Bill Irwin.

A play made for songPericles all but mandates a musical element: Its opening words are “To sing a song that old was sung.” For Haj, this framing

suggested “the troubadour tradition, the Homeric tradition, a folk tradition. The sea is in the ears of all the characters in this play.” Though the play’s action spans the Mediterranean, with the title charac-ter hurled over decades from Antioch to North Africa and back, and the play’s vi-sual design evokes a “pan-Mediterranean style,” Haj says. “What didn’t seem right to Jack and me was to make some pseudo-Mediterranean soundtrack.”

Indeed, Herrick’s Pericles score, he says, ended up “fairly eclectic, somewhat folksy, somewhat techno,” employing sampled music alongside live instruments. His own deep background in Americana and Appa-lachian folk surfaces in some Celtic-sound-

ing passages. Explains Herrick, “Those styles are perfectly modern and current, but they sound antique—or at least emotionally take us back through the years.”

This suggestive, non-exotic approach fits with Haj’s mandate. “We leaned rather intentionally away from anything that felt heroic or chivalric,” Haj says, instead interpreting the wild, Odys-sean journey of the title character as the story of “an Everyman, an ordinary person, trying to move his way through a life.”

Though Herrick says he much prefers the specificity and purpose of writing music for the theatre as opposed to “just writing a song,” not every marriage of theatre and music is foreordained. “You can’t just take a play and throw the band onstage,” he says. “You have to have a reason. But with Pericles, it’s a no-brainer.”

The Musical Travels of Pericles

Like Pericles, composer Jack Herrick’s score will take a journey from folksy to techno, with a little Celtic thrown in. By Rob Weinert-Kendt

Jack Herrick

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Writer Alexa Junge picked up Fingersmith when a friend rec-ommended it and then—propelled into its startling, vivid

world of Victorian con artists and thieves—barely put it down until its 500 pages were done.

She knew right away that she had to turn Sarah Waters’ Man Booker Prize–nominated novel into a play. The stage version of Fingersmith will have its world premiere at OSF in 2015.

“The characters were so alive, I could see them and hear them all speak,” Junge said during a recent interview at OSF. “Their needs were urgent, life or death. And the many different points of view, so mesmerizing in the book, felt innately theatrical. Every scene felt like a seduction.”

Adapting a book that betrays as well as seduces, and contains several dramatic plot twists was a challenge that she delighted in. Not only are we being told a story, we’re being directly spoken to by the characters, so that we think we’re part of that story. We have to shift our thinking and shift our hearts, but we can’t disengage; the characters are stand-ing there in front of us, working to win us to their perspective. They need us. They live and breathe because we’re there. And as we give to them and the story, we take from them in turn.”

Junge delighted in making the story’s romance part of this active engagement. Seeing a forbidden love grow opens our eyes to lives we don’t know we’ve been blind to, she says. “Waters reclaimed the Victorian novel by creating a narrative within it that could never exist in its day. Now I get to make theatrically present something that was forbidden, unnamed, while still being true to the time and the roles people had to play. You may think you know what this story is, but you don’t. It’s much more interesting than you think. It’s much more complicated as well.”

First, you cut. But what? After pitching her project to OSF and getting stage rights to the book, Junge faced her first creative hurdle in deciding what to cut. “That’s any adapter’s dilemma,” she notes: “How do I want to spend my time on the stage? What scenes do I want to see? Can I serve the plot as it is, or do I have to simplify?” Fingersmith, with its intricate, twisting story and its large cast of characters, posed a particular challenge.

She wondered briefly if she could do what the Royal Shakespeare Company did with Nicholas Nickleby in 1980: capture the work’s richness in a massive, six-hour, two-day production. She gave up that idea quickly; “Everyone I proposed it to blanched.”

Instead she set priorities by focusing first on the emotional needs of the characters. “When I write, I have to connect emo-tionally with each character’s story, to feel its every beat,” she says. “Then I focus on the

significant beats in the action.”

She was aware that staying true to the novel—its spirit and aims—might mean changing it. “You can’t sit with characters for ages, the way you can do in the book,” says Junge. “So to articu-late their stories, you sometimes have to reframe them in a way that an audience can more immediately understand and feel.” But as she built in or fleshed out motivations for selected char-acters, she aimed to make them an outgrowth of what was in the book, not a wholesale change. She saw signs that she was on the right track when, watching auditions, she couldn’t remember whether the scene being read was in the book or not.

“It’s that thing an adaptation does,” she says. “It’s different, but it feels of a piece with the original work and its world. It keeps essential what’s essential, but it also makes the work new.”

A Victorian Play with a Modern Heart

Alexa Junge’s challenge in adapting Fingersmith was to trim down the huge book while still staying true to the characters’ needs and wants. By Judith Rosen

Alexa Junge

Elis

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14 Prologue | Oregon Shakespeare Festival14

Do Come True...

Urban missionary Sarah Brown from Guys and Dolls—the 1950 musical based on stories by Damon Runyon—believes

steadfastly that true love is out there, fated for her, and that she’ll recognize her white knight instantly when he arrives. “I’ll know when my love comes along . . .” she sings. “I’ll know, as I run to his arms, that at last I’ve come home safe and sound.”

The sentiments of Frank Loesser’s song “I’ll Know” are nearly interchangeable with those in ballads written for Walt Disney’s Snow White (“Someday my prince will come . . .”) and Sleeping Beauty (“I know you! I walked with you once upon a dream. . .”).

But that shouldn’t be surprising. Guys and Dolls is in good company with a number of mid-20th-century American stage musicals with a fairy-tale sensibility. My Fair Lady is based on George Bernard Shaw’s take on the myth of “Pygmalion and Galatea,” but also calls to mind “Cinderella.” Funny Girl gives us the Ugly Duckling transformed to a Ziegfeld Follies swan. Once Upon a Mattress, meanwhile, goes directly to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea” for its libretto.

Gangsters with heartIn an interview at OSF in June, Director Mary Zimmerman said she recognizes Guys and Dolls’ connection with the worlds of storytellers like Andersen. “For all its milieu of Damon Runyon and the back-alley world of New York City, Guys and Dolls is, in the end, a sort of brilliant, complex fairy tale,” she said. “It’s a world in which the gangsters aren’t particularly dangerous, and the ‘doll’ Adelaide—the burlesque performer—wants nothing more than a house full of children and a white picket fence. A great deal of its charm resides in how essentially sweet these rough-and-tumble characters and story turn out to be in the end.”

The reformation of Guys and Dolls’ gamblers Sky Masterson (Sarah’s love interest) and Nathan Detroit (Adelaide’s guy) is familiar territory for Zimmerman: “Radical transformation or transfiguration is a big theme in a lot of what I’ve done. This is that in more human and realistic terms. There is radical transformation and transfiguration of these two characters, Nathan and Sky, away from their gambling ways.”

Chicago-based Zimmerman has repeatedly turned to storybook worlds, often with “presto-change-o” plot points, throughout her career. In 2012 she directed The White Snake, an adaptation of an ancient Chinese legend, for OSF. Her most famous work, Metamorphoses, was a stage adaptation of Ovid’s myths. Developed at Northwestern University and the Lookingglass Theatre Company, of which she is a longtime member, the play

opened on Broadway in 2002 and earned Zimmerman a Tony Award for direction. She also developed stage versions of “The Arabian Nights,” Homer’s “Odyssey” and—more recently—Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book” stories (for Disney Theatricals).

Although she has directed opera and revamped Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, Zimmerman has never directed a classic American musical—until now. Unsurprisingly, she’s begun the process by examining the original Runyon stories used by writers Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows for the show’s book. Guys and Dolls is customarily presented in a post-World War II setting, but Zimmerman is rethinking that: “The stories on which Guys and Dolls is

based were written and set squarely in the 1930s—the heyday of gangsters and ‘dolls.’ The OSF production will push more toward that era.”

Music director Doug Peck is concocting an effervescent, early-jazz orchestration of the Loesser score. Wrote Peck, in an email: “Many of the songs of Guys and Dolls have become jazz standards in their own right—“If I Were a Bell,” “I’ve Never Been In Love Before,” “Luck Be a Lady,” “My Time of Day,” etc.—and it’s exciting to be able to acknowledge the double life these classic tunes have led when scoring them in the context of the show.”

Zimmerman emphasized that the original stories and the show both have a “defiantly exuberant” energy. Theatregoers need not worry about being enshrouded in Hooverville gloom. “You know, gangsters and showgirls do very well during the Depression,” she said. “The spirit of the stories and the show is very, very high.”

Director Mary Zimmerman, used to transforming ancient tales, now takes on Guys and Dolls—a different kind of enchantment.By Mark Dundas Wood

Mary Zimmerman

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Dust off your dancing shoes, because you are cordially invited to Head Over Heels, a deliciously inventive musical-literary

mash-up in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre in summer 2015. Head Over Heels is the unlikely pairing of Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century tragicomedy Arcadia (freely adapted by playwright Jeff Whitty with a decided emphasis on the comedy) with the music of 1980s pop icons the Go-Go’s, creators of such hits as “Our Lips Are Sealed,” “Vacation” and “We Got the Beat.”

If a mash-up is defined as “a mixture or fusion of disparate elements,” then the marriage of Sidney’s Renaissance prose to the soundtrack of an all-female band that rose out of the 1970s Los Angeles punk scene to become a chart-topping pop band might be considered a mash-up on steroids. What makes it work is Oregon native Whitty’s intense love of both halves of the artistic equation.

“I remember reading Arcadia in grad school at the University of Oregon and thinking this would be a wonderful story to put onstage,” Whitty, the Tony Award–winning author of Avenue Q and The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler (OSF, 2008), said in an OSF interview. “I kept waiting for someone to do an adaptation of it, and no one did.”

Meanwhile, Whitty’s agent told him the Go-Go’s catalog had become available and would be an ideal vehicle for a Broadway jukebox musical—and that Whitty should write the book. In a light-bulb moment that perhaps could only occur in Whitty’s irreverent and creative mind, Head Over Heels was born.

“One day, I put together a three-page document saying this is what the show could be,” Whitty said. “Use the Go-Go’s catalog, but set it to my version of Arcadia. People got excited, I got committed, and a 15-page treatment became a 55-page treatment because I got so into writing the dialogue in meter and mashing it up with the songs.”

For Shakespeare lovers, the plot of Arcadia will feel familiar. A visit to an oracle results in dire predictions, a worried duke fears he will be cuckolded and his throne usurped, young lovers resort to

disguises to win those they love, and—just maybe—everything will work out fine in the end.

A party aesthetic Whitty wrote the piece with only one director in mind—Ed Sylvanus Iskandar. An OSF directing fellow for two seasons, Iskandar is a fast-rising New York–based director making a

name for himself with what he terms “inclusive” productions. His latest triumph is The Mysteries, a five-and-a-half-hour dramatization of the Bible featuring a cast of 54 and written by a cadre of 48 playwrights, including Whitty. TheaterMania praised The Flea Theater production as “breathtaking in its scope . . . a radical reclamation that can be appreciated by believers and nonbelievers alike.”

Food, drink and a convivial party atmosphere are part of any Iskandar production—what he has called his “socially inclusive party aesthetic.” In his New York shows, the actors and crew greet you at the door, tear your ticket and serve

you a cocktail before transforming seamlessly into their roles, only to return again at intermission with your dinner. “I create theatre from the fundamental belief that the story is rendered more profoundly by the recognition and empathy for the human effort behind the piece of art,” says the director.

How Iskandar’s aesthetic will translate to the 1,200-seat Allen Elizabethan Theatre is an exciting challenge involving OSF departments from Artistic to House Management to the Green Show. Audiences may come from a themed Green Show performance and be welcomed by an actor who escorts them to hear the pre-show concert being performed by the house band. A longer-than-usual intermission may feature a bit of disco dancing in the Bill Patton Garden, or karaoke singing in the balcony or maybe just conversations with actors and crew who are strolling through the theatre.

Iskandar’s foremost goal is for everyone to have a delightful, engaged, utterly unique experience in the theatre. “What I imagine is that you are walking into a party that’s in full swing, and you get to choose your own adventure over the course of the entire night.”

Your BootyShakeHead Over Heels is an exuberant new musical mash-up that expresses director Ed Sylvanus Iskandar’s motto: “Where the play is the party.” By Eddie Wallace

Jeff Whitty and Ed Sylvanus Iskandar

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Top: TenerifeBottom: Canary Islands

Travel with OSF to the Canary Islands, a place of geologicsplendor, rich history and great cultural charm. Our

journey also takes us to the island of Madeira, with its UNESCO-reserve forests, and we’ll sample some of Lisbon’s big-city fun as well.

We invite you to join Dr. Lue Morgan Douthit and company members Rex Young and Miriam Laube aboard the Cunard Line’s Queen Mary 2 for this 12-day excursion! Bookings for the cruise and program start at $6,000 per person. Won’t you join us?December 3–15, 2015Departing from Southampton, traveling to Portugal andSpain and returning to Southampton.

For booking information, please call Neil Baumanat 650-787-5665, or email Neil@InsightCruises.com. For program details please email doreeno@osfashland.org.

We look forward to traveling with you for Shakespeareat Sea IV!

Shakespeare at Sea IV

Come sail away with us to the Canary Islands on the Queen Mary 2 in 2015!