Dorothy Velasco

Coriolanus, now playing at the Shakespeare Festival’s Thomas Theatre, offers the chance to see a lesser known play by Shakespeare adapted to contemporary language that is easier to understand.

As directed by Miriam Laube, the production is bursting with highly original stage business performed to perfection by a stellar cast.

Dorothy Velasco reviews the theatrical adaptation of the famous gothic novel by Charlotte Bronte in production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

Born with Teeth, Liz Duffy Adams witty two-person comedy briskly directed by Rob Melrose, pits Will and Kit, the nickname for Christopher, against each other as extremely competitive playwrights vying for patronage. Don’t take this play as history. The facts aren’t well known, and Adams uses her imagination, just as Shakespeare did with his history plays.

To offset the costs of large productions like Macbeth, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has scheduled several one-person shows written by actors. These engaging writer/performers are all dedicated to interpreting Shakespeare’s characters.

The managers of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in the midst of financial problems, wisely chose a sure-fire musical for this season, the 1993 Pulitzer and Tony award winner by Jonathan Larson, Rent.

Revenge Song, now playing at the Allen Elizabethan Theatre, is a lavishly produced punk musical, 1990s style, based on a real-life 17th century French bisexual singer and sword fighter, Julie d’Aubigny.The author, Qui Nguyen, and director, Robert Ross Parker, were in school together when they and others formed a company called Vampire Cowboys and started creating their first works, including Revenge Song. Their objective was to break the rules of traditional theater and bring forth gender-bending, BIPOC superheroes inspired by comic books.

Shakespeare’s King John, one of his lesser known works, is now playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in a fresh, unconventional production. Presented in association with Upstart Crow Collective of Seattle, the drama, directed by Rosa Joshi, features 12 women in all the roles.