I have just returned from spending two weeks in beautiful Ashland, Oregon, where I interned in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s literary office. I was surrounded by mountains, delicious chocolate, and not a spot of rain. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is an incredible place to visit and to intern. The company has grown from a temporary summer Shakespeare festival, performing for an audience of 500, to the largest professional regional repertory theatres in the United States. Today OSF performs 11 plays on three stages over a eight-month season. In 2012, their total attendance was nearly 400,000. While I was there, nine shows were running, and a tenth held its first preview. I saw Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline, The Taming of the Shrew, and King Lear. I saw modern classics: My Fair Lady and A Streetcar Named Desire. And I saw new works: The Heart of Robin Hood, The Unfortunates, The Liquid Plain, and The Tenth Muse, these latter three works receiving their world premiers at OSF.
While I was in Ashland, I visited with Scott Kaiser, Director of Company Development. Scott is the author of two wonderful books, Mastering Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Wordcraft. I was fortunate to first meet him in 2011 at the Blackfriars Conference in Staunton. Scott was in the artistic staff that had just finished up casting the 2014-2015 season. I asked him how the company handled casting people in multiple roles over three stages, and he said while it used to involve paper, pencils, and a lot of erasing, over the years OSF has internally developed their own computer software that makes the process easier. The dates for all eleven productions are fed into the software, and then they can tell the computer that they’ve cast a certain person in one show and the computer can then tell them the other plays for which that person would be available. It’s still an extremely complicated process, because not only to they have to cast all the roles, but they also have to cast understudies. And with such a long season, these understudies are likely to perform. I saw at least seven understudies in the two weeks I as there, and all performed well.
During my stay, the literary office, under the direction of Lue Douthit, was already preparing for next year’s season, which starts rehearsals in January. Dramaturgs were preparing scripts for directors to be able to start developing their cuts and visions, and scheduling initial meetings with directors and designers. Using Adobe InDesign, I helped put together what OSF calls a “side-by-side” for The Two Gentlemen of Verona. This script displayed the texts of the 1623 Folio alongside a modern edited edition, and the performance scripts from the last two productions at OSF.
Having studied the script, and also having worked on this play previously in my career, I was able to sit down with Lue one day to assist in the examination of what she called “play math.” We looked at the structure of Two Gents, asking questions like: Where do the scenes take place? Is there a pattern to interior and exterior or public versus private? What are the patterns? The first half of the play bounces between Verona and Milan. But in the second half, Verona disappears as a location, and instead the action moves between Milan and the forest. Lue told me she has a theory that somewhere between 58-63% of the way through a Shakespeare play is where the major action occurs, and around where the intermission should take place. By counting up the lines we discovered that what happens at this point in Two Gents is the banishment of Valentine from Milan. The pattern of the play is clear: Valentine and Proteus are separated. Proteus follows. Proteus is thus separated from Julia. Julia follows. Valentine and Proteus are reunited, only to be separated again by Valentine’s banishment. That also separates Valentine and Silvia. Silvia follows. Proteus follows. Julia follows. Everyone is reunited in the forest.
Structurally, the play sets up Proteus and Valentine as the primary relationship. They are the first two characters we meet, and the first thing that happens is we see them physically separated. Once they are physically reunited, they are then emotionally separated due to Proteus’ betrayal. Therefore theirs is there final reconciliation towards which the play is leading. The previous two productions at OSF had fascinatingly changed the order of events in the final scene so that the final moments the audience sees, and the final reconciliation, is that between Proteus and Julia. All choices are legitimate, but this one clearly changes the structural DNA of the play, for good or bad. Perhaps these directors were attempting to make the end more palatable or more romantic, and as a result the final line of these productions went to Julia. Again, a fascinating shift, considering the play as it stands makes silent women of both Silvia and Julia in its final scene.
The result of working on these projects is that I now have some new tools for analyzing Shakespeare's texts. I look forward to applying these ideas and questions to the five plays Rogue Shakespeare is producing this year. Thanks for having me OSF, I had a wonderful time!
See more at: http://actorscholar.com/content/internship-oregon-shakespeare-festival#sthash.knEe8i1y.dpuf
