The two shows now playing in the intimate Thomas Theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland will appeal to audiences at opposite ends of the spectrums of age and interest—but both have something to offer audience members across those spectrums.

Virgins to Villains: My Journey with Shakespeare’s Women will have broad appeal for longtime fans of Robin Goodrin Nordli, who has been an OSF company member for most of the last 30 years. Having appeared in 61 productions of 30 different plays by Shakespeare, including 51 female roles, Nordli is well-positioned to speak from the inside of the roles the Bard created for women. She does so in an entertaining and engaging way, employing long-honed skills to create intimacy with her audience. 

She finds an especially receptive audience in Ashland, where people who have genuinely admired her work over many years thrill at the chance for a look inside her life and her creative process. Nordli weaves her experiences playing Shakespeare’s women with entertaining stories of her own development as an artist and as a person, beginning with her very first experience as an actor, playing Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew as a freshman in high school. 

She continues with other early ingenue roles, connecting those to her experiences with acting as a high school and college student, her years in bad relationships as a young woman dabbling in community theater, and finding her way out of a marriage and into pursuing a career as an actor.

All these stories are delivered with the command of a seasoned veteran who keeps her instrument honed, embodying her physicality at all ages convincingly and also comically conveying her tentative first steps and her evolution as a performer. In earlier productions, she performed the material in the format of a reading, working from a music stand, but this production benefits from direction by Penny Metropulos (formerly OSF’s Associate Artistic Director) and finds movement and energy that enlivens the work. 

Missing from Nordli’s reflections is much grappling with why the trajectory of female characters in Shakespeare is as limited as it is. Why “virgins to villains,” exactly? There is a bit more variety than that in the female roles, but not as much as one would wish. The range of Shakespeare’s men is deeper and wider, a fact that doesn’t receive more than glancing reference in this rendering.

But that sort of reflection feels beyond Nordli’s purpose. She is a Shakespeare lover and clearly has found plenty to chew on in playing his women—and this production allows her to indulge that enthusiasm with an audience that will generally include many people who not only share it but are also her fans.  Those less familiar with Shakespeare will not feel excluded; Nordli includes plenty of context and of course knows how to make Shakespeare accessible.  Here, bits of her own life story make the journey intriguing and fun.

Sponsor

***

Lizard Boy is a different kind of play entirely—and to my mind, a delight from start to finish. It’s a musical with a comic superhero at its center, and also a queer love story concerned with spiritual transformation.

The superhero is Trevor, played endearingly by Justin Huertas, who also wrote the book, music, and lyrics. Trevor lives in loneliness and chosen isolation in Seattle, opting to hide the scaly green skin he developed after a childhood encounter with a dragon. He goes out only during an annual event called Monsterfest, which commemorates the notorious occasion of the dragon’s visit to Seattle and allows Trevor to move about freely without attracting unwanted attention. The play centers on his tentative search during Monsterfest for love and for answers to the questions that have been haunting his dreams— and the stakes turn out to be higher than whether Tinder can help him find a match.

This production benefits from a decade of loving work by Huerta and three central collaborators:  director Brandon Ivie and the two other cast members, Kiki deLohr and William A. Williams, who originated their roles and have been with the production throughout its evolution. Williams plays the focus of Trevor’s awkward Tinder-fueled quest for love, and deLohr plays Siren, a performer with whom Trevor feels a mysteriously powerful connection. The commitment of these four to the production reflects a lived-in understanding that such commitment is required to lift up the misunderstood beauty and gifts (or, as reflected in the play, the superpowers) of outsiders.

The three actors are utterly balanced in terms of musical skill and appeal. An energetic thread connects and blends their voices and movements. Often they lithely shift instruments and props between them, as though connected by an invisible thread. And the play sustains a momentum of songs and stagecraft that draws you into its comic-book world. Though these artists have been working on this for a decade, they and their collaborators keep building it; they added several new songs in building this production.

Huerta has lived the experience of an outsider; he noted at opening that he wrote this play about a journey he was still on. He brought to it a love of superheroes and a fascination with religion, having noticed that the superhero stories that thrilled him as a young person were his sacred texts. One can enjoy the inspiration here on a surface level, but I think this show resonates as deeply as you can or will allow. For young people, the appeal of Lizard Boy may be more obvious—but a bit of lived experience may deepen this journey for older audience members too.

***

Sponsor

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

• Virgins to Villains continues in repertory through July 19 in the festival’s Thomas Theater. Lizard Boy continues through Oct. 12 in the same space.
• Read Darleen Ortega’s reviews of Smote This and Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Danger at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
• Read Darleen Ortega’s reviews of Macbeth and Born with Teeth at the Orgon Shakespeare Festival.
• Watch for Darleen Ortega’s reviews soon of Much Ado About Nothing and Jane Eyre, in repertory at the festival’s large open-air Allen Elizabethan Theatre.