Two of the four shows that have opened the 90th season of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival — August Wilson’s Jitney and James Ijames’ Fat Ham, both of which I’ve written about here — are the work of African American playwrights and revel in their specifically African American context. The remaining two shows — Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest — are classics of the sort OSF audiences count on to anchor the entire run any season, envisioned in a fresh way by two talented women directors. Both appear to be headed into very successful runs.
Julius Caesar
By now, audiences know to greet the work of director Rosa Joshi with anticipation. Drawn especially to Shakespeare histories, Joshi knows how to bring them alive to even the most resistant audience members, while still earning admiration from the most diehard Shakespeare fans. She has directed several shows at OSF, many of them in connection with upstart crow collective, which produces classical plays with racially diverse casts of women and nonbinary people, reimagining those works for a contemporary audience. A favorite of OSF company members and audiences alike, Joshi now makes OSF her home base, serving as its associate artistic director.
This season’s Julius Caesar is another upstart crow co-production, which is always good news. There is something about entrusting these male-dominated stories of political intrigue to performers we have not been accustomed to seeing enact them, under such strong direction and with such innovative movement and design, that helps us see them differently. Joshi works here with several frequent collaborators, including movement director Alice Gosti, to convey that battles both physical and political are in a sense spiritual; Gosti knows how to capture with movement how power and energy are passed among people in conflict.
That’s not to minimize the importance of text. Joshi is working with a strong cast, including her talented upstart crow co-founders Kate Wisniewski as Julius Caesar and Betsy Schwartz in a variety of roles, including Portia. Other standouts in a uniformly excellent ensemble are Jessika D. Williams as a convincingly charismatic Antony, Kate Hurster as the tormented Brutus, and Caro Zeller as a furious Cassius.
All the rest of the cast perform a variety of roles — Ava Mingo’s soothsayer is especially memorable — and while each is worthy of attention, they somehow combine their collective strength to convey a sense of much larger crowds than we are seeing on stage. They are more together.
The essential story here is of powerful leaders taking violent action in service to the people; Brutus sets aside his fealty to Julius Caesar once Cassius and others convince him that violence is necessary to avoid tyranny, and then Antony convinces many that it is the supposed saviors from tyranny who must be deposed.
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This rendering captures a sense of the people being more servants than served, their fervor being manipulated in radically opposing directions by the charisma of a few whose stated aims are freedom and justice. The movement of energy feels fraught rather than principled, no matter how compelling the rhetoric. It may well be that these women and nonbinary performers, imparting this text with such energy and skill, are especially well-equipped to pull forth energetic reality that is hardest to capture.
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“Julius Caesar” continues in repertory through Oct. 26 in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Angus Bowmer Theatre. Find ticket and schedule information here.
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Importance of Being Earnest is all fun and frippery, a very British story written by the ultimate insider-outsider, Oscar Wilde. Wilde was an Irishman gifted in the literary arts, a flamboyant dresser who pushed the limits of Victorian mores and was a sort of celebrity much sought-after in elite British society, though he ultimately spent two years in prison for homosexuality.
Earnest is considered his masterpiece, a skillfully balanced confection of wit and shallowness that demands style and perfect timing from its players. I can’t say I’ve ever considered it a favorite, but director Desdemona Chiang’s fresh take nicely opens its pleasures.
Perhaps it helps that Chiang hasn’t seen herself in this very British story until now. An immigrant from Taiwan, Chiang hadn’t encountered the play since a bad experience long ago in a beginning acting class, until OSF artistic director Tim Bond suggested it to her as a directing assignment.
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There is reason to admire that instinct on Bond’s part: The way into the play that Chiang eventually found was to set the production in the British Malay Peninsula during the Victorian era, which allowed her to work with a cast featuring several strong Asian leads and to play with Wilde’s witty critiques of Victorian norms in the context of their expression in colonialism and assimilation. Fittingly, Chiang found her way inside from outside.
Those elements will intrigue and delight some audience members, but one needn’t think about any of that to enjoy this production, which nimbly imparts all of the pleasures of Wilde’s humor.
The show’s two male leads are especially strong: Newcomer Hao Feng is an arch comic dreamboat as Algernon Moncrieff, preening and posing and grabbing for all the pleasures at his fingertips; and the endlessly versatile Julian Remulla offers an endearing take on the more serious John Worthing.
Savoring the sparring of these two dandies is central to the play’s many pleasures, which also include strong work from veterans David Kelly, Rex Young, Lisa Tejero, and the definitive Lady Bracknell, Linda Alper. Amelio Garcia evokes belly laughs even in a utility role, and the two female leads — Kiki deLohr (absolutely unrecognizable from her role in last year’s Lizard Boy) and the charming Thilini Dissanayake balance silliness and loveliness as the two female leads.
One should look elsewhere to struggle with the transplantation of British norms of entitlement inside cultures around the globe. Like Wilde’s original conception, this is lighter fare, playful and fun and frothy — but the zing of critique adds a little spice to this confection, and these players serve it up well.
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“The Importance of Being Earnest” continues in repertory through Oct. 25 in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Angus Bowmer Theatre. Find ticket and schedule information here.
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Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest join James Ijames’ Fat Ham (playing through June 27) and August Wilson’s Jitney (through July 20) in opening the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 90th season.
Opening later in the season are Karen Zacarías’s Shane (July 31-Oct. 5), Shakespeare’s As You Like It (April 16-Oct. 25), Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (May 30-Oct. 12), the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical Into the Woods (May 31-Oct. 11), and Octavio Solis’s Quixote Nuevo (July 9-Oct. 24).
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