Set Change on the Elizabethan stage
One of our favorite activities at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is taking the Backstage Tour. We try to do it every year and it is both the same and different each time – the same because it takes you behind the scenes in each of OSF’s three theaters and different depending on which of the Company’s 500 employees is the tour guide.
Yesterday morning we were met in the New Theater by Resident Teaching Artist David Eric Thompson.. He gave us an overview of the Festival’s history, beginning with a reminder that founder Angus Bowmer’s first two productions in 1935 were “Twelfth Night” and “The Merchant of Venice.” Both are being performed this year in honor of the Festival’s 75th anniversary.
Thompson talked about the New Theater, itself, the most recent of the three performance spaces in the OSF complex. A black box theater, designed to be totally flexible in its configuration, it is the most intimate OSF venue and is often the setting for new productions and experimental theater. We are seeing two plays there this trip: Pulitzer winning “Ruined” by Lynn Nottage and the world premiere of “American Night: The Ballad of Don Jose” by Richard Montoya and Culture Clash.
Our tour of the backstage areas of the Bowmer and Elizabethan Theaters was led by actor Kate Hurster. This is her first year at the Festival and her roles include Elizabeth Bennett in “Pride and Prejudice” and Third Customer in “She Loves Me.” We were pleased to learn that she will be returning to the Festival next year to take a role in “The Pirates of Penzance” among other things.
With Kate we visited the Green Room where actors from both the Elizabethan and Bowmer theaters wait for their entrance cues and we stopped backstage-left in the Elizabethan Theater where the intricacies of quick costume changes in total darkness were explained. We heard behind-the-scenes stories about those mind-numbing times like when an actor’s costume ripped out completely at the crotch while he was onstage, and about more mundane matters such as the ice packs in the special inner pockets of the costumes that help with those days of 105 degree Ashland heat.
At the Bowmer this visit we’ll be seeing “Throne of Blood” an adaptation by Ping Chong based on Akira Kurosawa’s film which, in turn, was based on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and “She Loves Me,” a musical by Joe Materoff, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick” (lyrics). “The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare’s still controversial play about conflict of religion, class, and gender, is the only performance we’ll see in the Elizabethan theater. As we watched the transformations happening on the outdoor stage while the sets were being changed, I thought once again that even though it might not seem logical, the magic of the productions – “the willing suspension of disbelief” as theater people say – is always enhanced by Backstage Tours.
What fun, Sydney, to get to see the other side of the embroidery so to speak!