This publication explores my final season as OSF’s artistic director, and so I write you
with a complicated heart. I have often said that I am the luckiest artistic director in
the world that I have gotten to serve the mission of this particular institution for this
particular audience. Your passion for the work on our stages is without parallel in the
American theatre.
I am more than a little melancholy as I encounter an ongoing series of “lasts” this year,
and introducing these articles about our 2019 season is a big dose of reality in terms of my
upcoming transition. At the same time, I am filled with such excitement about what lies
ahead for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. As a leader of an 84-year-old institution, I’m
comforted and delighted to think about the artistic adventures that you will discover well
beyond these (to me, joyful) years of my temporary stewardship.
In this issue of Prologue, you will read reflections on what I’ve tried to accomplish as
the Festival’s fifth artistic director, and a conversation between myself and its sixth, the
brilliant Nataki Garrett. You’ll find essays on our 2019 Shakespeare productions, the new
plays in the Thomas Theatre that foreground communities of color, and what it means to
be Jewish in the world today and have the opportunity to work on a piece of revolutionary
art like Paula Vogel’s Indecent. You’ll feast your eyes on the brilliance and hard work of
designers and artisans in an article on the costumes and wigs of three very different plays.
The two works I am honored to be interpreting in my final season are the subjects of two
Q&As: one with the producers of the community experience of our first full bilingual
production, and another with playwright Octavio Solis, whose world premiere marks
his fourth OSF staging. La Comedia of Errors, which I had the honor of co-adapting with
Lydia G. Garcia, and Octavio’s Mother Road share the same dynamic cast of nine actors in
an exciting experiment: distilling the incomparable energy of rotating repertory and the
brilliance of our resident acting company within a single pairing of a new play and a classic.
It feels so right to use the word “experiment” as I describe my final season as your artistic
director. Since I was appointed in 2006 right on through today, you have encouraged us to
experiment. You have rewarded risk after risk, whether it was the introduction of Golden
Age musicals, the epic sweep of American Revolutions world premieres, the expansion
of the classical canon to include work from countries well beyond Europe and the
United States, the provocative questions posed by Play on! translations of our namesake
playwright, or an eclectic and community-based format for the Green Show. I’m certainly
proud that we’ve won awards, contributed significantly to the canon of new American
plays being produced far and wide, and that two of our Shakespeare productions toured to
theatres on the other side of the country this last winter and spring. Ultimately, however,
what has really given us the courage to continue to innovate is . . . you: your curiosity, your
belief and your support.