With great anticipation Tuesday evening my husband and I made our way 30 minutes down the road from our house to see our first outdoor play of the season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore. The repertory season begins in mid-February with performances at the festival’s two indoor venues, but the summer shows in the outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theater (the oldest stage in the complex) don’t start up until early June.

The temperatures were in the low 90s with only a light breeze, so we felt confident in wearing lightweight clothing even though the play wouldn’t end until nearly 11 p.m. For the first time we chose seats in the balcony: first row and nearly dead-on center stage, and it proved an excellent perch from which to enjoy Love’s Labor’s Lost.            Even though I was an English and drama major, I’d never seen nor read the play. I found the prospect delightful: Unfamiliar with the plot and characters and having no preconceived notion of what the play should be “about,” I could just let it unfold before me and discover it as new. The notes from the director in the program thankfully gave little more than the barest outline of characters and storyline, aiding in my uninformed experience.

This was a production in which the youthful exuberance of the main characters gushes forth in lots of physical comedy; charming and witty repartee; and rules invented, reversed, revised, discarded and reinvented at lightning speed. Shakespeare dabbles with words, rhyme, cadence and double meaning in the same way as the players in this production splash their plain white costumes with brush strokes of color, delighting in creating a new world and new versions of themselves in the woods of Navarre.

Music and song informed much of the action in this version as well, with an onstage “band” including violin, cello, guitar, drums, keyboards and vocalists. Director Amanda Dehnert felt this contemporary commentary would help connect the audience to the meaning and texture of Shakespeare’s vernacular, and I found it helped underscore the emotional context of certain scenes, as well. This comedy ended quite differently than Shakespeare’s other, earlier ones: lessons have been learned and the characters have grown, but all is not neatly resolved with weddings and happily-ever-afters. It provided a bittersweet but utterly satisfying conclusion to this “new” find for me.

A few additional notes:

As I’ve mentioned before in my reviews of OSF productions, one of the delights in seeing repertory company performances is recognizing actors one has seen in other seasons or other plays within the same season. It allows you to develop a real sense of their range and scope and ability. This evening we saw Chris Butler, whom we saw as Othello earlier in the spring, play a ridiculous, pompous curate — a completely different character. And Jennie Greenberry who, with a lovely voice, played Belle in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast a season or two ago, this year is a wise and saucy Rosaline in Love’s Labor’s Lost.

Also, there is something extra-magical about watching a play outdoors on a summer evening. The sky slowly darkens and the stage lights glow brighter, drawing you deeper into the play itself as the stars appear, the moon rises and tiny bats flit and flicker overhead. I hope you have the opportunity to experience such magic yourself this summer!

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor