One of the sure signs that fall has fully arrived here in Southern Oregon is the winding down of the performance schedule at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. The outdoor performances, in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre, wrapped up just this week, while the remaining plays running at the Festival’s two indoor venues finish next week. Of the 11 plays on the playbill this year, I was fortunate to see seven of them. They ran the gamut from Shakespeare — of course — (Othello and Love’s Labor’s Lost) to a play about Shakespeare (The Book of Will), one based on a literary classic (Sense and Sensibility), two world premieres and a U.S. premiere.

Snow in Midsummer is an adaptation of a classic Chinese drama by Guan Hanqing, a 13th-century literary equivalent of William Shakespeare. First performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company last year, the OSF production is the first to introduce it to U.S audiences. It proved a remarkable play which touched on contemporary issues like environmental degradation, greed and corruption while also embracing universal and timeless questions such as how do we address injustice, and to what lengths will we go to protect and avenge those we love? While firmly rooted in the present, as good theater often does, it showed how little we humans have changed over the centuries and how much we are alike, no matter where we come from.

Written by a Cherokee Nation playwright, Manahatta shifts between the contemporary story of a young, ambitious Lenape woman eager to build a successful career on Wall Street while her family in Oklahoma tries to keep their home and their native language, and 17th century Manahatta, as the Lenape people contend with the arrival of the Dutch West India Company and its determination to establish a thriving fur trade on their land. In both time periods, the desire for home and security conflict with greed and ambition.

The second world premiere production was The Way the Mountain Moved, another in the OSF-commissioned American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle. Plays in the cycle focus on watershed moments in American history and have included the Tony Award-winning All the Way and its companion The Great Society, about the Lyndon Johnson presidency. Mountain is set in the Utah Territory in the mid-1850s, with a team from the Army Corps of Engineers surveying a route for the Transcontinental Railroad. In this still wild, open land they and other travelers — a white pioneer settler and her daughter, a black Mormon couple — forge fragile alliances in an effort to survive while the indigenous peoples observe at a distance, pondering the changes these newcomers will wrought upon their land and culture. The play brings into stark relief the pull between the positive nature of exploration and scientific discovery and innovation and the destructive consequences of economic conquest and disruption of the natural environment.

I’m already looking forward to next season, which begins early next spring. The productions at OSF, whether comedies or dramas, are always wonderfully executed and intensely thought-provoking.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor