Last Sunday, less than a week after our first outdoor show of the season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, my husband and I again found ourselves seated in the Allen Elizabethan Theater eagerly awaiting the start of another play on a hot summer evening. We’d arrived at the Festival grounds well ahead of the 8 o’clock curtain in anticipation of catching a bit of the Green Show on the Bricks.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Starting at 6:45 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays throughout the summer and into the fall, these free and open-to-the-public performances feature artists of every genre from all over the world. Within the span of a few weeks you might hear old-time fiddlers, blues and jazz guitarists and Chinese opera and see dancers perform traditional folkloric steps from Mexico or hip hop and jazz. The moderately sized stage        sitting on the brick courtyard between the Elizabethan and Angus Bowmer theaters faces a hillside of granite blocks and lawn on which the audience sprawls to enjoy the show.      On this evening we saw a bit of NANDA, a quintet of performers who juggled, danced and faux-kung fu fought their way around the stage. It wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I had to admire their physicality, especially in light of the 99-degree heat!

From there we made our way further up the hillside to enter the Elizabethan Theater, admiring the stunning view out over the sunlit valley below. 

We thoroughly enjoyed The Book of Will, a warm, funny, thought-provoking modern play which portrays the efforts of a group of William Shakespeare’s friends to publish the First Folio of his works three years after his death. In the course of trying to preserve his words, the words that have given them and their audiences so much joy and meaning to their lives, they confront their own mortality. Though death certainly looms over much of the play, one comes away at the end with an appreciation of the love, joy and friendship which helped preserve the plays which have endured and flourished for 400 years and continue to examine and reveal the best and the worst of human nature.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor