OSF's New 'American Revolutions' Commissions Make National Impact

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's growing reputation as an incubator for some of the best new American plays continues this fall and winter, as commissions from the "American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle" program and other new work will grace stages across the country.

Among the most high-profile productions are a pair of American Revolutions commissions that will play at New York's Public Theater this fall. First to open will be Lynn Nottage's Sweat, which galvanized audiences last season at OSF. Sweat explores America's industrial decline at the turn of the millennium with a look inside a Pennsylvania town whose residents struggle with factory layoffs and fractured relationships. Sweat begins performances October 18 and runs through November 27.

Next up will be Party People by UNIVERSES (Steven Sapp, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and William Ruiz aka Ninja), running November 1 to December 4. Directed and developed by Liesl Tommy, Party People rocked OSF's Thomas Theatre in 2012 with its high-energy mix of poetry, jazz, blues and hip-hop as it explored the early days as well as the legacies of the Black Panthers and Young Lords movements.

The American Revolutions commission Roe by Lisa Loomer, currently running in the Angus Bowmer Theatre through October 29, travels to the nation's capital just in time for the presidential inauguration, with a production at Arena Stage that begins performances January 12. The production then travels back to the West Coast to Berkeley Repertory Theatre from March 3 to April 2, 2017. Roe tells the story of Norma McCorvey, a.k.a. Jane Roe, and the lawyer who argues her famous case before the Supreme Court, Sarah Weddington. With shocking turns and surprising humor, the play illuminates the difficult choices women make and the passion each side has for its cause.

"I couldn't be more proud of the work we're sending out all over the country," said Artistic Director Bill Rauch. "Alison Carey's direction of the American Revolutions program is having a profound effect on the American theatre, with many more exciting stories yet to come. Our other new plays are also proving irresistible to our fellow regional theatres, as evidenced by upcoming productions of Fingersmith, Vietgone and The River Bride."

Qui Nguyen's Vietgone, possibly the most difficult ticket to score in OSF's 2016 season, will be hitting the road after concluding its OSF run. Vietgone received its second professional production in Ashland after its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in 2015, and will travel to Seattle Repertory Theatre for performances December 2 - January 1. Nguyen's audacious, funny and music-filled story, which he's called "a sex comedy about my parents," will have its New York premiere in a separate production later this month at Manhattan Theatre Club, featuring original OSF cast member Paco Tolson.

An early hit of OSF's 2016 season, the world premiere of Marisela Treviño Orta's haunting, evocative The River Bride, will play at Arizona Theatre Company's Phoenix and Tucson theatres January 14 - February 26, 2017. Critics praised the OSF production as "a work of great beauty, at once transcendent and triumphant" and "a mesmerizing, magical tale of heartbreaking romance."

Audiences at The American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, will have the delight of seeing the second professional production of Fingersmith, which was a runaway hit in OSF's 2015 season, directed by Bill Rauch. Adapted by Alexa Junge from British novelist Sarah Waters' gritty, suspenseful 2002 novel, Fingersmith pulls viewers into a tale full of shocking twists set in squalid Victorian London streets, madhouses and a stifling mansion with a ghastly secret. The production runs December 4 - January 8 in Cambridge.

The reach of Robert Schenkkan's towering pair of plays about Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Tony Award-winning All the Way and its follow-up, The Great Society, continues to grow. All the Way will be produced at San Jose Stage (Calif.), South Coast Repertory (Calif.), Cleveland Play House (Ohio), Actors Playhouse (Florida), Theatre Pops (Okla.), Gibbs High School (Florida) and Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts (Mass.) in the coming months. The Great Society will be performed at Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, FL, with OSF's own Jack Willis playing LBJ once more, running January 11 to April 2.

Founded by Angus Bowmer in 1935 and winner of a 1983 Tony Award for outstanding achievement in regional theatre, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival presents an eight-month season of 11 plays that include works by Shakespeare as well as a mix of classics, musicals, and new works. The Festival also draws attendance of more than 400,000 to almost 800 performances every year and employs approximately 575 theatre professionals. In 2008, OSF launched American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle, a 10-year cycle of commissioning new plays that has already resulted in several OSF commissions finding success nationwide.

Pictured: Party members revisit moments in the past in 2012's Party People. (Ensemble). Photo by Jenny Graham, Oregon Shakespeare Festival.