Oregon Shakespeare Festival Announces 2020 Season

Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) Incoming Artistic Director Nataki Garrett and Artistic Director Bill Rauch announced the Festival's 2020 playbill today. The season celebrates OSF's ongoing commitment to the work of Shakespeare, imaginative adaptations of beloved classics and illuminating new plays in a Jubilee year that includes two world-premiere American Revolutions commissions for only the second time in the Festival's history.

"I'm thrilled to be coming onboard at OSF as we plan in 2020 to celebrate a Jubilee year-the nationwide effort to get theaters to diversify the voices of the writers they produce, with a focus on women, people of color, LGBTQIA writers and playwrights with disabilities," said Nataki Garrett, incoming artistic director. "Although we will not waver on our commitment to our namesake playwright as we continue Canon in a Decade, creative teams on our Shakespeare productions will be sure to reflect the Jubilee spirit of voices too often marginalized in the American theatre."

Artistic Director Bill Rauch said, "The artistic staff and I began to select the 2020 season last August in collaboration with over 60 of our colleagues, and our work has been further refined by our Incoming Artistic Director Nataki Garrett. I could not be more proud of the plays and artists in this season that fully reflect OSF's dual commitment to innovative classics and dynamic new voices. I am humbled to pass the Festival baton to one of the most vital new leaders in the American theatre."

The 2020 season will emulate the current year's production schedule, including a slightly later season opening weekend and earlier starts for the Allen Elizabethan productions. Best of all, no show will close before the end of the season. To give audiences even more opportunity to experience this exciting line-up, the 2020 season will include an end-of-season expansion with the Allen Elizabethan shows running one week longer and all indoor plays performing an additional week. The season will end on November 1, 2020.

In the Angus Bowmer Theatre

"The course of true love never did run smooth." The 2020 season will officially open in March with one of Shakespeare's most magical and enduring comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Joseph Haj (artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis). Haj previously helmed OSF's widely praised Pericles in 2015 and looks forward to interpreting Shakespeare's whimsical masterpiece for the first time in his extensive theatre career.

Running all season alongside A Midsummer Night's Dream is Peter and the Starcatcher by Rick Elice, based on the 2004 novel of the same name by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, with music by Wayne Barker. With both Broadway and Off-Broadway runs in recent years, this joyful theatrical adaptation provides an inventive backstory for how the characters of Peter Pan, Mrs. Darling, Tinker Bell and Captain Hook all came together in Neverland. Lavina Jadhwani, former Phil Killian directing fellow coming off the success of her recent production of As You Like It at the Guthrie Theater, will direct.

Also running all season is one of two American Revolutions commissions and a world premiere, The Copper Children, written by Karen Zacarías and directed by Shariffa Ali. Inspired by true events involving an Irish "orphan train" that arrives in a mixed-race Arizona mining community in 1904, this compelling story explores the profound impact and provocative intersections of difference across race, religion and family. One of the most produced playwrights in the nation and a core founder of the Latinx Theatre Commons, Zacarías also penned the much-buzzed-about subversive homage to the telenovela, Destiny of Desire-a runaway hit in OSF's 2018 season.

The final show to open in the Angus Bowmer Theatre is Qui Nquyen's Poor Yella Rednecks, a sequel to Vietgone that explores the next chapter in Tong and Quang's journey as they build new lives in a foreign land called rural Arkansas. A raucously funny, deeply moving take on the challenges of reaching the American Dream, Poor Yella Rednecks features a memorable fusion of pop culture, history, martial arts, multimedia and music. Co-commissioned by South Coast Repertory and Manhattan Theatre Club and developed by South Coast Repertory as part of the Pacific Playwrights Festival,the play is additionally the recipient of the 2018 Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award.

Opening first in the Thomas Theatre and running the entire season is Bring Down The House, an epic two-part adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy, featuring an all-female cast. This adaptation by Rosa Joshi and Kate Wisniewski will also be directed by Joshi, who returns after her widely praised OSF debut helming 2018's Henry V and 2019's As You Like It. Joshi and Wisniewski, along with Betsy Schwartz, are Co-Artistic Directors of the upstart crow collective who originally conceived and devised Bring Down The House in 2017. The upstart crow collective, founded in 2006, is dedicated to producing theatrical classics with all-female casts.

Opening in early April and running through October is Confederates, written by 2018 MacArthur Fellow Dominique Morisseau and directed by OSF's incoming artistic director, Nataki Garrett. The play leaps through time as it traces the identities of two black American women living over a 150 years apart and explores the reins racial and gender bias still hold on American educational systems today. Confederates is an American Revolutions co-commission with Penumbra Theatre and world premiere.

The final show to open in the Thomas Theatre is Everything That Never Happened by Sarah B. Mantell, directed by Jessica Kubzansky, artistic director at Boston Court who helmed the world premiere. Taking place in the gaps between The Merchant of Venice and the realities of Jewish culture, law and history, Everything That Never Happened is a play about a father, a daughter, disguise, assimilation, pomegranates and everything Shakespeare left out.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." The last play attributed to Shakespeare as a sole author, The Tempest, is an extraordinary blend of tragedy, comedy, spectacle, politics and psychologically nuanced family dynamics. Directed by Nicholas C. Avila, the only of Shakespeare's plays to bear the title of a natural event returns to inaugurate the Allen Elizabethan Theatre season in late spring.

Also opening on the outdoor stage is Black Odyssey by Marcus Gardley. Described by The New Yorker as "...heir to Garcia Lorca, Pirandello and Tennessee Williams," Gardley's heart-stopping interpretation of Homer's The Odyssey smashed box office records at California Shakespeare Theater in 2018. Gardley is the 2013 USA James Baldwin Fellow and recipient of the National Alliance for Musical Theatre Award, the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Scholarship and the ASCAP Cole Porter Prize, amongst many other awards. Directed by Monty Cole (Oracle Production's The Hairy Ape) in his OSF debut.

The third show to open outside is Theresa Rebeck's Bernhardt/Hamlet, directed by Dawn Monique Williams, who helmed The Merry Wives of Windsor in 2017. Bernhardt/Hamlet tells the story of Sarah Bernhardt, the French stage actress who starred in some of the most popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and her determination to tackle one of the greatest male roles in the dramatic canon, Shakespeare's Hamlet. With one of the most thrilling developments in the American theater being the broader acceptance of women playing the great male roles of dramatic literature, The New York Times calls Bernhardt/Hamlet, which debuted on Broadway in 2018, a "deep-inside love letter to the theater as a kind of laboratory in which experiments in both art and equality are possible." The real-life Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) performed as Hamlet in 1899.

In 2020, there will be 11 mainstage shows including both parts of Bring Down the House. OSF will complete five more Shakespeare titles (all three Henry IV plays are included in Bring Down the House), bringing the total Canon in a Decade tally to 24 of the 37 plays historically counted in the canon.

The 2020 season will begin previews on February 28 and open the weekend of March 6-8. The official opening weekend in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre will be June 5-7. The season will run through November 1. Tickets for the 2020 season will go on sale in November 2019 for members, and general sales will begin in early December.

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