Ashland: There's more here than Shakespeare

ASHLAND, Ore. — Will the crowds at Oregon Shakespeare Festival this summer look beyond the fest's audience-friendly but predictable outdoor stagings of top Shakespeare romps and seek out less-familiar works about the extremes of human temptation?

That's a tough call. In this inviting Rogue Valley drama outpost, which some 100,000 tourists (many from Washington state) are expected to patronize this year, OSF operates in summer high season with the efficiency of a well-oiled theater machine — cranking out attractive, solid yet often bland, predictable fare for its devoted fan base.

This summer, the Ashland company's biggest tickets will likely be the well-appointed renderings of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" and "Love's Labor's Lost," performed outdoors on the Elizabethan Stage. No matter that these diversions are broadly comic, and offer few interpretive surprises: Full houses are expected, and arriving.

But Ashland visitors willing to tread off the beaten theatrical path should also consider investigating some of the numerous lesser-known titles in OSF's $20 million, 11-play 2005 season. This summer, they include a rare Ashland mounting of the Christopher Marlowe classic "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus," and the world premiere of "Gibraltar," a flawed but sensuous and searching drama by San Francisco dramatist Octavio Solis.

Though centuries and many stylistic differences apart, both are poetic works that peer into the turbid depths of temptation and its consequences.

In "Faustus," it is the heretical search for knowledge that proves a fatal temptation, in an arrogant man's bargain with the devil. In "Gibraltar," romantic love tempts — with a passion that can damn, or redeem.

"Doctor Faustus"

Marlowe's erudite, poetic, spectacle-rich tragedy has been staged by OSF only once previously (in 1979 by the late Jerry Turner, the company's longtime artistic honcho).

But don't let unfamiliarity scare you off. "Doctor Faustus" was penned by a contemporary and rival of Shakespeare (Marlowe who, like the Bard of Avon, was born in 1564). And it was the first great drama to imagine and immortalize the legendary devil's bargain of Johann Faust, an infamous 16th-century German magician who Marlowe loosely based on a real-life necromancer (or two).

"When the world dissolves and every creature shall be purified, all places shall be hell that are not heavens ... "

As the legend goes, in exchange for granting Faust's desires and answering all his queries about the workings of the world, Satan obtained the man's soul. And in Marlowe's retelling (though not all those that followed, including the famed Goethe version), that soul would ultimately be doomed to the ravages of hell.

James Edmondson's new staging of "Faustus" (dedicated to Turner, who died last year) meshes two extant versions of Marlowe's script.

And thanks to OSF's wealth of production savvy and an elaborate design scheme by veteran scenic designer Richard Hay and lighting designer Robert Peterson, the production summons up all manner of occult wonders.

Angels, devils and demons are conjured. A shimmery vision of ultimate It-Girl Helen of Troy rises up from the beyond. Smoky vapors of evil, the seven deadly sins and, of course, raging hell fires that will be Faust's eternal punishment — all are on display.

Laughably at times, so is a semi-shlocky, Las Vegas-style aesthetic, particularly in Marie Anne Chiment's costumes. Lucifer is a Liberace-meets-Siegfried & Roy vision in his all-white, skin-tight, fur-trimmed togs. And it's not, as Marlowe coined, the face "that launched a thousand ships" that makes Laura Morache's Helen of Troy so striking. It's that nearly-nude spangled sheath, and those bleached ringlets à la Cher.

Also jarring is the stagy lead performance by Jonathan Haugen, who seems to be playing Faust in a 19th-century melodrama warp. Haugen's ferocious intensity has been an asset in some previous OSF outings. But here it obliterates all trace of a more subtle, mercurial account of one of literature's most paradoxical protagonists: a Renaissance seeker who dares at his own peril to challenge the religious and philosophical orthodoxy of the Middle Ages.

If OSF's "Faustus" wastes a chance to make Marlowe's brilliantly witty and poetic colloquies on faith, hypocrisy and enlightenment feel more immediate and historically pertinent, at least the players articulate the verse with clarity.

Listen particularly to the exchanges between Faust and Satan's agent, Mephostophilis (played simply and potently by Ray Porter) for philosophical debate at its most bracing — and a reminder that Shakespeare wasn't the only bravura dramatist working the Elizabethan stage.

"Gibraltar"

The modern-day characters in "Gibraltar" (staged indoors by director Liz Diamond, in OSF's New Theatre) are tempted to commit all manner of sins. But in our post-nuclear age, where we seem to have conquered many of the universal mysteries, they risk all for love — perhaps a more elusive quest these days than scientific knowledge.

Amy (soulfully played by Vilma Silva) is an artist whose husband is missing after last being seen on his sailboat in San Francisco Bay.

Paralyzed by guilt and grief, Amy brings home a stranger: Palo (René Millán, a magnetic University of Washington alum), who believes Amy may be a woman he loved and drove away years ago, and has spent years searching for.

As the romantic histories of Amy and Palo gradually unspool, so do other stories of passion, jealousy, betrayal and yearning from other intense unions. Male jealousy and violence threads through some of these couplings, particularly the disturbing encounter of a tight-wired policeman (fervent U. Jonathan Toppo) who can't accept that his wife (Julie Oda) has left him for a female lover.

Eventually the roots of Amy's own turmoil are clarified, in flashbacks of her affair with a man (Bill Geisslinger), who is caring for a beloved wife (Judith-Marie Bergan) with advancing Alzheimer's disease.

And gradually the play becomes a study of love's bargains: How much power should amorous passion exert over one's soul? And what deals are we willing to make for it?

Solis is a deeply empathetic writer. But his people often express themselves here in an over-ripe poetic cadence, which makes their erotic ruminations sound more stilted and grandiose than palpably sexy.

The script also gets sticky when elaborating on, rather than animating its symbols — like the image of the "Duende" (borrowed from the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca), a "demonic earth spirit" that arouses irrational, untamable passions in people.

It is, in fact, in the enacted and unspoken gestures between lovers, and not in the more elaborate verbal overlay, that Diamond's staging of "Gibraltar" really sizzles. And that's when the devilish pacts that enraptured lovers make and undo, at their own peril, are most compelling.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com