On the Oregon Shakepeare Festival
'Macbeth,' 'Lizard Boy' and 'Much Ado About Nothing' are great, but Liz Duffy Adams' blistering one-act about William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe is OSF's best-kept secret of the 2024 season
Sometimes it takes awhile for a work of art to find an audience. The Shawshank Redemption famously tanked at the box office but got legs on home video. The same happened with The Iron Giant and many other films. I’ve seen the phenomenon with theatrical productions, both as an actor and a theater-goer. Usually the play is an obscure one, not performed often, and early audiences are thin. Late in the run, the buzz finally packs the house for a performance or two.
This happened recently at my local non-profit community theater with a night of terrific one-acts: Nine performances of Susan Glaspell’s early feminist piece Trifles, followed by Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. I saw them with roughly half the 80 seats empty, a scenario I gather was more or less repeated nightly. But word got around town, and on closing night, they finally sold out the house.
The same is happening at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland now with a play that deserves an audience.
Born with Teeth by Liz Duffy Adams appears in the 600-seat Angus Bowmer Theater through Oct. 13. It was conceived by the playwright upon hearing that a computer analysis of texts established that William Shakespeare almost certainly collaborated with his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, the bad boy of Elizabethan theater, on the epic history trilogy Henry VI.
She let her imagination run wild: What must that have been like?
Adams cast herself as a fly on the wall during those writing sessions and produced her own script. It was first performed as a reading in New York, and director Rob Melrose says in OSF’s program notes that his pitch to mount the play was rejected by twenty regional theaters before he finally launched the world premiere himself as the artistic director at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas.
Making their OSF debut in this one-act show are Alex Purcell as “Kit,” (Marlowe) and Bradley James Tejeda as “Will” (Shakespeare), two extraordinary actors who, with this potentially dry and too-niche material, hold the audience rapt for 90 minutes as they circle each other like gladiators. They banter, fight, accuse, insult, and even flirt. Tejeda’s Shakespeare is the younger of the two men trying to hold his own against Marlowe, who was likely a spy for Queen Elizabeth in a politically-charged London, which gives the encounter between the two men life-and-death stakes.
“He is David Bowie, plus a Cambridge scholar plus 007,” Purcell says of his character in a behind-the-scenes video. “He’s a dangerous cat, he’s not just a writer. This guy is a killer, on and off the page.”
The chemistry between the two actors is palpable, and the final scene packs an emotional wallop you don’t see coming. They catch lightning in a bottle. It’s one of the few plays I’ve seen where I was hungry for a second viewing.
But alas, I doubt that even half the seats in the Bowmer for the performance I saw were full. I’ve heard the same from two colleagues—one from my journalism world, and one from my theater world—who saw it on different days and loved it. At one, I’m told, there were maybe fifty people in attendance.
To be sure, theater-goers’ tastes vary, and I suppose the premise of it—two dead white men talking about Henry VI—sounds like a yawner. In fact, the collaboration aspect is only that—the pretext. As Marlowe declares, the only reason they’re working together is because he “summoned” the younger playwright. They actually talk very little about Henry VI—that would be boring. This is a battle of wills, wits and ego that plays out in a politically charged and even dangerous moment in Elizabethan London. It’s difficult to imagine someone seeing Born with Teeth and not enjoying this intense and amusing showdown.
Another production I saw was Behfarmaheen (if you please), a one-act created and performed by OSF fan favorite Barzin Akhavan, whose Iranian family immigrated to the United States when he was a child. It’s a new work with a strange (to English-speaking audiences, anyway) title, and little space required for a minimalist set. OSF wisely put it in the smaller, “experimental” space of the Thomas Theatre … and at the matinee my family and I attended, roughly half the seats were empty.
I suspect these are the anomalies in the 2023 season. Certainly, OSF’s magnificent Macbeth in the Bowmer, needs no help. I’ve seen four productions of the Scottish play and this one is absolutely the best—so good that I actually feel like I don’t need to see any more. The outdoor theater was also virtually full for a delightful Much Ado About Nothing (where Tejeda is a fine Claudio alongside OSF veteran John Tufts as Orlando). Lizard Boy, a banger of a musical, is also packing them in.
OSF has done a few of these one-person shows now—it’s obviously a post-pandemic cost-cutting move—where a single theater artist takes over the Thomas stage for what amounts to a memoir-as-theater. The ones I’ve seen have been good and, like this one, occasionally great. Akhavan is so, so good and—like his fellow actors in Born with Teeth—deserves a wider audience.
I realize few, if any, of my readers will be able to see these shows (Akhavan’s closes Sept. 15) but here’s the takeaway: If you see films or plays, if you listen to music or if you read novels, get outside your comfort zone. Try an artist you’ve never heard of, or a book with a strange title. Wade into Bandcamp and find your next favorite musician. Don’t settle for what you know. Explore!