Dorothy Velasco

Born with Teeth, Liz Duffy Adams witty two-person comedy briskly directed by Rob Melrose, pits Will and Kit, the nickname for Christopher, against each other as extremely competitive playwrights vying for patronage. Don’t take this play as history. The facts aren’t well known, and Adams uses her imagination, just as Shakespeare did with his history plays.

To offset the costs of large productions like Macbeth, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has scheduled several one-person shows written by actors. These engaging writer/performers are all dedicated to interpreting Shakespeare’s characters.

The managers of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in the midst of financial problems, wisely chose a sure-fire musical for this season, the 1993 Pulitzer and Tony award winner by Jonathan Larson, Rent.

Revenge Song, now playing at the Allen Elizabethan Theatre, is a lavishly produced punk musical, 1990s style, based on a real-life 17th century French bisexual singer and sword fighter, Julie d’Aubigny.The author, Qui Nguyen, and director, Robert Ross Parker, were in school together when they and others formed a company called Vampire Cowboys and started creating their first works, including Revenge Song. Their objective was to break the rules of traditional theater and bring forth gender-bending, BIPOC superheroes inspired by comic books.

Shakespeare’s King John, one of his lesser known works, is now playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in a fresh, unconventional production. Presented in association with Upstart Crow Collective of Seattle, the drama, directed by Rosa Joshi, features 12 women in all the roles.

The Tempest, now playing at the Allen Elizabethan Theatre, may be Shakespeare’s swan song, the last play he wrote without collaborators. Some scholars suggest that the leading character, Prospero, represents Shakespeare himself.As directed by Nicholas Avila, this production, although traditional in style, focuses on enslavement, represented by Ariel, a bird-like sprite played by Geoffrey Warren Barnes, and Caliban, portrayed by James Ryen as a half-human monster, yearning not only to be free, but to be respected.

Confederates is a brilliant new drama that examines America’s race issues by showing the Civil War through the eyes of enslaved people. In its west coast premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, this luminous play, written by Dominique Morisseau and directed by Nataki Garrett, the OSF artistic director, is a marvel of theatrical expertise.

How I Learned what I Learned, August Wilson’s one-man show about his life and work, is now playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

In this romantic tale, said to be inspired by The Little Mermaid and Romeo and Juliet, a young girl is swept away from her home in a storm and ends up on a scenic island, where she is adopted by a loving couple.