"Destiny of Desire" at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

OSF photo by Jenny Graham

What better way to end our four-day, eight-play trip to Ashland than with a crazy story presented in the form of a Mexican telenovella, bizarrely melodramatic and overwrought, yet on some level entirely Shakespearean?

Such was the ending of our visit, seeing the hilarious comedy Destiny of Desire by Karen Zacarias.

The Play

For a while I really didn't know what to make of this whole thing. I have no experience with the telenovella style, other than having sort of heard it described. But truthfully, it's just the standard soap opera, but amped up to a truly absurd level of melodrama and seeming to take itself oh, so seriously.

The story opens at a hospital, where two women are simultaneously giving birth. One is the wealthy former beauty queen, the wife of a famous TV actor. The other is a poor servant who happens to clean the other woman's house. Because her baby is terribly weak, the wealthy woman persuades the doctor to switch the babies, giving her the healthy one, and leaving the puny one to presumably die young with her poor, supposed parents.

Nearly eighteen years pass, then the two girls meet and become friends, at which point things start to get really complicated. Meanwhile we get to see just about every soap opera trope you could possibly imagine thrown together in the midst of the play: a mysterious nun, the estranged son returning to regain his father's favor, multiple marital infidelities, and a sort of Cinderella moment at a big party.

It's all played for laughs, but we also get some interruptions from the sidelines, where actors not involved in the scene listen and sometimes react, holding up signs and citing facts and statistics that make the current action pertinent to current U.S. situations.

And at the end, all the complications get resolved by the revealing of true identities, lost loves relocated, and past indiscretions explained away. In short, they concoct a happy ending out of a very bizarre set of circumstances, but it's totally fun and funny.

The Production

One of the joys of a rotating repertory company is that you can sometimes see actors doing things you would never picture them doing. In this show there are several actors who often play serious dramatic roles having a grand time playing broad comedy. For example, the last two actors to play Julius Caesar at Ashland, Armando Duran and Vilma Silva, really camp it up as the wealthy stars Armando and Fabiola Castillo, and its great fun to watch them being so playful.

On the whole, the production values are very high, considering that they are mimicking a low-budget TV serial. So the props and set pieces are simple and cheesy, but the whole thing flows together quite seamlessly, so you have to admire the art of producing something simple-looking that is really complex.

There are small snippets of dialogue in Spanish, but not enough that you'd miss anything much, and the context is very clear. This is not a tough story to follow, although once they start unraveling things, it gets a bit mind-boggling. But by then you're having such a good time it doesn't matter. They've set us up for the absurdity, and it's welcome when it arrives.

Bottom Line

In spite of the little interjections from the cast with insights about how such things as income disparity and working conditions as depicted in the play reflect realities in our actual lives, there is not a lot of substance to the play. We do get some social criticism in some of the forms of the play itself, but really, you can't be thinking too hard about all of this. It is clearly a play meant to be entertaining, and not a lot more than that.

And I'm fine with that. It's extremely well done and a pleasure to watch. In many ways it was the perfect way to end a long, fairly intense several days at the festival.

Unfortunately, we caught one of the final two or three performances of Destiny of Desire. It was only scheduled to run through the first half of the season, to be replaced in the Bowmer rotation by Snow in Midsummer in early August. On the other hand, I suspect this play will be a popular one in regional theater, since it is so entertaining and doesn't require particularly elaborate sets and such. So if you missed it in Ashland, you will likely have a chance to see it closer to home before long.

All told, I would put this in my three favorite shows of the season (of the eight we saw), along with The Book of Will and Henry V. But truly, this was an excellent Ashland season. Seven of the eight shows we saw were really quite good, with only Romeo and Juliet disappointing us. That represents an improvement over the last couple of seasons, where we collectively had the feeling they had made some poorer choices of plays and a couple of productions hadn't been up to our expectations. But this season was a good one, and in fact I would dearly love to go back to catch the two shows that opened after we left as well as seeing The Book of Will one more time.