"La Comedia of Errors" at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

A couple of years ago the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced a new program they call "Play On!", a project to translate all 39 plays in the Shakespeare canon into language more accessible to modern audiences, and including 36 diverse playwriting voices. The project is not without some controversy, but it definitely has some admirable goals.

And the first fruits of this project to reach production at OSF comes this year with a production called La Comedia of Errors, a bilingual adaptation of a Play On! translation of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. I've been keeping an open mind about the Play On! project, so this is my first take on a first glimpse of an adaptation of one of the results.

The Play

I'm pretty sure I've already established that The Comedy of Errors is one of my favorite Shakespearean comedies. I went out of my way to see it in Stratford last year, and I quite enjoyed the last version I saw in Ashland. So it seems like a good first peek into Play On!

But this is not strictly speaking a Play On! project, rather a bilingual adaptation of one. The starting point was playwright Christina Anderson's translation of the original play. Then two more hands got involved, Lydia G. Garcia and outgoing OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch, who turned it into a bilingual romp. What I don't know is how much of what I saw was a result of the translation, and how much the adaptation. I suspect mostly the latter, but I don't really know.

The other aspect of this I should mention is that this is not a fully-staged OSF production. It is, in fact, meant to be a touring show for local schools and community groups, and as such has a simplified staging involving relatively few props, essentially no scenery, and costume pieces, rather than full costumes for the most part.

The adaptation sets the play squarely in modern times, straddling the US-Mexico border. Two sets of twins are born in the same hospital in Mexico, and one family adopts the second set of twins to raise as their own. Encountering a storm on a flight from Canada, the plane crashes in the desert near the border in a sandstorm, separating the family. The father, with half of each set of twins, is returned to Mexico, while the mother and the other two twins are caught by the border patrol and kept in the US.

I should note that this whole back story is presented in pantomime, quite humorously.

Fast forward over 30 years and we find ourselves at the start of the play, with the father having come to the US to find his lost family, facing deportation at the hands of the local sheriff, while unbeknownst to him his Mexican children are in the same town getting into confused hijinks because they look like their identical twins who happen to live in the town.

From there the story is pretty close to that of Shakespeare's play, with some little adaptations to fit the modern setting. The real key is that characters are speaking in both Spanish and English, but done in such a way that a speaker of either language should be able to follow the plot. It's really quite clever, very funny, and very well done.

The one real addition to the play is a created character who sits in the audience and interjects a few salient points about the plot or the language that really helps things along.

The Production

Because the production is mostly meant to tour, it doesn't have a permanent home in any of the OSF theaters. But when spaces are available the festival sells tickets and mounts the play in various spaces, including the Thomas Theatre and (in our case) one of their rehearsal halls. Seating consisted of two concentric circles of chairs with four designated gaps for players to enter and exit.

As we entered, the members of the cast were milling about in matching jackets (so, more uniforms than costumes), greeting audience members casually. It was very pleasant. And then, they started the show. It's quickly paced, quite interactive, and of course, very funny.

I was really impressed with how easy it was to follow the story, convoluted as it is, while only understanding about half the language. The audience stayed fully engaged, and applauded enthusiastically at the end.

All told, it's about 90 minutes and tells a stripped-down version of the story quite effectively, with some statements at the end about the current situation at the US border that are relevant, but not preachy.

Bottom Line

This was great fun, an interesting experiment that seems to work well. It's fun to see so many of the regular OSF company working up close and quite personally. That alone is worth the price of admission. But I also thought it was cool to see how well the bilingual presentation worked. I would be interested to know if it worked as well for people who a) speak mostly or only Spanish, and b) don't know the original play well or at all. I suspect it would still work.

If you're in Ashland this year, I recommend seeing this. It's quite fun and innovative, and really gets you thinking about how storytelling works in a theatrical environment. I appreciate that OSF is making this effort to reach out to other parts of the larger community.

The show runs through the end of October on the OSF campus, and in various venues in the Rogue Valley thereafter.