Portland Magazine
November 21, 2023
Alums and current students traveled all over Portland with the Original Practice Shakespeare Festival.
Story by Marty Hughley
Photo Credit: David Mackintosh
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT, you’ve no doubt been told. But the theater troupe presenting Shakespeare’s Cymbeline on a lovely mid-August night in Mount Tabor Park hasn’t practiced, or rehearsed, or—in this case—performed the play before.
“We do practice our fights,” troupe member Hannah Rice says amid some introductory remarks, “because insurance prefers it that way.” Other than that, she explains, they’re pretty much making the leap without a net, in keeping with the Original Practice Shakespeare Festival motto: “Because Shakespeare should be a little dangerous.”
Shakespeare, the man, might have agreed. The rise of a movement toward original practices in Shakespearean performance—that is, employing methods similar to those used about 400 years ago when the plays first were performed—has been linked by some observers to the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre in London and a surge in historical research over the past few decades. But fusty academics this ain’t.
The basic notion is simple: In Shakespeare’s day, theater troupes performed a lot of plays, rapidly changing up their offerings so that their audiences had something fresh. As the OPS Fest website puts it, “A modern company might produce five to eight plays in a season; Shakespeare’s actors exceeded that by a factor of ten or twenty.” That would’ve left no time, so this thinking goes, for scrupulous rehearsals or even memorization. So, instead, OPS actors train in how to understand and perform the Bard’s language, prepare individually on their own time, then take the stage with scrolls containing cues and lines for just their character.
Because many performances are outdoors, a prompter, playfully dressed in a black-and-white-striped referee shirt, sometimes whistles the action to a halt if, say, an airplane drowns out the dialogue, but might also use that interval to check in with the audience or to comment on the action.
And like the groundlings of old, OPS audiences like to have their voices heard, too. In Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s late-career Romances, OPS founder Brian Saville Allard plays a skeevy schemer called Iachimo. His lewd insinuations soon are met by robust boos from the picnicking crowd. One woman repeats a succinct critique: “Gross!”
Unlike in Victorian theater, women are welcome onstage, and this particular performance benefits greatly from University of Portland grads Ariel Puls ’10 and Emmy Christopherson ’21, each confidently tackling a couple of different male character roles.
All told, it’s loose and lively, with more the improvisatory immediacy of a jazz combo than the starched precision of a symphony.
Allard started OPS Fest 15 years ago, having performed in a similar format at the New England Shakespeare Festival.
OPS work requires a broad set of skills, a high degree of flexibility, and a spirit of adventure. And, increasingly, Allard has been finding those qualities in students and alumni from University of Portland, who say that the company is a perfect match for the generous approach to acting and arts that the University fosters.
“They’re a tight-knit group,” Allard says of some of the younger OPS performers with UP connections. “They bring each other into the fold.” This season there was also a current student, Zora Richardson ’26, in the cast.
Riley Anna Olson, a 2020 grad in her third OPS Fest season, discovered the company when her mother took her to a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Mission Theatre. Education director Lauren Saville Allard, as Juliet, “performed the balcony scene in Mickey Mouse PJs—a perfect reminder that she’s just a young girl. It was fresh and immediate and stuck with me forever.”
Later, when she began working with the company, she found its “Renaissance man” ethos “kind of married my UP education and the two filled in holes for each other.”
“To succeed in OPS,” says Olson, “you have to be devoted to the text—that’s number one. But you also have to be bold, to have a swing-for-the-fences spirit about how you approach the storytelling.”
OPS Fest apprentice Shae McCarty, who graduated from UP last summer with a major in vocal performance, auditioned because of enthusiastic reports from her friends Olson and Christopherson, but also because of how approachable the company made Shakespeare. “It never felt like I was being talked down to. I’d always wanted to learn more about Shakespeare but always felt dumb when I talked to people who knew a lot. That never happened here.”
“Something I’ve struggled with throughout my life is the feeling that everything I do has to be perfect,” McCarty says. “But in OPS, things are going to happen, both good and bad. There’s no dwelling on it. Just let it be fun. You can respect the work and still have fun with it.”
On this night, they knock it out of the park. Though almost no one in the crowd has seen the play before—and its mix of tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale has flummoxed many a good director—folks beam and laugh and cheer as the wild tangle of narrative threads gets resolved.
Shakespeare has, once again, reached across the centuries and touched them. Practice, as we usually think of it, might have merely gotten in the way.
“All you can do is be honest in the moment,” Olson says. “And OPS Fest is just a font of those honest moments.”
MARTY HUGHLEY is a Portland journalist who writes about theater, dance, music, and culture. In 2013, he was inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame for his contributions to the industry.
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