OK, so as the more ravenous readers might know… I’ve been thinking of some possible directorial productions lately.
There are times when the iron is hot, and then…
There are times when you’re just a day late and a dollar short.
A couple of months back, I discussed an idea for The Comedy of Errors that I’ve been knocking around my brain for the last two years:
One’s a wild and raucous The Comedy of Errors, contemporary, set in the fictional border town of Ephesus, Texas, on the Day of the Dead, complete with a roving Mariachi band.
And now I learn that– well, I’ll let the OSF press release take it from here:
The 11th production of the 2019 season will be a bilingual (Spanish and English) adaptation of THE COMEDY OF ERRORS by OSF Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence Luis Alfaro, commissioned as part of the Play on! Shakespeare translation program. This Community Visit Program pilot production will be the final project Bill Rauch will direct as OSF’s artistic director, and the first Play on! translation to be produced at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
The Comedy of Errors marks a pilot of multiple initiatives: OSF’s first-ever Community Visit Project, a pairing of a new work and a Shakespeare play, and OSF’s first-ever fully bilingual work of art that can be experienced and enjoyed by monolingual Spanish-speaking, monolingual English-speaking and bilingual audience members.
The cast of The Comedy of Errors, which will be shared with the world premiere of Octavio Solis’s Mother Road, will perform Alfaro’s bilingual adaptation without sets and with minimal costuming and props at community venues throughout the region in the summer, and performances will be held on the OSF campus later in the season. Further details of the program will be announced this spring.
Of course, I was thinking of having the Dromios–at least at times–speak Spanish… AND I’ve been bouncing around the idea of a barnstorming guerrilla tour of a production (even considering calling it “the driveway tour”). Damn, what a drag.
Well, shoot.
Back to Andronicus, I guess. And watching this YouTube video (about one of my favorite music films of all time–Stop Making Sense [about which–I’ll digress EVEN further: I saw the tour on which this is based the summer before this particular performance was filmed…so there])… well, let’s just say, I’m getting some staging and lighting ideas…
Fingers crossed I’m able to get to this before someone else thinks of it in a similar fashion.