It is a bad year for the Philistine fringe. For summer theatergoers who cannot stand Shakespeare, avoiding him is all but impossible in this season of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. There seem to be even more Hamlets in the country than Smiths. Herewith a selective survey of Shakespearean productions in the U.S. and Canada.
∙ASHLAND, ORE. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is the oldest in the U.S. (1935). In the remote forests, casting has to be done by questionnaire rather than audition, but Producer-Director Angus Bowmer has in the past discov ered actors like Hollywood's George Peppard (Breakfast at Tiffany's) and Off Broadway's Joyce Ebert (The Trojan Women). This summer he has a witty, elegant Portia, a sunlit Viola, and a really arachnid Regan, all in the person of Elixabeth Huddle, a 25-year-old ac tress from San Francisco. Richard Coe, drama critic of the Washington Post, recently came away from Ashland pro claiming her "the finest young undiscovered actress in America."
The Oregon group does Henry VI, Part I as well as Lear, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, and does them all with fluid skill. Rigorously Elizabethan in style, the company offers no intermissions and performs in a simulacrum of 17th century London's Fortune Theater. "This is a stepping-stone between the academic and professional theaters," says Bowmer. "We use Shakespeare because we think he's a damned good theater man."
∙ATLANTA. The Southern Shakespeare Festival occurs in a converted Baptist church before audiences that have sometimes achieved levels of unsophistication reminiscent of the sort of people who watched Shakespeare's plays when they were originally performed. "He went thataway," a bloodthirsty young man once shouted over the footlights to Macbeth, indicating where the thane might corner King Duncan. But this year the Atlanta group has a really outstanding Hamlet in Jonathan Phelps, whose considerable technical facility is matched by a scholarly understanding of his subject, resulting in a performance of unusual balance.
∙HIGHLAND PARK, ILL The Ravinia Shakespeare Company may prove to be the best performing in the U.S. this summer, but this remains to be seen, since its opening night is Aug. 18. The group consists of 25 English Shakespearean actors, many of them graduates of the Old Vic. Assembled in London by Peter Dews, who produced and directed the BBC's An Age of Kings, the company will give 52 performances in the open air of Ravinia Park. King Henry V and Hamlet will be played by Robert Hardy, who played Laertes to Richard Burton's Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1953-54 and became one of Burton's favorite friends. The Ravinia Shakespeare Company has been imported as a result of the efforts of a Chicago advertising man, who thinks of Anacin by day and dreams of anapaests at night.