A past Original Practice Shakespeare performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Original Practice Shakespeare
If you pass through Mt. Tabor park Sunday night, you may see a fairy queen fall in love with an ass, or find yourself caught up in the very tragical mirth of Pryamus and his love Thisbe.
Portland's Original Practice Shakespeare Festival is performing a Midsummer Night's Dream on the the summer solstice.
The twist: the audience will get to vote on which cast member will play each role. If you want to choose who's playing Puck and who will be Oberon, voting starts at 8 p.m. Sunday.
The actors will have just 45 minutes to prepare and each will get a little scroll with their part and three-word cues written out. Only one person, a designated prompter in a referee's striped jersey, will have a full copy of the script.
The show, which is free, will begin at 9 p.m.
The company's goal is to make the material rowdy and fresh. "It's in a lot of ways more like a sporting event than your traditional type of show, where you're expected to sit quietly and watch. You don't have to turn the ringer off on your phone at our show. But we might answer it for you," said artistic director Brian Allard.
While crowd-sourcing the casting of the play may be unusual, Allard argues that combining Shakespeare and improvisation is in the spirit of how the plays were performed in Elizabethan England.
"We believe that going back to the historical documents, and things like that, we are performing the way that Shakespeare's actors did. We know they didn't have the time to rehearse, because they were performing 5 or 6 different plays a week," he said.
Oregon Art Beat profiled the company's unusual approach to Shakespeare in 2011. The Original Practice Shakespeare Festival will be performing its lightly rehearsed and comic versions of 11 of Shakespeare's plays at parks throughout the metro area in July and August. You can find the full schedule here.