NSU Sponsors Trip To Oregon Shakespeare Festival

TAHLEQUAH For Northeastern State University students, the play is the thing this summer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. The NSU College of Liberal Arts and the Department of Languages and Literature is sponsoring an educational trip to the annual festival, scheduled May 30 June 6.

Dr. John Mercer, professor of English at NSU Broken Arrow, took a group of students to the festival during the summer of 2008, and had an overwhelmingly positive experience.

Our week in Ashland in June 2008 was a wonder experience for all 22 of us who went, said Mercer. The trip was supposed to be a one-time event, but the students lobbied for a return trip in 2009.

The cost of the trip is $1150, including round-trip airfare, ground transportation, dormitory housing, breakfasts, theatre tickets, and educational sessions with the acting company. Students will earn three hours of undergraduate credit in English, Humanities or Theatre, or three hours of graduate credit in English. Tuition and fees are in addition to the cost of the trip.

Winner of the Tony Award and the Oregon Governors Award for the Arts, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been operating its non-profit, educational brand of theater since 1935. The companys yearly schedule of performances spans over eight months and 11 plays.

I know of no other theater company in the country that can compete with the quantity and quality of Shakespearean productions in Ashland, said Mercer. In 2008, my students especially enjoyed the original settings that breathed new life into the old plays: the woods in A Midsummer Nights Dream was like a nightclub in the 1970s, The Comedy of Errors was set in a frontier town of the American West in the 1800s.

Productions scheduled for this years festival include Shakespeares Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing and Henry VIII, along with Bill Cains Equivocation, a new play about Shakespeare and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 which served as inspiration for Macbeth, Cervantes Don Quixote, in a world premiere adaptation of the classic novel, Wole Soyinkas Death and the Kings Horseman, a Nobel Prize-winnng playwrights tragedy of the clash of British colonialism with African tradition, and Meredith Willsons The Music Man or Sarah Ruhls Dead Mans Cell Phone.

While on the trip, students will participate in discussion about each of the plays, take a backstage tour of the Oregon Shakespeare Festivals three theaters, participate in two pre-performance talks with members of the Festival company, and participate in two question-and-answer sessions with Festival actors.

For more information, contact Mercer at 918-449-6541 or mercer@nsuok.edu. Documents related to the trip can be found on Mercers website, arapaho.nsuok.edu/~mercer. A trip blog is at http://sashakespeare.blogspot.com.

2/5/2009

Published: 2009-02-05 00:00:00