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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0061  Wednesday, 12 January 2000.

From:           Nancy Charlton <nancjbc@snip.net>
Date:           Tuesday, 11 Jan 2000 11:57:01 -0500
Subject: 11.0058 Tygres Heart Shakespeare Company
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0058 Tygres Heart Shakespeare Company

Congratulations, Tygres Heart, on your new artistic director, on what
sounds like a smashing season, and on surviving!

During the years I lived in Portland I saw several Tygres Heart
productions:  a colorful Henry IV Part I, the next year a Part II that
was my first serious brush with that play.  Their Richard III was in
production about the time "Looking for Richard" came out.  That was
about the time, as I recall, that TH's continued existence was in
jeopardy, and their Richard was done on a shoestring budget.  They did
wonders by using symbolic colors of hats and other articles of clothing
to identify the various factions as the same actors came and went.

I'm also glad to hear that the Winningstad is still your venue.  The
Portland Center itself was in jeopardy a year or two ago, with some
feeling in the public of 'who needs it?'  The part where TH plays is a
natural Shakespearean space, capable of proscenium staging or
in-the-round.  The space is tall and skinny, but even from the top
balcony the hearing and seeing is excellent.

Local reviewers were usually pretty caustic about TH, Willamette Week in
particular.  They wrote once that TH needed to decide whether it was a
superannuated school production troupe or real professional theatre.  I
never met anyone in all those years who had actually seen the plays
there who had anything negative to say.  It was well received always by
the public.

I may try to arrange a trip to Portland at the time "Mystery of the
Sonnets" is playing.  Keith Scales is extraordinary: I enjoyed his work
with the AHEPA on their yearly productions of the Sophocles plays and
various lectures he does from time to time.  I'd like to see your King
Lear, too.  Portland State U. did an extraordinary KL about 9 years ago,
the best student production I've ever seen.  They borrowed Wayne Banker
from I think it was Ashland to be a Lear with sufficient gravitas.

Good show, Tygres Heart!

Nancy Charlton

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