Present and former Oregon Shakespeare Festival company members, including Rex Young, Jeanne and Larry Paulsen, Richard Howard, Vilma Silva, Steven Patterson, Kathleen Turco-Lyon, and Kevin Kenerly will honor actor-director James Edmondson with a reading of Randall Stuart’s Squire Monday, September 16th, in the Southern Oregon University Recital Hall on Mountain Avenue. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., the reading begins at 7 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public. For further information contact Paul Squires at paulmasonbarnes@gmail.com; 541-941-5731.
Squire recounts Stuart’s collaboration with Edmondson, his now-retired, revered and cherished mentor, and with dramaturg-actor Barry Kraft on the Festival’s 1981 production of King Henry IV, Part One, in which the three crafted the role of John Hardyng, page to the Percy family, who existed in real life but was not a character in Shakespeare’s play. Stuart appeared as Hardyng, squire to Harry “Hotspur” Percy (played by Kraft), with lines requisitioned from other characters or from other of Shakespeare’s history plays.
Set against the tapestry of what Stuart calls the “golden age” of the American regional theatre and at a time when Festival actors performed outdoors without benefit of electronic amplification or the surrounding walls of the Allen Pavilion, Squire also recounts Stuart’s involvement in the peace movement of the time and the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on OSF and the American theatre.
James (Jim) Edmondson came to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as an actor in 1972 to play Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew and stayed on-and-off for over 35 seasons. His first directing assignment was the 1974 production of Twelfth Night, followed the next season by Romeo and Juliet, featuring Mark Murphey and Christine Healy. He is remembered for his portrayal of King Lear in Libby Appel’s inaugural season production, and for his performances as Joe in The Time of Your Life, George in Of Mice and Men, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, and for a host of roles in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (Shylock), Measure for Measure (Angelo), and the title roles in King John, Richard II, and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. Edmondson’s productions of King Henry V and Richard III (both featuring OSF actor Marco Barricelli) remain legendary. Edmondson directed the opening production in the Black Swan Theatre, A Taste of Honey, and was the Producer-Director of the Festival’s annual HIV/AIDS benefit, the Daedalus Project, for over 25 years, famously closing out each year’s gathering with a candle-lit “witnessing” ceremony, joining company and audience members in a communal expression of grief and remembrance.
