The Portland Actors Ensemble: Love’s Labour’s Lost

Elizabeth E. Tavares (Pacific University)

In the wake of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it is easy to lose sight of other early modern productions on offer in the Pacific Northwest. One such is the nearly fifty-year-old troupe, the Portland Actors Ensemble, which puts on a mobile Shakespeare-in-the-Park summer season free to the public. This summer’s circulating production of Love’s Labour’s Lost proffered an extended meditation on the limits of male camaraderie, while making thoughtful use of non-dedicated performance spaces in the city and the country.

With such a setting, the architectural elements were kept to a minimum: a gazebo and a pillar supporting a small statue of Cupid taking aim. One of the key dramaturgical challenges of Love’s Labour’s Lost is what to do about the cascading asides called for in the last scene of act four. A tree equipped with climbing apparatus and other geological features are often brought in to provide places for the four gentlemen to hide as they watch one another perjure themselves of their initial oaths to reject female infatuation for the sake of study. Not…