Various plays run through Oct. 31. Four works of Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, Henry IV Part One, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet. Others: Pride and Prejudice, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, She Loves Me, Throne of Blood, Well, Ruined, American Night: The Ballad of Juan José. The Courtyard Stage (no charge) offers various performances in The Green Show. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 15 S. Pioneer St., Ashland, OR 97520; 800.219.8161 or osfashland.org Prices begin at $20.

Ask Bill Rauch, Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) since 2007, his most important goal and he’ll tell you, “It’s that we’re building on 75 years of work and delivering productions that make people want to come.” The evidence, he says, lies in a ticket sales rate of 96% in a recent week. (Tickets remain available.)

OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch.

“OSF has commissioned new plays for several years,” Rauch says, “but we’ve certainly accelerated the number and development processes for these plays.” On average, OSF stages four Shakespeare plays per season among its 11 offerings. This year OSF has premiered American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle.

“Alison Carey, who along with me co-founded Cornerstone Theatre in Los Angeles, runs American Revolutions which is the program through which we’re commissioning 37 new plays over several years that look at moments of change in our past. Culture Clash is the first.”

Richard Montoya founded Culture Clash with Herbert Siguenza and Ric Salinas 25 years ago in Los Angeles. Montoya says, “A few years ago we sat in a living room in Silver Lake with a bunch of other playwrights and culture makers, folks from Actors’ Gang and Cornerstone, to talk about Bill Rauch who’d just accepted his job in Oregon. One of the ideas being floated was, ‘Could there be a new cycle of plays up there?’ Bill was taking a really detailed temperature if there was an interest and overwhelmingly everyone had a very positive reaction to the idea of reframing our country’s history. Not long after that we were invited to Oregon and it was decided Culture Clash would be first out of the gate.”

Montoya set to work on American Night: The Ballad of Juan José.

“We were writing at a clip having just finished Water & Power and getting ready to do Peace with Bill Rauch at the Getty and Palestine, New Mexico at the Taper. Even two years ago we knew it would be about immigration but we didn’t see Arizona coming along as it has, so that has really heightened the piece. It seems appropriate the first play in the cycle deals with immigration and the immigrant.”

American Night is told through the dream of a Mexican man about to take his test for US citizenship. He feels ill prepared. Fail this, he knows, and he is doomed to return to Mexico. Along his journey, he encounters historical figures and becomes one himself.

“This is a man who dreams himself signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the very document that will make an outlaw of him, some 200 years later when Mexico surrenders land [that eventually becomes Arizona].”

Richard Montoya.

Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, signed this summer by Governor Jan Brewer and temporarily tamped down by a federal judge, would have granted law enforcement officers the right - and responsibility - to inquire into a person’s immigration status as long as the officer had a legal right to question the person. They may be criminal suspects, drivers pulled over for traffic offenses or crime victims.

“Sometimes,” says Montoya, “you are following the culture and sometimes the culture follows you. The art couldn’t imitate the life fast enough. Even strange things, like Culture Clash’s name appearing on a list of banned books at Tucson High School. We didn’t even have to go to Arizona to be drawn into the culture war.”

On another stage in Ashland (there are three, along with a free outdoor stage) mysterious spirits work their macabre magic on Washizu, a warrior in the remote, ritualized world of feudal Japan. It’s the first-ever staged adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s landmark 1957 version of Macbeth. The haunted woods in which Washizu and his woman walk are not unlike the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.

“There might be a lot of laughs in American Night,” Montoya notes, “but we remind ourselves everyday that it’s life and death in the Sonoran Desert and if the photo in the New York Times recently didn’t drive home the point about bodies being warehoused in morgues outside of Tucson and Phoenix, people are going to die because of this issue. They already are. I’m not trying to be melodramatic about it but we have a very topical show with lots of satire and lots of humor. We don’t want to lose sight of the fact it’s a very desperate situation out there.”

Juan José, in his dream, encounters a multitude of figures in realistic, fantastical and impressionistic scenes. Among them is a braces-wearing Sacajawea, a radio play troupe, and Marielito refugees in a raft, floating toward the Florida coastline from Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the 1980s. Everyone’s always on the move.

“It is, by all accounts, a complex subject,” Montoya says. “There are problems along the Mexican border, least of which are the narco trafficantes in Mexico. A lot of my friends point to the guns and drug appetite coming from America. That may be. Part of that is true. But there’s a culture of death in Mexico that wasn’t invented in America. It’s invented with the monies and corruptions in Mexico. When do we begin to take a longer, darker look at that? And on those issues, you may even find a strange kinship with some [conservative] members in our audience. Where we disagree is the extreme nature of the immigration laws, the profiling.”

Richard Montoya in American Night.

While researching the play, Montoya drove through Arizona with his wife. He laughs as he recalls the story. “I remember getting stopped. I couldn’t tell if it was because my back taillight was taped over with red tape or because we fit a certain description. It can be frightening and if you’re not as articulate as the next guy or have a slight accent or are nervous under the questioning, then no telling what could happen. The border officer who stopped us happened to be a Mexican American who was tougher on us. I said to my wife if we get pulled over again, I hope it’s a white border officer because we might have a better chance.”

It’s not that the border agent was a caricature - or character, to Montoya’s mind - like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He’s the lawman admittedly eager to enforce Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070. “Arpaio is a character,” says Montoya, who describes the Sheriff as a gun slinging, holster wearing guy in a cowboy hat. “A bad Hollywood joke. He’s a guy from Massachusetts who’s remade himself in the Old West, very much like an immigrant might be trying to refashion himself.”

Montoya had his sites on Arpaio “for over a year. We knew the bill was coming. We knew the sentiment was there. What fascinates me about Joe Arpaio is that he’s the son of Italian immigrants. So ‘give me your meek, your huddled masses’ seems to apply to only certain members of our community and that seems extreme and unjust. When that argument gets rejected, then we take it to the next level: the play submits to the audience that we may be talking about a morality issue here.”

For Montoya, the rhetorical question is, “If Jesus is walking toward you in the desert and he’s dark and he’s dirty and he’s speaking with a thick accent, do you turn your back? Give him water? Arrest him? Joe Arpaio would likely arrest Jesus if he were walking in the Sonoran Desert. There’s humor in that, satire in that but more than a couple kernels of maize in that.”

Do current events force the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to be culturally responsive? Artistic Director Bill Rauch says, “I think artists have to be both proactive and reactive at all times and I think we have to be that in Oregon, in this isolated, rural, beautiful place.”

Rauch considers his plans as the country emerges from “this great recession and I don’t mean great-as-in-terrific.” OSF has had its share of fiscal challenges. “Compared to a lot of our sister and brother theatres across the country we’re doing quite well because audiences are so excited by the work,” says Rauch. “Many people are packing in to see the plays.”

Last year, for example, Don Quixote, a world premiere adaptation, “did better on our outdoor stage than did the two Shakespeare plays. I think the audience is so hungry for artistic adventure and artistic variety and what we talk about as the kaleidoscopic energy of rotating repertory. The audience is so in tune with that.”

Tickets are nearly gone for American Night, even though it runs into October.

Richard Montoya says he’s proud of humanizing Mexican male immigrants. “They are the most vilified people after Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. So to humanize him and give him song and give him voice and give him narrative that parallels the narratives of many of the grandparents and great grandparents sitting in the audience. It’s a reminder that, oh, this is a tradition: people come here.”

And not everyone comes here to commit crimes or sell drugs, notes Montoya. “I’ve never understood where the stereotype of the lazy Mexican comes from. Every Mexican in Ashland has about three or four jobs including this Mexican who’s also a playwright.”

Feature image of Richard Montoya, René Millán and Herbert Siguenza in American Night by Jenny Graham.

Article by Steve Julian.