On stage, it's the best of times

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The nowhere hour before dinner. The Yankees on one station, the Celtics on another, both in hi-def, and my wife not home when my son calls.

"Hey. What's goin' on?"

"Mussina is beating Cleveland, the Hawks are taking it to Boston."

"I have the same games."

"Is this a great time of year or what?"

You have early season baseball — in which everything you thought you knew last year might now be wrong — and the NBA playoffs — in which players begin actually playing hard — and the NHL playoffs to boot, all at once. The only comparable time is September, when the pennant races are coming to a head as the college and NFL football seasons start. It is an embarrassment of riches.

And so it is in theaters heareabouts just now. A time of abundance. What brings this up is the approach of Rogue Community College's production of "The Merchant of Venice," which will open Friday in RCC's Warehouse in downtown Medford.

RCC in Medford does just one play a year, and it's always worth checking out. It's staged in a former furniture warehouse, with RCC's John Cole and Ron Danko co-directing a mix of student actors and a few experienced hands.

Like Atlanta Coach Mike Woodson, who sends Joe Johnson and Josh Smith into the heart of the vaunted Boston defense, these guys don't believe in easy. Last spring it was Jean Giraudoux's "The Madwoman of Chaillot." This year it's "Merchant," just your basic little romantic comedy with that nasty streak of anti-Semitism. I'm not saying that's what it's about, but it's there. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival got its ears singed when it mounted a "Merchant" in 1991. An OSF production a decade later proved not as feather-ruffling.

If you've had a theater-junkie relative show up, you could almost take him to a different play every night of the week. The OSF has opened its two spring plays, a sharp "Coriolanus" and "The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler," a madcap comedy with a point, to run in rotation with its four season-opening plays, which continue.

Camelot Theatre in Talent opened the mystical "Dancing at Lughnasa" Friday. "The Great American Trailer Park Musical" just finished a run at Oregon Stage Works in Ashland, and Horton Foote's elegiac "Trip to Bountiful" will open May 23. Ashland Community Theatre just had a reading of short, original plays by area playwrights at Paschal Winery.

Southern Oregon University is preparing its spring plays, Janusz Glowacki's "Hunting Cockroaches," which will open May 15, and Mary Zimmerman's "Metamorphoses," which will open May 23.

SOU, which offers a major in theater arts, has two stages, resources for sets and costuming and frequent help from OSF pros. "Cockroaches" is directed by the OSF's Terri McMahon.

So is there a theater time analogous to fall sports? You could argue for August and September, when OSF runs nine plays in three theaters (OSF's outdoor season runs from June to early October), plus there are the semi-professional theaters' late summer shows. But you don't have the college plays sweetening the mix then.

So take your pick, and get your tickets early. Live plays scratch an itch TV sports don't even know about.

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com.

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