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OSF has `thrilling' road trip By BILL VARBLE Libby Appel has two words for anybody who wants to know how it feels to be invited to perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.: "Unbelievably thrilling," she says in a telephone interview from Washington. Appel, artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is directing the Festival's production of Lillian Garrett-Groag's "The Magic Fire" in Washington. The play opens tonight at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater. It's the first play ever presented by the OSF outside Oregon. A party is planned for Sunday at the Kennedy Center, moving later to the Watergate Hotel. While the Festival's Ashland home is hardly the bush leagues, this is definitely the majors. Time magazine and the Washington Post sent critics to the previews. Playing next door are the National Symphony Orchestra's "Porgy and Bess" and The Washington Opera's "Samson and Delilah." The green room, where actors go when they're not on stage in the 1,100-seat theater, is filled with posters from past plays starring Sir John Gielgud, Henry Fonda, Peter O'Toole, James Earl Jones. The Festival has taken shows 300 miles up the road to Portland before, but the logistics of taking one 3,000 miles were daunting: sets designed to be reassembled on the spot, stuff OSF staffers can't touch because of union rules, local workers who handle scenery and can't touch props, others who do props and can't touch scenery, a window of just 15 hours for workers to put it all together. "It was tough," OSF associate producer David Dreyfoos says. "But it's gone smoothly." "The Magic Fire" premiered at the Festival's Angus Bowmer Theatre in Ashland last year. Part of the money for the production came from the Kennedy Center's Fund for New American Plays. But that doesn't get you onstage at the Kennedy Center. The fund has aided dozens of new plays in the 1990s, three of which went on to win Pulitzers. But a Kennedy Center spokeswoman says only about one play a year from outlying theaters usually winds up being produced in Washington. "It tends to be first-rate companies," says Tiki Davies, director of the center's press office. "Which we think the Oregon Shakespeare Festival definitely is." Davies said word of the play got around after Kennedy Center director Max Woodword saw the opening in Ashland. "Right then and there he said it would work at the Kennedy," Appel says. Woodward called back a week later, and the groups made a deal. Janeen Olsen, OSF's marketing director, says the Eisenhower Theater has been a challenge to Festival actors, who have had to learn to make their voices cover a theater with tough acoustics. "It's not tuned as beautifully as the Bowmer," Olsen says from her room at the Watergate. "They have to pitch their voices to the back." In their off hours, she says, actors and staffers have been taking in White House tours, the Holocaust Museum, a Van Gogh exhibit, the colors along the Potomac River. Appel says she and Garrett-Groag have made a few changes in the play since its Ashland run. She says the actors seem to be finding more depth in it after being away from it a year. "I think it's richer," she says. Appel can be forgiven if she sounds a bit like the player who hits the season-making home run. One of the promises she made to the Festival's board when she replaced a popular predecessor was that she would try to get a play produced at a prestigious venue. "To get it in the very first season (in which she picked the Festival's plays) was shocking and thrilling." Appel says Washington audiences are tougher than those in Oregon, but the play has been well received in previews. "They're laughing and clapping," she says. "The Magic Fire" plays nightly through Dec. 6, with both matinees and evening shows on weekends. Tickets range from $20 (balcony) to over $50 (box seats). Call Instant-Charge at 800-444-1324. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA