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Bard times four = OSF 2000 Appel announces roster for season By BILL VARBLE Several of William Shakespeare's best-loved plays join six American plays in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2000 season announced Tuesday. "Hamlet," "Twelfth Night" and "The Taming of the Shrew," all by Shakespeare, will run from June to October on the festival's outdoor Elizabethan Stage. A fourth Shakespeare entry, "Henry V," is slated for February through October at the indoor Angus Bowmer Theatre. Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's "The Man Who Came to Dinner" and Tennessee Williams' "The Night of the Iguana" will be presented in the Bowmer Theatre along with "Force of Nature," by Steven Dietz, and "The Trojan Women," by Euripides. Scheduled for the Black Swan are "Wit," by Margaret Edson, "Crumbs from the Table of Joy," by Lynn Nottage, and "Stop Kiss," by Diana Son. "We're thrilled with the diversity of great world drama," OSF Artistic Director Libby Appel said in announcing the roster. "It is a challenging and exciting lineup of plays befitting America's oldest and largest repertory theater." "Night of the Iguana," "The Man Who Came to Dinner" and "The Trojan Women" are all being produced at the Festival for the first time. "Force of Nature" will enjoy its West Coast premiere. Tickets go on sale in November for groups, in January for individuals. Exact dates of the shows will be announced later. Among the plays new to the festival, "Iguana" brings together several dysfunctional characters in a seedy Mexican resort hotel -- a sex-starved widow, a de-frocked preacher and a gentle maiden. In "The Man Who Came to Dinner," the pompous critic Sheridan Whiteside is simply having dinner with the Stanleys when he breaks a hip and, forced to stay, takes over their home for six weeks with hilarious fallout. "The Trojan Women" examines the sorrows of the Queen of Troy, Hecuba, and her daughters, Polyxena and Cassandra. It's a rare glimpse of a take on female nobility in the classical world. "Force of Nature," by Steven Dietz, will have its West Coast premiere. It's based on Goethe's novel about Edward and Charlotte, who were lovers in their youth and are finally able to marry in deep middle age, only to find their life turning out not quite as they expected. Three contemporary plays make up the final season of the Black Swan Theater, a venue prized for its intimacy. The Festival plans to replace it with a new theater seating about 300 people, expected to open in 2001. The Pulitzer Prize-winning "Wit" is the story of Vivian Bearing, an academic and an expert in the poetry of Donne who is dying of cancer. "Crumbs From the Table of Joy" is about an African-American man who joins the post-War northern migration of blacks from the Deep South to Brooklyn. He takes his two daughters, encountering changes that will affect them forever. "Stop Kiss" is about Callie, a traffic reporter and New Yorker, and Sara, a teacher transplanted from St. Louis, and their surprising attraction to each other. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA