Several people have asked what’s worth seeing among the four new plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
I answer: all of ‘em.

But for those who like the results of a horse race, here’s the way I see ‘em in brief, done up like quickie movie listings.

“As You Like It” — Lively, highly theatrical production of a middling Shakespeare comedy, but played so broadly the themes get lost.. Playing Rosalind as a silly schoolgirl and Touchstone as a lovable clown are not good choices. Rating: One-and-a-half stars out of four.

“The Cherry Orchard” — Beautifully nuanced, gently comic/ironic version of Chekhov’s masterpiece. Proves it can be soulful without having to be a dirge. A triumph for director Libby Appel and for Judith-Marie Bergan as Mme. Ravenskaya, but strong throughout. Three-and-a-half stars.

“On the Razzle” — Fun, slightly naughty farce that fractures the English language. You expect good stuff from Tony DeBruno, but where did Rex Young and Tasso Feldman come from? You’ll never look at plaid in the same way. Three stars.

“Rabbit Hole” — Director Jim Edmondson’s fine take on David Lindsay-Abaires domestic drama about a child’s death and parental grief. Includes gentle humor. No ground-breaking theater here, but good writing in a sensitive rendering by a strong cast. Two-and-a-half stars.

I might have had the only dry eyes in the house. Plays like Rabbit Hole are not my usual cup of tea. There’s a sense in which writing about a dead kid and some sympathetic, grieving adults is setting the dramaturgical bar too low. But Rabbit Hole plays better than it describes. Some of the OSF’s best actors turn in fine performances, Jim Edmondson’s direction is razor sharp, and David Lindsay-Abaire’s script is so finely crafted it could be used in playwrighting classes. Nothing is maudlin or sentimental or over the top. The thing has an integrity about it you can feel.

David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Rabbit Hole” is a play very much about grief and coping with it. And for him, that’s different.

It is the last play of the weekend, and the only one in the New Theatre. The New is not the old Black Swan (yea! actors are saying), but it’s by far the most intimate space the OSF has. So bring the Kleenex.

It’s kitchen sink theater to the max (like the man said, recognize your prejudices and blind spots, dude): a middle-aged couple, a 4-year-old son dead for no reason (the very thing Hemingway came up with when he wanted an image of great sadness), an emotional jumble they can’t seem to find their way out of.

It sounds like one of those disease-of- the-week TV movies.

James Edmondson, who is a terrific director, directs, so it has that going. And the parents are Bill Geisslinger and Robin Nordli, who gets more plum roles at OSF than just about anybody but Kevin Kenerly, and who showed you why in the inspired if uneven “UP” last year.

This is a different stroke for Lindsay-Abaire. The OSF did a good production of his Fuddy Meers a few years back, and I’ve seen nice productions of his Kimberly Akimbo at Artattack in Ashland and Lord Leebrick in Eugene. But consider, in the former a woman wakes up every morning not remembering who she is. In the latter a 16-year-old girl has that disease in which you age at four times the normal rate. Ideas that work in a darkly humorous, quirky, contrived sort of way.

If you liked those plays (I did), you might wonder how Lindsay-Abaire came to write a Rabbit Hole. But if you found those plays kind of whimsical/gimmicky, as some did, you’ll probably applaud him for going for a heart-twanging realistic drama.

The combination of Tom Stoppard and Laird Williamson figured to be dazzling, and it is. “Whoopee!” Williamson writes in the program notes. “I like this play.” Led by Tony DeBruno, a terrfiic cast romps through the absurd situations, and yet we see ourselves in them. Michael Ganio’s scenes, Robert Blackman’s costumes, Larry Delinger’s madcap music and Kendall Smith’s lights.

Funny as it was, I didn’t think the timing was consistently razor-sharp, particularly in the second half, but that’s typical of opening nights for fast-paced farces with lots of wordplay and all those doors. This is the one you take company to.

Whoopee!

Half a century after falling in love with Chekhov, Libby Appel has given us a rich version of his masterpiece. Productions of “The Cherry Orchard” are often played too slowly and founder around in vague Russian atmospherics. This time it’s played with great precision. Judith-Marie Bergan gives us both Ranevska’s charm and her foolishness, Armando Duran is a fine Lopakhin, and Richard Elmore as Firs proves once again that there are no small parts.

A bat that somehow got into the Bowmer before it was opened stole the pre-show buzz darting about high above the audience. When the house lights came up later the flying mammal was gone. Rumor has it that bat checked out the show and said that in Chekhov, “nothing happens.”

There is a certain kind of play the OSF consistently does as well as anybody, anywhere. It’s a witty comedy or farce, either English or classic American, opening in the Bowmer at the start of the season. This play is all about timing. It’s Wilde or Coward or Michael Frayne.

This year it’s Tom Stoppard’s “On the Razzle,” and it’s happening tonight (Saturday).

This is a really big show (I resist the temptation to say a really big shoe). Stoppard is Stoppard, and Laid Williamson has a way with big shows. Consider Cyrano de Bergerac or Life is a Dream at OSF. He’s worked with top LA composer Larry Delinger forever. Delinger scored last year’s King John and the recent Much Ado, Antony and Cleo and a striking Good Person of Szechuan a few years back.

He told me there is something funny about a xylophone. Just innately funny. It was my favorite quote of the run-up to the openings.

So look for the xylophone in the incidental music for Razzle. And he’s right. Just the little bit I’ve heard, there is a sort of manic/comic/big city/out-of-control-kinetic kind of energy about it.

Tony DeBruno figures to be a good Zangler, the boss. The two who go on the razzle (an expression understood to involve the consumption of immoderate quantities of alcohol and all that implies) are young guns Rex Young and Tasso Feldman. Young played Polixenes in last year’s Winter’s Tale, a small part, and I don’t know Feldman.

For sheer fun, this is the best bet of the weekend.

I should confess straightaway to looking forward to “The Cherry Orchard” this afternoon (Saturday) with unnatural anticipation. It’s the best play by an amazing writer

Consider Chekhov. He comes from a bankrupt peasant family and writes some of the greatest plays since W. Shake, all the while a practicing doctor — and he’s dying of TB the whole time! He starts schools and initiates other enlightened measures for the poor, and he somehow becomes a maniac gardener

Yes, he planted a cherry orchard.

Chekhov is the first guy to look at the stage and say: life isn’t like that.

He’s right. Don’t know about you, but I don’t spend every day falling in love or shooting somebody or giving immortal soliloquies. People in plays should eat lunch and chat and drift away from each other, C said, and here’s the tricky part: it must all mean something to audiences. It should all somehow open a window through which we glimpse the very essence of life passing us like a breeze, so that maybe we don’t wind up like Firs in the Cherry Orchard.

So a silly aristocratic woman fritters away her estate in 1904 Russia despite warnings that she’s blowing it. “Nothing happens,” as some people say, then everybody drifts off except an old servant, who is left behind, forgotten, to die.
The old fight is whether this is a comedy or a tragedy. Chekhov insisted it was a comedy, almost a farce. Stanislavski, who directed at the Moscow Art Theatre, was just as vehement that it was a tragedy, telling C he didn’t know what he’d written.

Clurman, who saw the Moscow Art Theatre touring production in 1924, with Olga Knipper, Chekhov’s wife, playing Madam Ravensky, said it was played faster and more comically than later American productions he’d seen. From this we conclude that the American practice for much of the 20th century was a slower and sadder Cherry Orchard than than the one that Chekhov considered too slow and too sad!

When I asked Todd Barton, who wrote the music, the tragedy/comedy question, he said there was an ambiguity about the play, and that tragic/comic wasn’t a question he was concerned with.

Libby Appel told me straight out it’s ironically comic, as did translator Allison Horsley.

Judith-Marie Bergan will play Ranevsky. Come to think of it, you have Ranevsky and Rosalind, two of the great roles for women, each in a play in which “nothing happens,” in less than 24 hours.

Bergan was formidable as Lady Bracknell last year. Lyubov is a complex role. The thing with Lyubov is that she’s a fool who cannot help but mess up. And she functions as the villain, driving the play’s action, what there is of it. Yet Chekhov has drawn her affectionately.

Richard Howard is the feckless Gaev. Armando Duran figures to be an intense Lopakhin, just because he’s intense. The key to Lopakhin is he’s not a bad guy, and he should not be played as a scheming, avaricious upstart. He too is more complex that that.

There should be no orations in any of this. You don’t emote Chekhov lines like Richard III.

I didn’t buy the rationale for The Great Depression setting (something about the quest to find the self in a journey of renewal, uncertainty, challenges to the will, unclear threats) for the OSF’s new As You Like It, which opened last night, but it turns out it works just fine.

But — in the end it goes to show the relative importance of nice staging versus intelligent characterizations.
Because both Rosalind and Touchstone were off. Of the play’s three main roles, only the dour/philosophical Jaques, played by Robert Sicular, was on the money.

Miriam A. Laube played Rosalind as a giddy schoolgirl, which is odd since she orchestrates things. David Kelly played Touchstone as a lovable clown. Rosalind is the whole package of wit, wisdom and love, and she should not be played as a blushing adolescent.

When I hear audiences laugh and laugh at Touchstone, I’m always amazed. Of course, he can be quite funny if he’s played by an actor as good as Kelly — if you don’t listen too closely to what he says.

William Bloodgood’s set was spare and dominated by large, leafy flats that would glide in and out of place as the action moved to different parts of the Forest of Arden. John Tanner’s faux-30s tunes added to the ambiance.

There are some nice moments, but the real story is still somewhere out there in the forest with the lions and the snakes and the magic.

Here’s a flash. A source says incoming OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch will announce the OSF’s 2008 season — his first — at Shakespeare’s March 9 member event.

“It’s a different kind of season,” the source said.

No word on what that looks like yet.

There’s a feeling at the festival that it’s kinda weird to announce the next year’s season just two wks. after the current one opens. But things move fast, and they need to get a jump on lining up free-lance directors and designers and other guest artists for the following year.

A reader says she can’t access the new music from each of the four opening OSF plays this weekend she heard was supposed to be up on our Web site. If you wonder what the music will sound like for the new As You Like It, or maybe On the Razzle, here’s a quick way to get to it:

Log on directly to www.mailtribune.com/shakespeare, and you’ll be on a page with a story about the four composers who wrote original music for the new plays. There are four buttons to click, one for each play/composer. See what you think.