SOURCE: Armstrong, Alan. “The 1997 Oregon Shakespeare Festival.” Shakespeare Bulletin 16, no. 2 (spring 1998): 33-7.

In the following excerpt, Armstrong appraises the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Timon of Athens as directed by Penny Metropulos, noting that the director viewed the play as a work-in-progress and took a number of liberties with the text in order to quicken the pace of the production.

OSF [Oregon Shakespeare Festival] associate artistic director Penny Metropulos directs a welcome production of Timon of Athens on the festival's outdoor Elizabethan stage. Relatively unadorned even in the putative splendor of the early banquet scenes, the stage is completely bare during Timon's later self-imposed exile. The focus of action shifts then to a coffin-sized sandbox recessed in the floor at the very front of the stage, where Timon scrabbles for his roots and finds the buried gold. The production eschews classical “weeds of Athens” in favor of richer...