[In the following review, Winn critiques the staging of Troilus and Cressida directed by Kenneth Albers for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, maintaining that despite the production's “missed opportunities,” it was the best of the outdoor shows at the festival.]

Theater happens in a big way at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. That can be a mixed blessing with the country's largest repertory company, which opened its prime summer season over the weekend with three outdoor Shakespeare productions at the Elizabethan Theatre.

Spectacle and the sheer administrative achievement of rotating nine shows in three houses have a way of trumping the artistic adventure at times. The festival mounts 11 productions overall, in a bill that runs from February through late October and draws an audience of about 380,000 to this hilly southern Oregon hamlet.

Size, when it comes to the company's absorbing new production of Troilus and Cressida, is an impressive and instrumental asset. When the Greeks and Trojans finally strap on their armor, well into this ripely cynical comedy about men and their terrible games of war and lust, the display of heroic breastplates and fearsome helmets, flashing swords, rhythmically clanging shields and a gruesomely showy hanging goes to the heart of this strange, florid and fascinating comedy.

The battles aren't really climactic in Kenneth Albers' alert staging. Indeed, in a play about the entropic futility of war, they're a kind of farcically grand afterthought. James Newcomb, more nimble with his game leg and caustic tongue than any warrior, savagely deconstructs the combat as the scavenger Thersites.

The action is set nine years into the Trojan War, and everyone seems deeply weary of the combat. The general Agamemnon (an excellent Richard Elmore) can barely conceal his contempt for his own Greek “princes.” Mark Murphey's Ulysses is a fussbudget conspirator. The mountainous James J. Peck embodies a wonderfully obtuse Ajax.

Things aren't any better in the Trojan camp, where a bored, puffy-looking Hector (William Langan) issues an idle challenge to the enemy. Jeff Cummings plays Helen's abductor Paris with louche, idle vanity.

Language flowers with a kind of sickening aroma. It's there in the inflated strategems for a static war. And it clogs the air when Troilus (a strong Kevin Kenerly) fawns for Cressida. The hauntingly vacant Tyler Lawton portrays the story's ill-used, love-token blonde, procured for Troilus by her star-struck uncle Pandarus (a droll Albers, standing in for the injured William Leach for the first month).

The show has its failings—a pale Achilles (Jeffrey King) and other missed opportunities. But this dense, disturbing play, last seen here 17 years ago, is the first choice of the 2001 outdoor shows. …