Oregon Shakespeare Festival - History

History

The festival traces its roots to the Chautauqua movement of the late 1800s. In 1893, the residents of Ashland built a facility that hosted its first performance on 5 July. The building was expanded in 1905, and in its heyday, accommodated audiences of 1500 for appearances by the likes of John Phillip Sousa and William Jennings Bryan during annual 10-day seasons.

In 1917, a new domed structure was built at the site, but it fell into disrepair after the Chautauqua movement died out in the 1920s. In 1935, the similarity of the remaining wall of the by then roofless Chautauqua building to Elizabethan theatres inspired Southern Oregon Normal School drama professor Angus L. Bowmer to propose using it to present plays by Shakespeare. Ashland city leaders granted him a sum "not to exceed US$400" (US$5,600 2005 est.) to present two plays as part of the city's Independence Day celebration. However, they pressed Bowmer to add boxing matches to cover the expected deficit. Bowmer agreed, feeling such an event was in perfect keeping with the bawdiness of Elizabethan theatre, and the performances went forward. The Works Progress Administration helped construct a makeshift Elizabethan stage on the Chautauqua site, and confidently billed as the "First Annual Oregon Shakespearean Festival", Bowmer presented Twelfth Night on July 2 and July 4, 1935 and The Merchant of Venice on July 3, with Bowmer directing and playing the lead roles in both plays. Reserved seats cost US$1, with general admission of US$.50 for adults and US$.25 for children (approximately equivalent to US$13.80, US$6.90, and US$3.45 2005 est.). Ironically, it was the profit from the plays that covered the losses the boxing matches incurred.

The festival has continued ever since, excepting 1941–1946, when Bowmer served in World War II, and quickly developed a reputation for quality productions. In 1939, OSF took a production of The Taming of the Shrew to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California that was nationally broadcast on radio. The lead actress, learning at the last minute the broadcast would be to a national audience, suffered a panic attack, was rushed to the hospital and the stand-in took over. The scripts didn’t arrive on the set until three minutes before air time. The Festival achieved widespread national recognition when, from 1951 to 1973, NBC broadcast abbreviated performances each year that were carried by more than 100 stations and, after 1954 on Armed Forces Radio and Radio Free Europe. The programs won favorable review from critics and for the first time people began to come from around the country. The programs led Life magazine to do a story on the Festival in 1957, bringing even more people to the plays. The NBC programs and the subsequent attention go a long way to explaining the mystery of how a tiny out-of-the-way timber town in the Northwest became a theatrical and tourist Mecca.

A second playhouse, the indoor Angus Bowmer Theatre, opened in 1970, enabling OSF to expand its season into the spring and fall; within a year, attendance tripled to 150,000. Bowmer retired in 1971, and leadership of the festival passed to Jerry Turner, a respected actor/director and later a translator of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Turner opened OSF's third theatre, the Black Swan, in 1977, and festival attendance soon reached 300,000. In 1983 OSF won a Tony Award for achievement in regional theatre. Five years later, the Oregon Shakespearean Festival was renamed the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. At the invitation of the City of Portland, from 1988–1994, OSF established a resident theatre in the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, which later spun off to independence as Portland Center Stage. Those six seasons ran from November–April, and company members often worked in both cities.

Turner retired in 1991 and actor/director Henry Woronicz took control for five seasons. 1992 saw the opening of the Allen Pavilion, which encircled the open-air seating area within the walls of the Elizabethan Theatre.

When Woronicz left in 1996, OSF recruited Libby Appel from the highly respected Indiana Repertory Theatre, and a guest director at OSF from 1988 to 1991, as artistic director. In 1997, the OSF-commissioned The Magic Fire was presented at the John F. Kennedy Center and named by Time among the year's best plays. In 2001, the ten millionth ticket to an OSF performance was sold. In 2002, the New Theatre replaced the Black Swan as the venue for small, experimental productions in a Black box theatre. In 2003, Time named OSF as the second best regional theatre in the United States (Chicago's Goodman Theater was first).

Appel was succeeded in 2008 as Artistic Director by Bill Rauch. Rauch was the artistic director and co-founder of the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles and had directed plays previously at OSF. He is making direct connections between classic plays and contemporary concerns, exploring beyond the Western canon to incorporate Asian and African epics into the Festival, and reaching out to youth. Inspired by Shakespeare's history plays, he has initiated a series of original plays focusing on American history. While continuing to work with established playwrights, he has commissioned works by new ones, and has initiated the Black Swan Lab to develop new works for the stage. His work resulted in his receiving the Margo Jones Award recognizing his impact on American theatre in 2009.

In 2007, OSF initiated a ten-year plan to create 37 original plays under the direction of Alison Carey, equaling the number of plays Shakespeare wrote, collectively known as American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle. The plays focus on moments of change in America's past that help to establish a shared understanding of our national identity. Grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Collins Foundation, the Edgerton Foundation, the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Trust, and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation support American Revolutions.

Partnerships with Arena Stage, Berkeley Rep, Guthrie Theatre, Playwrights Center, the Public Theatre, Seattle Rep, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and the Yale Repertory Theatre ensure that the plays will reach beyond their original OSF audience.

The first play in the series, American Night: The Ballad of Juan José, was presented as part of the 2010 season and proved so popular that for the first time in OSF history, was expanded to include four extra performances. It was later produced at the Denver Theater Center, Center Theater Group, La Jolla Playhouse, and Yale Repertory Theatre. Ghost Light, the second in the series, was presented as part of the 2011 series. The OSF production then transferred to Berkeley Rep. The 2012 season includes All the Way and Party People, bringing to four the number of plays written and produced as part of the cycle at OSF. A fifth, an adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s The March, premiered at Steppenwolf in 2012. The Liquid Plain will premier during the 2013 season.