Build It and They Will Come: The Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Photos courtesy Oregon Shakespeare Festival
WHEN ANGUS BOWMER, an outgoing English teacher and Shakespeare enthusiast moved to Ashland in 1934, he convinced town officials to bring back the fireworks and summer festivities that lit up Ashland before the Depression. He also offered to stage (and star in) a three-day festival of Shakespeare plays as part of the celebration. Town officials agreed, but they assumed the performances would lose money and organized afternoon boxing matches to offset the theater losses. In the end, it was boxing that went into the red. The actors in the Shakespearean festival—local students and residents—returned to adoring audiences the next summer and the next and the next.
Build it and they will come.
More than 90 years later, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) has become the oldest, largest, professional, regional, rotating repertory theater company in the U.S. It is also the country’s most diverse and inclusive company, with 70 percent of the actors people of color (in a town where 90 percent of the 22,000 residents are white).
Much more than a summer festival, OSF now produces eleven plays, usually three to five by Shakespeare and the remainder by other playwrights (many new), on three stages during a ten-month season. Under Bill Rauch, OSF’s current (but departing) artistic director, the company has become not only diverse but bold—connecting classic plays to contemporary concerns, showcasing Asian and African theater, privileging female playwrights, making unlikely cast picks (e.g., a female Julius Caesar), and more.
Inspired by Shakespeare’s canon of plays—all of which OSF has performed multiple times—Rauch also initiated a 10-year program to commission up to 37 new plays collectively called American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle. Each looks at moments of change in America’s past; one, All the Way, won the Tony Award for best play in 2014.
It has been a successful formula. In 2015, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival welcomed its 20-millionth visitor. Each year, more than 300,000 visitors drive an average of 120 miles to Ashland to take in as many plays as they can
“It builds the muscles of the actors,” Rauch says. “It also builds the muscles of the audience.”
Soon after Tony and I closed on our Ashland house, we joined my friend Kathy in ordering tickets for the 2018 season.
We missed the first play in our lineup, Henry V, when we arrived at 8 pm on a chilly April night to discover that the performance had been a matinee. We had landed in Ashland the week before and, apparently, we were still coming out of the dark.
Destiny of Desire was warm and hilarious. Written by Karen Zacarías and directed by José Luis Valenzuela, it’s a comedic parody of the telenovela, exploding myths of the Latin culture with facts, laughter, and music.
We saw Romeo and Juliet at OSF’s stunning, outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theater (just before smoke from nearby wildfires drove performances indoors, to the local high school).
In my years documenting adolescent learning, I’d observed ninth grade English classes wind their way through Romeo and Juliet, challenged less by the Early Modern English than by the young lovers’ age (thirteen) and their choice in the face of warring families (suicide). “Shakespeare has it all wrong,” I remember one girl saying.
This July night, the intensity of the romance between Romeo and Juliet swept me off my feet. For one minute, I wondered if in this OSF rendition, perhaps, just perhaps, the two love struck teenagers would find a happy ending.
Our August lineup included Oklahoma! and a new play, Manahatta,by Native American playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle.
The classic 1943 musical traditionally follows the romances of cowboy Curly McLain and farm girl Laurey Williams, as well as cowboy Will Parker and his love Ado Annie. Last March, OSF tweeted that the characters of Curly and Laurey would be played by women, while Will and Ado would be played by men. Artistic Director Rauch explained that he had been dreaming of giving Oklahoma! an LGBTQ makeover for decades and finally began hashing out the details with the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate a year and a half ago.
When I was nine in Princeton, New Jersey, my best friend and I spent hours enacting Oklahoma! and other musicals, singing along with the record player and imagining other lives for ourselves. We took turns playing Laurey and Curly. What was most striking about Rauch’s same-sex Oklahoma! was how sweet the relationships seemed, how the cast seemed to dance on air.
Manahatta tells the story of a young Cherokee woman named Jane Snake, whose ambitions take her to Wall Street during the financial crisis of 2008 and Manahatta—“island of many hills” in Lenape—the homeland her ancestors were violently forced to leave in the 1600s. Meanwhile, her family in Oklahoma struggles to save their language, their culture and their over-mortgaged home. Jane Snake’s triumphs on Wall Street signal that the Lenape still occupy Manhattan.
I am continually surprised by those who wonder why theater matters. I’ve always marveled at its alchemy: the way a good play and actors, in minutes, can transport you to another world, whether it be star-crossed lovers in Elizabethan England or same sex couples in early 20thcentury Oklahoma. I’ve always believed that theater models a kind of public discourse that lies at the heart of democratic life, building our capacity to listen to different sides of a conversation, to cross boundaries, to validate the struggles of others.
Next time I walk the streets of Manhattan, I will salute the Lenape. I’ll salute, too, a small town in Southern Oregon that has lessons for Broadway.
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