Oregon Shakespeare Festival

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The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is an annual theatre festival held each year from February to October in Ashland, Oregon, near Oregon's border with California. It defines its mission to be the creation of "fresh and bold interpretations of classic and contemporary plays in repertory, shaped by the diversity of our American culture, using Shakespeare as [its] standard and inspiration."

Contents

[edit] Overview

While OSF has produced non-Shakespearean works since 1960, each season continues to include three to five Shakespeare plays. Since 1935, it has staged his complete canon three times, completing the first cycle in 1958 with a production of Troilus and Cressida and completing the second and third cycles through the works in 1978 and 1997.

Currently, a typical season at OSF consists of eleven shows: five performed in the large, indoor Angus Bowmer Theatre, and three each in the open-air OSF Elizabethan Theatre and the intimate New Theatre (formerly the Black Swan). Each actor usually performs in two or three shows at a time, as well as understudying other performers.

OSF is well-known for commissioning new works from playwrights such as Octavio Solis (Gibraltar) and Robert Schenkkan (By The Waters of Babylon and Handler). However, over the years, they have worked closely with a wide variety of prize-winning and notable playwrights, including August Wilson, Nilo Cruz and David Edgar (Pentecost and Continental Divide). Since the 2000 season, there has always been at least one new work on the schedule, and it has usually been a commissioned piece.

In 2005, OSF presented more than 750 performances of 11 different plays on three different stages, sold more than 375,000 tickets and had an operating budget of about USD$22 million. The company brought in about $5 million in donations, and their capital account grew by more than $100,000 to a bit more than $30 million. The record for tickets sold is 399,609 (95% capacity) and was reached in 2000 at the end of an economic boom cycle.

The company has had four artistic directors since its inception. First, Angus Bowmer. When Angus retired in 1971, he passed the reigns to Jerry Turner, a well-respected actor/director and later a translator of Henrik Ibsen. Turner retired in 1991 and actor/director Henry Woronicz took control for five seasons. Libby Appel was recruited from the well-respected Indiana Rep in 1996 and announced plans to retire at the end of the 2007 season in order to pursue translations of Chekhov. In August 2006, Bill Rauch, former artistic director and co-founder of the Cornerstone Theater Company, was selected to become the Festival's fifth artistic director.

The company typically consists of approximately 70 actors and 200 other production and management positions. Each season brings various new artists in residence as well as visiting artists and artisans, as the company is known for its "from scratch" approach to set pieces, costumes and furnishings, going so far as to include welders, woodworkers and other craftspeople on its staff. There are also hundreds of volunteers who work thousands of hours in various capacities. OSF is the largest repertory theater in the United States.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is part of the Shakespeare Theatre Association of America (STAA).

[edit] History

The festival dates its roots to the Chautauqua movement of the late 1800s. In 1893, citizens of Ashland, Oregon built a facility which hosted its first performance on July 5. The building was expanded in 1905, and in its heyday, hosted an audience of 1500 to appearances by John Phillip Sousa and William Jennings Bryan during an annual ten-day season. In 1917, a new domed structure was built at the site, but it fell into disrepair after the movement died out in the 1920s.

OSF in its modern form was founded in 1935 by Angus L. Bowmer, a teacher from Southern Oregon Normal School in Ashland. Seeing a resemblance of the concrete wall —which was all that remained of the old Chautauqua building— to playhouses for Elizabethan theatre, Bowmer presented a proposal to the Ashland city fathers. They granted him a sum "not to exceed $400" to present two plays as part of the city's 4th of July celebration. He directed the Oregon Shakespearean Festival's first performance, a July 2, 1935 production of Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice on the 3rd, and repeated Twelfth Night on the 4th. Reserved seats cost $1, with general admission of $.50 for adults and $.25 for children. (adjusted for inflation up through 2005: $13.80, $6.90, $3.45) The city fathers, fearing the venture would lose money, pressed Bowmer to add boxing matches. Bowmer agreed, feeling such an event was true to the uses of an Elizabethan theater, and the performances went forward. Confidently billed as the "First Annual Oregon Shakespearean Festival," the profit from the play performances covered the losses the boxing match incurred.

In 1939, OSF took a production of The Taming of the Shrew to the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco, California, which was nationally broadcast on the radio. Bowmer would later credit that broadcast and publicity for helping OSF to resume production after OSF was closed from 1941 to 1946 due to World War II.

1959 saw the opening of a new Elizabethan stage, modeled after London's Fortune Theatre. In 1960, OSF produced its first non-Shakespeare play, The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster.

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, just as Bowmer retired. Seven years later, OSF converted a former car dealership showroom into the Black Swan Theatre, creating an intimate venue for experimental works.

In 1983, OSF won a Tony Award for achievement in regional theatre. Attendance exceeded 300,000. Five years later, the Oregon Shakespearean Festival became the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and opened a resident theatre company, OSF Portland, in Portland, Oregon.

1992 saw the opening of the Allen Pavilion which encircles the open-air seating area of the Elizabethan stage, creates a balcony level and adds vomitoria (known as "voms"), entrances from under the seating, to expand staging possibilities. Two years later, OSF Portland became Portland Center Stage, an independent theatre company no longer associated with OSF.

By 2001, ten million tickets had been sold to OSF performances. In 2002, the New Theatre opened, replacing the Black Swan as venue for small, experimental works in a Black Box type of setting. In 2003, Time named OSF as the second highest rated regional theatre in the United States.

Various productions and performances have received special attention over the years. The 1997 production of OSF-commissioned The Magic Fire was invited to run at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and was consequently named one of the year's best plays by Time Magazine in 1998. In 2002, Horton Foote, author of The Trip to Bountiful spotted veteran OSF actress Dee Maaske and asked her to play the lead in the production commemorating the 50th anniversary of the play. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center's Theatre on Film and Tape Archives (TOFT) includes numerous OSF productions, including The Magic Fire, Shakespeare's Pericles, Ibsen's Rosmersholm, and Euripides' The Trojan Women.

[edit] Plays of the Festival

[edit] 2007

Angus Bowmer Theatre


New Theatre


The Elizabethan Stage

[edit] 2006

Angus Bowmer Theatre
New Theatre
Elizabethan Stage

[edit] 2005

Angus Bowmer Theatre
New Theatre
Elizabethan Stage

[edit] 2004

Angus Bowner Theatre
New Theatre
Elizabethan Stage

See Also: Production history: 1935-Present

[edit] Actors of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

  • Tiffany Adams
  • Christine Albright
  • Linda Alper
  • Kjerstine Anderson
  • Richard Baird
  • Alexander Barnes
  • Natasha Barnes
  • Marco Barricelli
  • Michelle Beck
  • Judith-Marie Bergan
  • Todd Bjurstrom
  • Geoffrey Blaisdell
  • Duane Boutte
  • Danforth Comins
  • Catherine E. Coulson
  • Jeff Cummings
  • Kelly Curran
  • Catherine Lynn Davis
  • Tony DeBruno
  • Eileen DeSandre
  • Armando Durán
  • Christopher DuVal
  • James Edmondson
  • Christopher Edwards
  • Michael Elich
  • Richard Elmore
  • Richard Farrell
  • Robert Vincent Frank
  • Yorke G. Fryer
  • Perri Gaffney
  • Nell Geisslinger
  • John Michael Goodson
  • Emma Harding
  • Brent Harris
  • Erik LaRay Harvey
  • Jonathan Haugen
  • Malcolm Hillgartner
  • Richard Howard
  • Michael J. Hume
  • Liisa Ivary
  • David Kelly
  • Kevin Kenerly
  • Jeffrey King
  • William Langan
  • Miriam A. Laube
  • Tyler Layton
  • Juan Rivera LeBron
  • Gregory Linington
  • Garrett Little
  • Dee Maaske
  • Kristen Martz
  • Terri McMahon
  • René Millán
  • Laura Morache
  • Linda K. Morris
  • Gwendolyn Mulamba
  • Mark Murphey
  • James Newcomb
  • Robin Goodrin Nordli
  • Vanessa Nowitzky
  • John J. O'Hagan
  • Julie Oda
  • Greta Oglesby
  • Jeanne Paulsen
  • James J. Peck
  • Mark Peterson
  • Josiah Phillips
  • Hardy Pinnell
  • Alex Robertson
  • Heather Robison
  • Robynn Rodriguez
  • S. A. Rogers
  • Sarah Rutan
  • Jeris Schaefer
  • Caroline Shaffer
  • Robert Sicular
  • Vilma Silva
  • Brandon St. Clair Saunders
  • Terwilliger
  • G. Valmont Thomas
  • Grace Thorsen
  • U. Jonathan Toppo
  • Shona Tucker
  • John Tufts
  • Rafael Untalan
  • Derrick Lee Weeden
  • Leah Wessler
  • Brad Whitmore
  • Shad Willingham
  • Tyrone Wilson
  • Adam Yazbeck
  • Rex Young

[edit] The Green Show

This show takes place before each evening show of the festival and includes live music from a variety of styles, and dance performed by Dance Kaleidoscope.

The stage for this show is nestled between the three theatres on the bricks.

Before the arrival of Dance Kaleidoscope in 1996, the Green Show was performed by traditional Elizabethan dancers, with music from that period.

[edit] External links

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