Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is an annual festival held 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."

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 Elizabethan Stage and the intimate New Theatre. Each actor usually performs in two or three shows at a time, as well as understudying other perfomers.

In recent years, OSF has shown a strong commitment to new work, presenting world premieres of plays by Pulitzer Prize winners Nilo Cruz and Robert Schenkkan.

History

The festival dates its roots to the Chautauqua movement of the late 1800s. In 1893, citizens of Ashland 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. Inspired by the resemblance of the remains of the Chautauqua building to playhouses for Elizabethan theatre, Bowmer directed the Oregon Shakespearean Festival's first performance, a July 2, 1935 production of Twelfth Night.

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-Shakespearean 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 garage 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 and adds vomitoria under the seating to expand staging possibilities. Two years later, OSF Portland became Portland Center Stage, an independent theatre company.

By 2001, ten million tickets had been sold to OSF performances. In 2002, the New Theatre opened, replacing the Black Swan. In 2003, Time named OSF as the #2 rated regional theatre in the United States.

External links

• The organization's website (http://www.osfashland.org/)
• Time magazine preview (http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/from_search/0,10987,1101030602-454479,00.html) and Ashland reprint (http://www.todayinashland.com/News.asp?NewsID=58) of the news of its 2003 selection as a top regional theatre