The Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Where There's a Will, There's a Play

By Johanthon Allen

Tucked away in an unassuming little town in southern Oregon is one of the nation's most brilliant cultural gems: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF). The Festival, as it's known by locals, started out 65 years ago in Ashland, Ore., when Angus Bowmer, a teacher at what is now Southern Oregon University, decided to create "America's first authentic Elizabethan theatre." Since then, OSF has gone on to become the second largest repertory theatre in the world.

Inspired by similarities between sketches of William Shakespeare's original Globe Theatre, and the remaining walls of a torn down performance house in Ashland, Bowmer staged what he insisted be called "the first annual" Oregon Shakespeare Festival in July 1935. The weekend production of The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night was presented with great success by a single group of actors on a simple stage built within the dramatic old walls. Since then, OSF has done more to sustain the vanishing art of repertory theatre (a series of plays performed by a single acting troupe) than any other company in the country. OSF now employs some 450 professional actors, dancers, musicians, directors, and support staff who work to put on an eight-month season (February through October) featuring 11 plays presented on three separate stages, six days a week.

Over 350,000 theatergoers a year migrate from around the world to partake in this most succulent of artistic feasts, and they are seldom, if ever, disappointed.

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