The Bard’s Work In Serene Setting 60th Anniversary Makes Ashland’s The Oldest Ongoing Shakespeare Festival In The United States

As the Oregon Shakespeare Festival celebrates its 60th year, you can’t blame the popular company’s longtime employees and fans for indulging in a little nostalgia.

An elderly few even can recall back to July 4, 1935, when a determined college teacher named Angus Bowmer presented the First Annual Shakespearean Festival in Ashland, a bucolic Rogue River Valley pioneer town.

Bowmer talked city officials into underwriting outdoor performances of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” and “The Merchant of Venice.” He persuaded local merchants to donate lumber for the sets, and the federally sponsored Works Progress Administration to contribute the labor to build them.

He even allowed boxing matches between the plays, to help draw in crowds and defray production costs.

Five hundred tickets were sold for the 1935 season. That was enough to spur Bowmer into making the festival an annual event - except for five war years (1941-46) of blackout, when there weren’t enough men out of uniform to perform the Bard’s male-heavy plays.

Today the festival that Bowmer invented has blossomed into a professional three-stage indoor and outdoor complex, operating nine months a year in Ashland. It sold 430,787 tickets last season.

And the Tony-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival now stands as the oldest ongoing Shakespeare festival in the United States with an excellent facility and a $12 million annual budget.

Yet, like all venerable living arts institutions, OSF struggles to honor its rose-tinted past without clinging to it. Staying up-to-date hasn’t always been easy for a festival that strives to please an enormous, largely tourist audience, while molding a “family” of veteran and newcomer drama artists with varied agendas.

On Feb. 17, OSF’s 1995 season began on a sentimental note with an anniversary mounting of “Twelfth Night.”

Also opening during that weekend was a classic American work, Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” The 1942 family fantasia would certainly have been at home in previous OSF seasons, during the two-decade reign of artistic director emeritus Jerry Turner.

But it’s hard to imagine the two newer plays on view this spring - “Pravda,” a David Hare-Howard Brenton brash satire about a Rupert Murdoch-like newspaper mogul, or “In the Mississippi Delta,” an uptempo African-American memoir by Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland - at OSF before 1993.

That’s when veteran OSF actor Henry Woronicz became Turner’s successor, with a mandate to bring more contemporary, provocative works, and ethnically diverse casts, to OSF audiences.

Woronicz still is criticized by cranky patrons for those priorities - but he’s holding firm.

“I want this to be one of the best regional theaters in the country,” he says. And he knows that can happen only with a healthy mix of fresh and classic material.

In terms of physical production, OSF already ranks high on the national scale. Each of the four opening shows in the 11-play 1995 season boasts costuming, lighting and scenery that uphold a top notch standard established by such stalwarts as Richard L. Hay, an esteemed scenic artist who has designed 203 sets for OSF over four decades.

But in other critical areas, the festival still radiates competency, not excitement. With the vivacious exception of Debra Wicks’ staging of “In the Mississippi Delta” in the tiny Black Swan playhouse, the current shows are afflicted to varying degrees with “Ashland-itis.”

By that I mean a tendency to approach scripts at dead-center, and to bloat them through sluggish pacing and a lack of interpretative dynamism.

Each of the three current offerings in the spacious Angus Bowmer Theatre runs close to three hours. And though all have their charms, audiences are in for a long haul.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: If you go The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has a wide variety of programs this year. In the large, indoor Angus Bowmer Theatre, you can catch “Pravda” (through July 9), “Twelfth Night” (through Oct. 29) and “The Skin of Our Teeth” (through Oct. 28). In the Black Swan, an intimate space often sold out in advance, “In the Mississippi Delta” holds forth (through June 24). On March 28, OSF staged the world premiere of “Emma’s Child.” Commissioned by playwright Kristine Thatcher, this drama concerns a couple whose adoptive baby turns out to be severely disabled. It runs at the Black Swan through Oct. 28. Joining the repertoire on April 19 was the West Coast debut of Nagle Jackson’s “This Day and Age,” a comedy of manners about an independent widow and her children. It runs at the Angus Bowmer through Oct. 28. OSF’s summer season at the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre kicks off June 6 with the Scottish tragedy of “Macbeth,” which (along with “Twelfth Night”) was in the OSF’s inaugural 1935 season. “Richard II” opens outdoors on June 7, and on June 8 a new edition of the “Merry Wives of Windsor” romps in. (“Macbeth” ends Oct. 6, “Richard II” on Oct. 7 and “Merry Wives” on Oct. 8.) The company unveils its final offering of the season in the Black Swan: “The Cure at Troy,” a new drama by Irish poet Seamus Heaney based on the Sophocles tragedy “Philoctetes” (July 5-Oct.29). Plays are offered at different times and days each week. It’s almost essential to book seats in advance by calling (503) 482-4331. (To a receive a full festival schedule, call the same number.) The festival also offers backstage tours, play readings, lectures and educational programs. For details, phone (503) 488-5406. Ashland has many tourist accommodations, from modest motel rooms and a youth hostel to elegant B & Bs. These tend to fill up on weekends and in summer, so early planning makes sense. For referrals, contact the Ashland B&B Network at (800) 944-0329 or the Ashland B & B Clearinghouse at (503) 488-0338.