Oregon Shakespeare Festival: The Stage in the Siskiyous
Near Ashland, Oregon
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland is one of the largest and oldest professional repertory theaters in the United States, and its origin story is one of the more improbable in American theater history. It began in the summer of nineteen thirty-five with a college drama instructor, a half-demolished building, and a deal to stage boxing matches.
Angus Bowmer arrived in Ashland in nineteen thirty-one to teach at Southern Oregon Normal School, a small teacher's college. The town needed to revive its Fourth of July celebration, and Bowmer proposed building an outdoor stage inside the roofless circular walls of an abandoned Chautauqua auditorium, whose shape reminded him of Elizabethan theaters he had studied. City officials agreed, with one condition: afternoon boxing matches on the same grounds would offset any losses the plays might generate. When the first season opened on July second, nineteen thirty-five, with Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, the plays earned more than the boxing. The boxing was quietly dropped. The Shakespeare was not.
Bowmer had sketched the design of the Allen Elizabethan Theatre from memory, based on academic reconstructions of the Fortune Theatre in London. The Works Progress Administration provided funds to rebuild the Chautauqua walls and construct a proper stage platform. Admission that first summer was fifty cents.
The festival grew slowly through the Depression and World War Two, nearly dying several times for lack of funds. It survived by building an audience of devoted patrons and by expanding its season from a few summer weeks to months. Today the Oregon Shakespeare Festival runs from February through October across three stages, mounting ten or more productions per season. It employs hundreds of artists and draws roughly four hundred thousand visitors annually to a town of about twenty thousand people, making it one of the most economically significant cultural institutions in the entire Pacific Northwest. Not bad for a venture the city initially hedged with boxing tickets.
