SHAKESPEARE IN ASHLAND, OREGON







LILIANA OSSES ADAMS



To my husband


North from the California-Oregon border in the Pacific Northwest, beside the Siskiyou and Cascade Mountains, and the stratavolcanoes Shasta and her "sister" Shastina, built from hot volcanic ash, lies the City of Ashland, whose name results from the geographic setting and geology of the region.




Shasta and Shastina, northhern California landmarks.
(Photo by Daniel Mayer)


Around 1850, gold was discovered near Jacksonville, Oregon. The gold mines contributed to the influx of settlers, who were enchanted with the beauty of nature and the colorful cascades in the nearby mountains. By that time, Ashland had become a place of destination, where families and those seeking health cures travelled to the "sources", from all over southern Oregon and northern California, enjoying the hot springs and mineral waters. In 1893, a few local enthusiasts formed the Ashland Cultural Society Chautauqua with the aim to bring "culture and entertainment" to the rural areas around Jackson County. They purchased 8 acres of land, where they built the round, dome-covered Chautauqua building, measuring 160 feet in diameter. (The old Chautauqua building was noted as the second largest unsupported wooden dome in the world; the largest was the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City). Soon afterward, the Ashland Chautauqua society (which traced its roots to the Chautauqua movement in New York), become more of an adult education program, offering lectures by authors, preachers, poets, including performances by opera singers, actors, musicians, comedians, and world figures in the arts, music (such as John Phillip Sousa and his band), sciences, and humanities.

In 1935, Angus L. Bowmer, a young English teacher from Southern Oregon Normal School, was struck by the resemblance between the Chautauqua walls and some sketches he had seen for Elizabethan theatre.




The Chautauqua walls as Angus L. Bowmer found them in 1935.


Inspired by the work of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and his theatre, The Globe (opened in London in 1598), Bowmer created the first "festival" under the large dome within the Chautauqua walls, later known as The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF).

As part of Ashland's July 4th celebrations in 1935, the performances of two Shakespearean plays, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, were presented to audience filling over 1500 seats. Thus was the beginning seventy years ago...




Angus L. Bowmer in late 1970's, the founder of Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, OR.


In 1959, the new outdoor theatre was built within the cement walls of the old Chautauqua, still intact and covered with ivy, named the Elizabethan Stagehouse, designed by Richard L. Hay, and modeled after London's 1599 Fortune Theatre.




A modern sketch imagining the interior of the London's Fortune Theatre, built in 1599 and opened 1560.


In 1992, the stage was extended and completed as the Allen Pavilion of the Elizabethan Theatre, with 1200 seats.




The Allen Pavilion of the Elizabethan Theatre.
(Photo by Liliana Osses Adams, 1992)


The Ashland Festival facilities also comprised two additional indoor theatres: the Angus Bowmer Theatre (600 seats), and the intimate Black Swan Theatre (138 seats), opened in 1977 by Jerry Turner, a longtime Director of the Festival. In 2002, the Black Swan Theatre, currently used as a rehearsal hall, was replaced by The New Theatre (350 seats). Ticket prices range between $14 and $56. Many hotels and bed-and-breakfast lodgings support the visitors to the Shakespeare Festival with many restaurants serving a wide choice of cuisine.

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The repertoire of Ashland's Festival contains the whole dramatic work of William Shakespeare produced in rich settings and often in contemporary convention. Since 1935, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has staged his complete canon three times, completing the first cycle in 1958, second cycle in 1978, and third cycle in 1997. In 1960, the Festival began to introduce non-Shakespearean works, and in recent years has shown a strong commitment to present contemporary plays by American playwrights and selections from European classics, using Shakespeare as its standard and inspiration. The artistic season runs from February 20 through October 31, and offers eleven plays in rotating repertory in three theatres with 784 performances. The audience, both loyal and demanding, arrives from all over the United States, constituting a yearly pilgrimage of more than 120,000 to these special theatres.

In the 2004 season, OSF presented five plays by Shakespeare: King Lear, Henry VI (Part One), Henry VI (Parts Two and Three), The Comedy of Errors, and Much Ado About Nothing. The repertory also included the following plays and world premieres: Friedrich Dûrrenmatt's The Visit (adapted by Kenneth Albers from The Visit Of The Old Lady); Oedipus Complex adapted by Frank Galati from the works of Sophocles and Sigmund Freud; American comedy The Royal Family by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber; the classic African-American masterpiece A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry; Top Dog-Under Dog, a hard-hitting hip-hop journey of dizzying verbal virtuosity by American dramatist Suzan-Lori Parks; and the Humble Boy by English writer Charlotte Jones, showing the climate of the magic reality of Oscar Wilde's plays with Shakespearian dramatic style.

The 2005 season included three plays by Shakespeare: Richard III, Love's Labor's Lost, and Twelfth Night. The European classics were represented by George Bernard Shaw's "unpleasant play", The Philanderer, a subversive comedy of ideas about men, women and sex from the author's 1898 cycle Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant; the theatrical masterpiece The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, an epic by Christopher Marlowe; the classic play The Belle's Stratagem, written in 1780 by the widely acclaimed woman playwright and poet, Hannah Cowley, using a pen name Anna Matilde; one of the great plays of the modern European stage, Napoli Milionaria!, written by an Italian actor and playwright, Eduardo De Filippo, dealing with the chaotic days of World War II; the 1938 classic American farce, Room Service by John Murray and Allen Boretz; the award-winning play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by American writer August Wilson (Frederick August Kittel), premiered on Broadway in 1984; commissioned by OSF, the world premiere drama Gibraltar by Mexican playwright Octavio Solis from San Francisco; the world premiere, commissioned by OSF, written by American actor and dramatist Robert Schenkkan, By the Waters of Babylon, the title being the pharaphrase of Psalm 137: 1, 2.

By the rivers of Babylon we sat down
there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows near by
we hang up our harps.

During the Festival there are many additional attractions, such as tours of the stages and the backstages, meetings with actors, playwrights, directors, and stage-managers, educational programs and sessions, and the Green Show, a Dance Kaleidoscope featuring colorful programs of Renaissance music and dance before each evening performance on the Elizabethan Stage.




The Green Show during the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.


The 2005 season marks the 70th anniversary of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; one of the most important Shakespearian festivals, and one of the handful of theatres anywhere to have endured for seventy years. This artistic season was dedicated In Memoriam to Jerry Turner (1927-2004), "whose heart was as big as The Globe." During his twenty years as the OSF Director, 1971-1991, after the retirement of Angus Bowmer, he led the Festival to national prominence. In 1983, the Ashland Festival received the prestigious Antoinette Perry (‘Tony') Award for outstanding achievements and distinguished service to the arts. Since 1996, the Artistic Director Libby Appel and Executive Director Paul Nicholson have maintained the OSF tradition of excellence in the hills of Southern Oregon, established by Angus Bowmer and Jerry Turner, and continued by the third artistic director, Henry Woronicz.

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There have been also Polish accents at the Festival. First of all, there is the appointment of Henry Woronicz as Artistic Director in 1991, after the retirement of Jerry Turner.




Henry Woronicz in 1988.


During a meeting with Henry Woronicz, I learned, that he had spent eleven seasons in Ashland; from 1984 as an actor and stage-director, and then as Artistic Director from 1991 to 1995. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, as the fifth child in the family. He speaks a bit of Polish language because his father was Polish, and his mother Irish 1) . He graduated from Boston College and then began his experience as an actor at the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in Boston. His acting technique relied on the Stanislavsky Method that stresses the introspective approach to artistic performance, reinforced by the formula of emotion, thought, action, and word, that means "the inner truth", as the actor becomes his character 2). Until today, Woronicz remains in audience memory (and in my own) as Philoctetes from the drama Philoctetes by Sophocles, translated and adapted into the play The Cure at Troy by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.




Henry Woronicz as Philoctetes at The Cure of Troy by Seamus Heaney, OSF Ashland 1995.
(Photo by Gregory Leiber)


One of the memorable productions directed by Henry Woronicz was The Rehearsal by French dramatist Jean Anouilh, performed with great artistry and unique charm by John Rensenhouse in the principal role of Tiger, the Count.




John Rensenhouse as Tiger, the Count and Fontaine Syer as Eliane, the Countess
in The Rehearsal by Jean Anouilh, OSF Ashland 1994.
(Photo by Michael Romanos)


Another Polish accent was the meeting with Mariusz Orski, an actor and director from Warsaw, who worked at theatres in India, Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands and Great Britain. He came several times to Ashland with an idea, among others, to introduce a new play The Fourth Sister, written in 2000 by contemporary Polish dramatist Janusz Glowacki, which is an ironic allusion to the Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov about the three Prozorov sisters. (The play, Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, was staged at the Ashland Festival in 2001). However, the common project of Nancy Benjamin from Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Ontario, Canada, and Mariusz Orski to produce the adaptation of the Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov with an international cast was not realized in Ashland's theatres, but at the OSF Art Center, Carpenter Hall, in the fall of 1996.

The early play by Janusz Glowacki Hunting Cockroaches, written in 1986, was premiered in Ashland in 1989 at the Black Swan Theatre. It is a tragicomic story about a couple of Polish immigrants, former artists, who were forced to leave Poland during Martial Law in the early 1980s, and whose sleepless nights in the Lower East Side are their tragic misfortune in Manhattan.




Ensemble cast. Hunting Cockroaches by Janusz Glowacki, OSF Ashland 1989.
(Photo by Christopher Briscoe)


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Several years ago, when first visiting Ashland for only three plays at the Festival, I had no thought that we would return every following year for the Festival's full repertory. During these years, we have seen superb and grand performances of Shakespeare's plays, like Coriolanus, ...




Derrick Lee Weeden as Coriolanus with Ensemble in Shakespeare's Coriolanus , OSF Ashland 1996.


... and also Othello, with the revelation of Derrick Lee Weeden's many interpretations (who also appears at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California).




Derrick Lee Weeden as Othello and Amy Cronise as Desdemona in Shakespeare's Othello, OSF Ashland 1999.
(Photo by David Cooper)




Derrick Lee Weeden as Othello and Anthony Heald as Jago in Shakespeare's Othello, OSF Ashland 1999.
(Photo by David Cooper)


The rarely performed youthful Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus, a classic tale of bloody revenge, often criticized as "deprived of good taste", remains in our memory, as one of the boldest interpretations of the Festival.




Polish poster of the play by William Shakespeare Titus Andronicus staged in Lodz, Poland.
The poster was designed by Polish artist Stasys Eidrigevicus.


Finally, the extraordinary production of Blood Wedding by Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca again with the phenomenal Derrick Lee Weeden, ...




Derrick Lee Weeden as Leonardo and Vilma Silva as The Bride
in Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca, OSF Ashland 1995.


... and that of Lorca in a Green Dress by playwright Nilo Cruz from Cuba (Pulitzer Award, 2003), staged as an intimate communication between actors and audience and based on the conventions of Theatre Dada von Bzdülöw from Gdansk 3), ...




Ensemble cast. Lorca in a Green Dress by Nilo Cruz, OSF Ashland 2003.
(Photo by Jennifer Reiley)


... make the playbill of our most memorable performances complete, reflecting the joy, fun, love, peace, sadness, violence, greed, and all of the challenges of the world we live in today.

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Evenings in Ashland, during the Summertime, listening to the rhythmic words of drama carrying beyond the stage of the Elizabethan Theatre open to the sky, sometimes the late bird flies under the stars...




The Elizabethan Theatre. Set and cast of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, OSF Ashland 2002.
(Photo by David Cooper)



*

I am thankful to Amy E. Richard, the spokeswoman for OSF and Media Relations Manager for archival materials of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland she made available to me.


©   Liliana Osses Adams
California, August 2005.


Biographical note on the author


Footnotes:

  1. We do not know if Henry Woronicz family is related to John Paul Woronicz (1757-1829), Archbishop of Warsaw, and Polish Primate.   (return)

  2. It is worthwhile to note that the Polish stage director and theatre theoretician, Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999), created his Laboratory Theatre (1959) based on the acting methods of Konstantin Stanislavsky.   (return)

  3. Renowned Theatre Dada von Bzdülöv was founded in Gdansk, Poland, in 1993, by dancer and choreographer Leszek Bzdyl, born in 1964 at Wroclaw, a former dancer at Henryk Tomaszewski's Wroclaw Pantomime Theatre in Poland.   (return)


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Articles and poems by Liliana Osses Adams published in   Zwoje – The Scrolls





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