Taken from
Wikipedia:
A typical season at OSF consists of three plays on the outdoor Allen Elizabethan Stage/Pavilion, three in the Thomas Theatre, and five in the Angus Bowmer Theatre. OSF provides a broad range of educational programs for secondary and college students and theatre professionals while providing a wide range of classic and contemporary plays. While OSF has produced non-Shakespearean works since 1960, each season continues to include three to five Shakespeare plays. Since 1935, it has staged Shakespeare's 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. Since 2000, there has also been at least one new work each season from playwrights such as Octavio Solis and Robert Schenkkan.
In addition to the plays, a free outdoor "Green Show" precedes the evening plays from June through October from a modular steel stage with a sprung floor for the dancers, a removable wheelchair ramp for handicapped performers, and built-in storage facilities that eliminate carting equipment from and to distant storage facilities six days a week. Originally, it offered Elizabethan music and dancers. From 1966 till 2007, it consisted of three shows in rotation inspired by the plays showing in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre. Live music was supplied by the Terra Nova Consort and other guest musicians and modern dance was performed by Dance Kaleidoscope. In 2008, the Green Show was revamped. Performers may include a dance group from Mexico or India, clowns doing ballet on stilts, jugglers, or a fire show.[1] OSF actors might showcase their musical talents. Improv, metal, or rock-n-roll variations on Shakespeare might be seen. Individual performers, groups, choirs, bands, and orchestras may present Afro-Cuban, baroque, blues, classical, contemporary, cowboy, funk, gospel, hip-hop, jazz, mariachi, marimba, poetry, marionette, renaissance, or salsa, sometimes combined in unexpected ways. Performers are drawn from throughout the Northwest and California.[2]
The Festival presents 750 to 800 performances of eleven plays in three theaters from February through early November each year, to a total audience of about 410,000 each season. The company of nearly 1400 people consists of about 675 paid staff and 700 volunteers.[3] The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is listed as a Major Festival in the book Shakespeare Festivals Around the World.[4]
OSF campus
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival occupies a 4-acre (16,000 m2) campus adjacent to Lithia Park and the Plaza in Ashland, Oregon. The primary buildings are the three theatres, Carpenter Hall, and the Camps, Pioneer, and Administration buildings, all surrounding an open central court, locally known as “The Bricks" that ties the three theatres together into an architectural whole and facilitates movement. It also provides a stage for the nightly Green Shows from June through September. Other facilities include the Black Swan, which serves as a laboratory for the development of new plays, the costume shop, classrooms, and rehearsal spaces. Other buildings are off campus.
Allen Elizabethan Stage
The Elizabethan Stage has evolved since the founding of the Shakespeare Festival when the first performance of the Twelfth Night was presented on July 2, 1935. A second outdoor theatre was built in 1947 and in October 2013 the theatre became officially known as the Allen Elizabethan Theatre.
Current Allen Elizabethan Theatre
The next year saw the opening of the current outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theatre, patterned on London's 1599 Fortune Theatre. The name was changed to Allen Elizabethan Theatre in October, 2013.[17] Designed by Richard Hay, it incorporated all the stage dimensions mentioned in the Fortune contract. The trapezoidal stage was retained but the façade was extended to three stories, resulting in a forestage, middle stage, inner below, inner above (the old balcony), and a musicians' gallery. The wings were provided with second-story windows. Each provides acting areas, creating many staging possibilities. A pitched, shingled roof enhances the half-timbered façade. A windowed gable was extended from the center of the roof to cover and define the middle stage. Just before each performance, an actor opens the gable window, and in keeping with Elizabethan tradition signaling a play in progress, runs a flag up the pole to the sound of a trumpet and doffs his cap to the audience.
The result is an approximate replica of the Fortune Theatre. The known but incomplete dimensions apply only to the stage. The original specifications sometimes say no more than "to be built like the Globe," for which there are no plans or details. The remotely operated lighting, on scaffolding on either side of the stage, of course did not exist in the original and the current site rather than the original architecture determines the shape of the auditorium. Twelve hundred seats in slightly offset arcs ascend the original hillside, giving an excellent view of the stage from each seat. The old Chautauqua theatre walls, now ivy-covered, remain as the outer perimeter of the theatre.
The $7.6 million Paul Allen Pavilion was added in 1992. It houses a control room, and audience services including infrared hearing devices, blankets, pillows and food and drink, which are allowed in the auditorium. Several hundred seats were moved to a balcony and two box seats, further improving sightlines and acoustics. Vomitoria, the traditional name for entryways for actors from under the seating area, were added and the lighting scaffolds were eliminated.[18]
Each year, three plays are offered in rotation Tuesdays through Sundays in the Elizabethan Theatre from late June to early October.