Where the Stage Is King

ASHLAND, Ore. —  Packs of casually dressed teenagers swarm up and down the main drag of this rural town. Bored locals, chafing at the restrictions of small-town life?

No, they’re likely to be from some other state, and they’re here for the theater. Repertory theater.

At least half of the audience at three recent performances of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival appeared to be teenagers. They watched and listened attentively to “Julius Caesar,” “Macbeth” and Robert Sherwood’s “Idiot’s Delight”--with no inappropriate whoops or whispering.

These young theatergoers belie the agonizing frequently heard from theater professionals about the graying of their audiences. But then the Oregon Shakespeare Festival--in this town of 20,000 people, only a few miles north of the California state line--is in stark contrast to most of the American theater, especially in its devotion to repertory.

Although many companies use the word “repertory” in their names, very few attempt true repertory with any regularity--that is, when more than one production uses the same space during the same period of time, with overlapping actors.

Yet the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s three stages--a 601-seat thrust stage, a new theater with flexible configurations ranging from 228 to 352 seats, and an outdoor Elizabethan-style stage with 1,190-seats--are, at the height of the season, in use by nine productions at once (out of 11 in the entire season). The 601-seat Angus Bowmer Theatre alone is the site of as many as 12 performances a week. During much of the season, each actor is performing in at least two plays.

Nowhere else in the United States is the concept of repertory theater honored as it is at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

“The original dream and hope of the regional theater movement was to maintain standard repertory companies doing classical work,” said Ben Cameron, executive director of Theatre Communications Group, the New York organization that represents most of the nation’s resident theater companies. “Oregon is now the exemplar of that model. A lot of other theaters look at them with great envy.” In L.A., for example, only Glendale’s A Noise Within attempts repertory on a regular basis--but on a far more modest scale than Oregon Shakespeare.

What does repertory mean for the audience?

“It’s an extraordinary and thrilling chance to see the real rewards of actor transformation,” Cameron said, referring to the ability to see actors playing very different parts within a weekend, and within the fabric of a long-term company. “That kind of work has a texture that’s hard to achieve without that kind of company.”

Theatrically speaking, Ashland is distinctive in other ways as well--especially in contrast to Los Angeles. Ashland and L.A. are near the top of any list of places with the highest number of professional performances and actors per capita in the United States. But by just about every other analysis, they are at opposite ends of the theatrical universe.

The festival’s season, which runs from February to November, is expected to sell most of its projected 400,000 tickets this year to tourists. Those teenagers in the audience are usually on school field trips from throughout the Northwest. Their numbers will diminish after schools adjourn in June, but older tourists will take their places.

Only about one in 10 Ashland theatergoers is from the immediate vicinity. The average distance a theatergoer travels to the festival is 392 miles. Southern Californians make up about 4% of the audiences, while about 48% come from the San Francisco Bay Area. By contrast, L.A.’s theater audiences are almost entirely local.

While L.A.’s theater scene is spread far and wide, Ashland’s is focused on the three blocks that house the festival and the second most prominent theater in town, Oregon Cabaret Theatre.

The festival employs 74 actors on months-long contracts. In L.A., however, most actors float from one short job to another, in order to be available for better paying screen jobs. Recalling her days as a teacher at CalArts in Valencia, Oregon Shakespeare artistic director Libby Appel said, “The mentality of believing that the film and TV industry is everything permeated even my theater students. It was [hard] to get them to leave their phones--as if anyone from the industry might call.”

Finally, audiences can relax in Ashland--or other rural theater centers such as Cedar City, Utah, home of the Utah Shakespearean Festival. Many Ashland theatergoers park once, at their hotel or bed-and-breakfast, and walk to the theater and nearby restaurants for the rest of their stay. There is no freeway traffic to combat while trying to catch an 8 p.m. curtain.

“That’s why a festival like this would never work in a city like L.A.,” Appel said. “Our audiences don’t arrive here after 43 business meetings all day long.”

“They’re relaxed and receptive when they step in the theater,” said executive director Paul Nicholson, who emigrated to Oregon from New Zealand 22 years ago. “You could put the trappings of this festival in L.A., but I doubt that it would be the same experience.”

Appel has plenty of experience in Southern California. While living in Corona del Mar, she headed the acting program at Cal State Long Beach from 1976 to 1981. Then she was dean of the theater school at CalArts from 1981 to 1990 and lived in Granada Hills. She has directed at such Southland theaters as the Odyssey and South Coast Repertory.

In the mid-’90s, she ran a more conventional resident theater, Indiana Repertory Theatre, which doesn’t actually do repertory. She got the Oregon job in 1995.

The festival presents plenty besides Shakespeare, whose works make up five of this year’s 11 plays and who will be represented by only four of the 11 slated for 2003.

On Saturday, “Handler,” a new play by Robert Schenkkan, will open at the festival’s New Theatre, which was financed with the help of a $6-million gift from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, whose parents took him to see Shakespeare in Ashland when he was growing up. For the new theater, Allen relinquished the naming rights that would normally accompany a $6-million gift so that someone else might be inspired to make a similar donation.

Schenkkan is best known as the author of “The Kentucky Cycle,” which made a Pulitzer Prize-winning splash at the Mark Taper Forum a decade ago. His new play will be directed by an even more familiar Southland figure, Bill Rauch, artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company, which has been L.A.-based for a decade.

“Handler” focuses on a troubled couple who belong to a small Holiness Way congregation in the South. The worshipers handle poisonous snakes as part of the service. After a traumatic snakebite during a service, the husband becomes a media sensation.

On a recent afternoon, Rauch was blocking a scene in which reporters pursue the couple even as they’re arguing with their minister.

It’s a complicated scene to stage, but Rauch was assisted by a company movement director. On the sidelines, Schenkkan observed while flanked by a dramaturge and a voice and speech director.

“The caliber of talent is consistently high, on stage and off,” Schenkkan said later. “And because these artists have worked together for a long time, there’s a sense of community and continuity that’s hard to achieve in a company that’s put together for a specific purpose.”

This sensibility, he says, is especially helpful for this play, which is about “a small community of faith, with all the advantages and disadvantages of a community. The theater company itself echoes that. Everyone is intimately familiar with each other.”

Yet the possible disadvantages of such a familiar community--that it might become stagnant or self-satisfied--are deflected in Ashland by “the infusion of new blood,” Schenkkan said. “Bill and I are outsiders. And the fact that they are doing new plays makes the festival edgier than it might otherwise be, challenging in ways that the festival didn’t used to be.”

Rauch agreed that the mix of long-term artists and guests prevents the Oregon company members from becoming “stuck in patterns or not pushing themselves.” On a much smaller scale, his Cornerstone company works in the same way, he said.

“In the history of theater, the best work has come out of company situations,” Rauch added. “There is a shorthand that comes from working with people you know that allows them to take risks. None of the actors in my cast are sussing each other out. They’re able to dive in and be fearless. They know each other’s rhythms and how to play off them--or subvert them.”

Rauch also feels a kinship with “Handler’s” subject matter, for Cornerstone last year launched a three-year program in which it’s working with various communities defined by faith. And Cornerstone always has worked with small communities of one stripe or another. Rauch said the company’s members have learned that within communities, “the act of defining who’s in also defines who’s out.”

That act of defining occurs within the Ashland acting community itself annually. Appel announces the next year’s season, along with the directors of the plays, in March. In May, she meets with every actor for 15 minutes and discusses which roles each would like to play in the following season. In June, next year’s directors observe the current repertory, taking notes on the actors. There are no formal auditions, but the directors submit wish lists of actors they would like in their plays.

Appel and her staff try to match the actors’ and directors’ wish lists. Each year, however, there are some roles that need to be filled from outside, and there are some actors who either don’t want to return or are asked not to return. Appel calls each actor in mid-July with news about next season. She estimated that nearly every season, 20 new actors arrive and about 20 depart, although they sometimes return in later seasons.

The actors in Ashland seem far away from the Hollywood rat race. Appel pointed to one of the reasons: In Hollywood and even in Southland theater, “actors are often cast to type. Here, they’re almost never cast to type. People play roles here they would never be cast in” elsewhere.

Armando Duran, a member of this year’s “Handler” and “Julius Caesar” casts, had worked at South Coast Repertory in Octavio Solis’ “La Posada Magica” and play workshops. When a Solis play was scheduled at Ashland in 1999, Duran was invited into the company.

He thought he would stay only a year, and after it was over, he appeared in another play at South Coast Rep. But then he was allowed to join the Ashland company midseason for a second year. The following year, he came back, attracted by the scheduling of a play by Cuban American writer Nilo Cruz. Now Duran’s in his fourth season, and another Cruz play is slated for next year.

Duran maintains an apartment in Silver Lake, “but I think they hope I’ll throw in the towel and say Ashland is my home.”

Still, his roots are very much in L.A., where he has lived most of his adult life after growing up in Fontana. Duran misses L.A.’s Latino cultura, he said, and his grandmother in San Gabriel. He’s critical of Ashland’s Mexican restaurants, and he goes to nearby, somewhat larger Medford for food, haircuts and soccer games in that town’s larger Latino community.

Nonetheless, in Hollywood he was offered only “a gamut of roles ranging from Colombian drug lords to Cuban hit men.” In Ashland, he’s playing Southerners and an ancient Roman. “The artistic opportunities are really satisfying. And you get to do these roles for such an extended period. That’s what keeps me here.”

Repertory is expensive. The equipment and crews required for the relentless set and lighting changes increase expenses by 20% to 25% over what it would cost to present one play after another, executive director Nicholson said. Although actors perform in multiple plays, they actually do fewer performances--usually about five a week--than they would in most other professional theaters.

On a strictly budgetary level, “we can’t cast as efficiently,” Nicholson said. The fest cuts expenses by dealing with only two unions--the actors’ and directors’--and by not doing costly musicals, which would require performers who couldn’t necessarily handle classical roles in the other plays.

Musicals are cash cows for many theaters, but when the festival occasionally does a small musical, the shows don’t sell well in advance, and people complain that “that’s not why we come to Ashland,” Appel said.

“Our audiences come because they want to see the same actors doing different things, and they’re willing to travel for it,” Nicholson said. “If we said, ‘[Forget] repertory,’ we would not get these audiences to come back.”

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Oregon Shakespeare Festival, through Nov. 3, (541) 482-4331 or www.osfashland.org.

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Don Shirley is a Times staff writer.