Ashland and its Oregon Shakespeare Festival is the Pacific Northwest’s hidden gem

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival — an underdiscovered gem

Pictured: This year's Oregon Shakespeare Festival includes the homoerotic dark comedy Born With Teeth, starring Bradley James Tejada (left) as William Shakespeare and Alex Purcell as Christopher Marlowe.

It’s tempting to call the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and its home city of Ashland undiscovered gems, but underdiscovered is more accurate. They’ve been discovered by many, attracting hundreds of thousands each year, but they deserve to be discovered by more.

The festival has been going on since 1935, focusing on William Shakespeare but including works by others. Ashland is a charming small city, population about 21,000, that is ultra-progressive and LGBTQ-welcoming. Home to Southern Oregon University, Ashland is just over the California border, halfway between San Francisco and Portland.

The festival was founded by Angus Bowmer, a teacher from Southern Oregon Normal School, as the local university was then known. Its first theater was erected in the shell of a dilapidated building, and its first production was Twelfth Night.

Over the years, OSF has performed the entire Shakespearean canon and many other works, including some world premieres, and it won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre in 1983. The average annual attendance is about 400,000, primarily from the West Coast, but “we do draw people from all over the country, we do draw people from all over the world,” says Kirsten Giroux, associate director of education and engagement.

In the 2024 season, which runs through mid-October, audiences can still see the Bard’s Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Much Ado About Nothing; the West Coast premiere of Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; gay playwright Justin Huertas’s indie-rock musical Lizard Boy, about a marginalized youth with green, scaly skin; and Liz Duffy Adams’s Born With Teeth, a homoerotic dark comedy imagining flirtation and fighting between Shakespeare and rival scribe Christopher Marlowe. There were several other productions earlier in the year.

The 2025 season, which begins in March, will feature Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and The Merry Wives of Windsor; Fat Ham, James Ijames’s Pulitzer winner retelling the Hamlet story in the American South, with the protagonist a Black queer boy; August Wilson’s Jitney, about challenges faced by Black taxi drivers in Pittsburgh; Oscar Wilde’s classic comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, with the setting transferred to the Malay peninsula in the British colonial era; the West Coast premiere of Karen Zacarías’s adaptation of Jack Schaefer’s novel Shane (the novel was the basis for the famed 1953 Western film); Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s fairy-tale musical Into the Woods; and Octavio Solis’s Quixote Nuevo, reimagining Don Quixote in a Texas border town, with its Quixote being a retired professor who has dementia.

“The goal is to have a broad range of plays that will appeal to the broadest range of people possible,” Giroux says. “Not everyone wants to see modern comedy; not everyone wants to see Shakespeare.”

OSF has hosted several world premieres and commissioned some plays, perhaps most notably All the Way, about President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s first year in office, 1964, marked by the civil rights movement and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Commissioned by OSF and written by Robert Schenkkan, it premiered at the festival in 2012, with Jack Willis in the lead. The 2014 Broadway production won Tonys for Best Play and for its star, Bryan Cranston.

The festival will keep on “carrying the banner of Shakespeare and new plays” and “change with the times, grow so we can continue to be for everybody,” Giroux says.

Born With Teeth

While the festival is Ashland’s crown jewel, the city has much more to offer. “I love the city of Ashland,” Giroux says. It’s a beautiful town, it’s a welcoming town.”

Ashland has a variety of restaurants, boutiques, galleries, and wineries, along with easy access to outdoor activities such as swimming, rafting on the Rogue River, and skiing. The setting is lovely, as the town is surrounded by mountains.

There’s something going on year-round, says Karolina Lavagnino, director of sales and marketing for the city’s premier hostelry, the Ashland Springs Hotel, which will mark its 100th anniversary in 2025.

“If you love the mountains, you can hike throughout the spring, summer, and fall,” she says. Fall is the best season for wineries — there are more than 40 in the area — and Mount Ashland offers skiing in winter. The Shakespeare fest, with both indoor and outdoor theaters, runs from March through mid-October, and there are many other festivals, including a wine festival and a chocolate festival. Beautiful Lithia Park is a great place to walk or just chill. In nearby Jacksonville, a historic gold rush town, there’s the Britt Music and Arts Festival, which presents dozens of summer concerts in a variety of genres — orchestral music, jazz, blues, folk, bluegrass, world, pop, and country.

And Ashland Springs is a great home base for any stay in the city. It’s “a beautiful mix of the European-style boutique hotel and modern amenities,” Lavagnino says. It has 70 guest rooms, and at nine stories high, it’s the tallest building in Ashland — it was once the tallest building between Portland and San Francisco. “I highly recommend that everyone take the elevator to the top floor and see the mountains and downtown,” she says. Its downtown location is within easy walking distance of the Shakespeare festival, boutiques, galleries, restaurants, and more.

It also has an in-house restaurant, Larks, which “celebrates everything about Oregon, sources locally, partners with local farmers and artisan makers,” Lavagnino notes. There is also a lovely English garden for relaxation or events.

“There’s a lot of passion in the people who work here,” she says. The average employee tenure is more than eight years, and some workers have been there more than 20.

She and Giroux share a passion for Ashland. “There’s something for everyone,” Lavagnino says.

“It’s a great experience to be in the town,” Giroux adds.

On the following pages, see more photos of the Shakespeare festival and Ashland.

Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre

Ashland Springs Hotel

Ashland Springs Hotel

Ashland Springs Hotel