Why Go to Ashland?

Ashland: Play-Ground for Big Kids
As soon as word got around that I hang out in theatres a lot, the question kept coming up: Why haven’t you been to Ashland? It’s a fair question, and one I used to ask myself before I knew better. I here offer my doubting old self to pose the negative questions, and my newly-enlightened self to reply.

Why on Earth would you make a five-hour drive to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when there’s plenty of Shakespeare right here in the Bay Area?
Bless your heart, Ashland is not all Shakespeare. There are three theatres, the Bowmer, The New, and the Elizabethan Stage, all are within a short walk of one another. Eleven plays will run in repertory this summer, along with noon lectures, dance and music concerts, backstage tours, and lots of impromptu surprises. Theatre is the main industry here; it gets respect. Besides, the drive north on I-5 has many rest stops, and the person in the passenger seat gets a close-up look at Mt. Shasta.

But isn’t Ashland really crowded? I mean, isn’t it hard to get a place to stay, impossible to get dinner reservations before a show, etc. etc.?
No. As our desk clerk said, “There are 70 places to eat here, and not one of them has a dress code.” However, the absence of a dress code can be important in other ways. (See below.)

So what did you see?
We saw a matinee and an evening show, both of them quality productions. The matinee in the New Theatre was a nearly-new play by Bridget Carpenter, called Up. This was a fantasy about a real-life character, stage-named Walter Griffin, whose one moment of glory was his ascent to 16,000 feet in a lawn chair lifted by gas-filled weather balloons. The play’s Walter devotes every resource toward new inventions that will give him and his family the same lift, all the while sinking lower in his family’s estimation. It’s a demanding role for the actor who plays Walter because he must be both sympathetic and reprehensible. I was delighted to see that this lead role was captured by Richard Howard, a former Belvederean and Reed School alumnus, whom I profiled in The Ark in November ’04.

The night performance, presented in the larger, open-air Elizabethan Stage, was Cyrano de Bergerac, Rostand’s beloved classic of the brilliant poet-swordsman with the colossal nose, undone by his love of the beautiful Roxane. The production was a grand swashbuckler, with Marco Barricelli commanding the title role, backed up by Robin Goodrin Nordli’s romantic Roxane. (A program check confirmed that Ms. Nordli was the same actress we’d just seen as Aunt Chris in Up, and Richard Howard – who must have an encyclopedic memory – was the understudy for the enormous part of Cyrano.) However, I’d made the great mistake of dressing up for the evening (see above,) and as darkness descended, so did cold air from snow-topped Mt. Ashland. Even rented cushions and lap blankets couldn’t make up the difference. Besides, the play was 3 ½ hours long, so we left after the second intermission, thus avoiding both a chill and Cyrano’s tragic ending.

But is there anything to do when you’re not in a theatre seat?
Oh my yes, you sweet thing. The town’s an old health resort. It used to be a spa with mineral springs, and the sulphurous “Lithia water” still shows up in drinking fountains – most of them inoperable – right on Main Street. There’s still woodsy Lithia Park to explore or to sit in for a band concert. But if your gassed-up car wants to keep driving, Ashland is within commuting distance of Gold Beach on the coast or Crater Lake in the mountains. We took the advice of the Chamber of Commerce representative (an ex-pat from Mill Valley) and made a brief trip to the well-preserved Gold Rush town of Jacksonville. Jacksonville, itself a stage set of the Old West, was in preparation for the Britt Music Festival, due to open the following week.

It this just a summertime thing?
The Ashland season runs from mid-February almost to Halloween, with some rotation of the plays. Up, for instance, has already closed, but Cyrano goes till October 7. Other plays will finish out the season, including some actual Shakespeare.

Ok, Ok, give me the website, and I’ll find out the rest for myself.
It’s www.OSFAshland.org. You’re welcome. Have a good time.