ASHLAND, Ore. - Hanging on the office wall behind Bill Rauch's desk is a large photo that shouts the word "YES" in bright white on red through the muted reflections of a store window.
He bought it for his office after he took over last November as the new artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
"It just grabbed my heart, and it didn't let go," said Rauch, 44. "I know that in my job I can't say yes to everything. But even when I have to say yes to certain boundaries and yes to certain limitations, there is the idea we can move forward in a spirit that's positive."
As the fifth artistic director in the 73-year history of one of the United States' oldest and largest Shakespeare festivals, Rauch is faced with how to keep a venerable institution fresh while preserving its traditions.
"Change is the air we breathe every day, all of us," he said. "The stakes are higher in terms of change in an organization like this."
The festival has become the centrepiece of this small town in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwestern Oregon.
Founded in 1935 by Angus Bowmer as the entertainment between Fourth of July boxing matches, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has grown up and out, winning a 1983 Tony for regional theatre and expanding to three theatres that offer a slate of 11 plays from February through October. It draws about 130,000 playgoers who buy an average of three tickets each.
Rauch's predecessor, retired artistic director Libby Appel, loves the way Rauch has put his own stamp on the festival.
"I think it is important for him to say, 'Guess what, there is a new horizon now, a new way of looking at plays now,' " she said. "That's a hard thing to do when you first begin. I can feel the difference. I think it is an exciting difference."
Rauch has dived right in, saying "yes" to a shake-up of the Green Show. Once a free warmup show of Renaissance dancing in the plaza outside the theatres, it more recently was a modern dance troupe. Now it will offer 50 acts performing everything from Renaissance to heavy metal.
Rauch's roster of plays includes a seemingly safe bet, Thornton Wilder's classic "Our Town," but in a risky venue, on the venerable Elizabethan Theatre outdoor stage, whose foundations were once a Chatauqua hall where the festival began. It is the first 20th-century play to be produced there.
On the same stage will be a Wild West version of "The Comedy of Errors" in which director Penny Metropulos adapted Shakespeare's script to include musical numbers and dancing in a kind of "Deadwood" meets the Sons of the Pioneers.
"The original texts we will always produce," said Rauch. "But I think . . . it's important for us in the country's largest Shakespeare festival to experiment with adaptation as just one thread of the work we do."
Appel said Rauch's decision to make "The Clay Cart," a 2,000-year-old Sanskrit play from India, one of the centrepiece plays running the whole season, was a big risk that solidified his stamp on the festival because the work is not generally known.
"It's an epic piece that is, while not a difficult text to understand, it is exotic," Appel said.
Other works include "The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler," playwright Jeff Whitty's take on what happens when Ibsen's title character wakes after shooting herself and accepts this chance at a new life, which Rauch also directed, the Wild West adaptation of "Comedy of Errors," and a visually startling version of "Othello."
They reflect Rauch's attempt to attract a younger, more diverse audience - a problem with which the festival has struggled for years, though it has never had trouble filling its seats to near capacity.
"It was time for new thoughts, new ideas, new initiatives, and that is certainly happening with Bill," said Paul Nicholson, the festival's executive director. Playgoers are resoundingly positively, and tickets are selling at 90 per cent of capacity, he said.
Rauch's background seems tailor-made for the job. After graduating from Harvard University, he and classmate Alison Carey founded Cornerstone Theater Company. The troupe travelled the country, casting local residents in small towns to act in classic plays, before settling in Los Angeles.
"My friends in school and I had read a damning statistic, that only two per cent of American people went to professional theatre on a regular basis," said Rauch. "We thought if we were to go off and have successful careers, to wake up 40 or 50 years later and realize we had only performed for two per cent of our fellow citizens seemed inadequate to us."
The project became a kind of proletarian "let's put on a show in the old barn" theatre company engaging with conservative rural America.
In 1988, they did Bertolt Brecht's "Good Person of Sichuan" in Long Creek, a tiny cow town in the Eastern Oregon outback. The cast was a mix of professional actors and local folks. The play - changed to "Good Person of Long Creek" - was set in Long Creek, with characters carrying local names. The theatre was a cattle auction barn, dressing rooms were in a tent and outhouses served as restrooms.
On the way there, Rauch got his first look at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when they stopped off to see a college buddy in "Twelfth Night." A few years later, he was invited by Appel to direct a play in the New Theatre, the festival's showcase for avant-garde productions.
As part of the long-range planning effort, the festival is raising the profile of new play development - a difficult balancing act as research has shown young playgoers are more interested in Shakespeare than new plays, Nicholson added.
That job goes to Carey, who is overseeing the "American Revolutions: American History Cycle" series, new plays based on American history that are expected to start hitting the stage in 2010 with funding from the Collins Foundation and Microsoft founder Paul Allen.
"Shakespeare's history cycle looked at the great anxiety of his age, which was who was going to replace the childless monarch, Elizabeth," said Rauch. "He chose to address that anxiety by dramatizing stories from his country's past. That felt absolutely right."
Carey said they hope the plays will help Americans think about their own history and future.
"The goal is to establish a shared vocabulary of what the United States is, and also look back and learn the paths that led to our future," she said.
Though festival research shows young people are most interested in seeing Shakespeare, rather than new plays, the history cycle still has a great potential to bring new people in.
Rauch's 20 years with Cornerstone taught him people could change in ways they never believed possible.
"And I really believe in the power of art to change people's lives," he said.
"It seems to me that it is very naive to think that as an artist I change the world in this specific way by doing this piece of art. But it is equally or even more naive and certainly destructive if you don't recognize the art you create does in fact change the world.
"You just can't dictate how it changes the world."
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