In 2007, OSF’s incoming Artistic Director
Bill Rauch asked me to join him in Ashland
to lead what would become American
Revolutions: the United States History
Cycle. We started meeting with writers,
producers, performers, historians and OSF
patrons. (And thank you to those of who
were there—you gave us such good advice!)
We started with Bill’s original impulse:
Shakespeare wrote the history of his people
onto the stage, and we should do the same
with the history of the United States. But
what would be the best lens for the program?
We rolled through dozens of ideas—a
play for each presidential administration, a
play for each state, a play for each decade—
but no lens captured what we were looking
for. Still, one theme came up in all our conversations:
the impact of change, and the
sense that the pace of change seemed to
be accelerating. Since one of the reasons to
portray our history is to illuminate a better
path to our future, we decided to ask writers
to craft their plays to explore moments
of change. It wasn’t a limiting lens—writers
can follow their passion but it gives us a
way to talk about the plays that underlines
their common threads and importance to
understanding the country. Change matters.
Which brings me to talk about one big
change for OSF this year: Bill Rauch’s transition
out of the job of Artistic Director of
OSF. Since he was a young man, Bill has
been illuminating paths to a better future
for so many people. I know this because I
was there.
In the fall of 1980, I was in the Harvard
University Coop, picking up books for the
upcoming semester. There was a wavy-haired
young man in a yellow button-down shirt (funny the details one remembers)
staring excitedly at the shelves of theatre
books. I don’t remember who spoke first,
although I assume it was Bill—he is still
a much more outgoing person than I am.
In any case, he was a freshman in need of
advice, and I was a sophisticated (hah!)
junior naturally happy to share my wisdom.
I don’t remember many details of the
conversation, but I am pretty sure that we
didn’t talk about spending (at least) the
next 39 years together as friends and play-making
collaborators.
But I sure am glad it worked out that way.
After a very brief stint as a college actor,
Bill starting directing, establishing both
his breadth of imagination and his dedication
to the task at hand. At the time, there
was no theatre major at Harvard, which
meant there was no one to tell any of us
what to do, or stop us from doing anything,
and we took full advantage of that. Bill
directed 26 shows as an undergrad, all over
the campus and even driving the streets of
Cambridge. Already a Shakespeare fan, he
directed Romeo and Juliet, in which he cast
the charming, talented Christopher Liam
Moore as Balthazar. By his senior year, he
began his own on-campus company that
spent a semester together making plays,
already cementing his belief that great theatre
is made with ongoing companies. He
also worked with a group of friends to stage
Molière’s Sganarelle with residents of a local
mental health facility, starting his lifelong
passion for connecting with individual communities
through artmaking. But, interestingly,
we had already been challenged for
our life choices: Robert Brustein, artistic
director of the Harvard-housed American
Repertory Theater, opened a class we both
took by saying that theatre was a dead art
form. What if he was right?
We would see, but first, in a perhaps under-publicized
part of his life, Bill worked at a
tombstone company for a year after college.
He got the job because of his remarkable
typing speed, which has continued to
serve him well in recent years answering
hundreds of emails a day. Although I think
Bill will forgive me for mentioning that his
relationship with the electronic age has not
always been an easy one: When computers
see Bill coming, they giggle, and it does not
always end well. But he persists.
In 1986, he headed home to live with his
family in Virginia and work at Washington
D.C.’s Kennedy Center, and it was time to find
out for ourselves the state of the theatre. I
was working as a paralegal in New York and
had recently purchased a snappy, oxblood,
shoulder-strapped briefcase, which made me
qualified to become managing director to his
artistic director. I moved into Bill’s family’s
house in Virginia, we started planning and
Cornerstone Theater Company was born.
For the next five years, we traveled the
United States, moving into communities,
mostly small towns, and working with community
members onstage and backstage to
create shows that reflected people’s lives.
The company then moved to Los Angeles,
where it still creates remarkable work. It is a glorious, interesting history, and I encourage
you to learn more about the company at
CornerstoneTheater.org. Cornerstone’s belief
that everyone is an artist was, we hope, part
of the imperative to inclusivity that continues
to change the field, as much as that
change is not yet realized.
Of course, in such a life-consuming undertaking,
there are all kinds of anecdotes. Living
in a fast-food restaurant! Stolen outhouses!
Snakes where you don’t want them! Break-dancing
in the streets with Black and white
kids from the same small town who had
never met! Turning odd spaces into theatres,
with big sets and seating made out of, say,
bomb crates! Meeting the young man from
Watts who was going to join the army but
instead went to college to study theatre and
is still at it! The communities that continued
to make theatre after the Cornerstone production
closed, and the moments we were
able to bring them all together!
And some moments that took our breath
away, such as finding out we were banned
from performing our school assembly in one
county’s school system unless we all took
an HIV/AIDS test. There was concern that we
had worked with a community of people with
AIDS and their friends and caregivers. Despite
the Virginia Secretary of Health sending a
letter saying (and I generously paraphrase):
“Yeah, no—even if any of us did carry the
HIV virus, it can’t crawl across the footlights,”
the school system insisted. We refused. A
local college offered us their theatre spaces,
and the afternoon we did our school show,
Girl and Boy Scouts in full uniform showed
up with signs saying “We support artists!”
and “We support AIDS patients!” It is a good
reminder in hard times that days of despair
can be followed by days of comfort.
Cornerstone’s story is also, speaking of
change, a story of a changing national
dialogue. In 1987, Bill and I met with the
National Endowment for the Arts and
were told that we would never get a dime
from them because we worked with nonprofessionals.
After U.S. Representative Jesse
Helms started an attack on the Agency,
the NEA called us to see if we would be
willing to help redesign some of their
programs to address the inclusion of work
by non-professionals. (We were happy to
help.) Cornerstone was awarded its first
grant from the NEA the year that Congress
required all awardees to sign a pledge to
refrain from obscenity, “including, but not
limited to, depictions of homoeroticism,”
which might forbid us from portraying the
lives of gay people on our stages. While
there may well have been more, we know
of three companies in the United States
that refused to sign the pledge: New York’s
Public Theater, Cornerstone and the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival.
While we left Cornerstone after 20 years,
it was a forge for all the values that Bill
brought forth and enhanced in his time
at OSF. Here is a reminder of some of the
changes at OSF Bill has led or supported
since he has been here:
- A revitalized, eclectic Green Show to bring
new artists to OSF and better serve our
local community.
- Not one but two new canons of the
American Theatre: American Revolutions Shakespeare.
- An expanded classical canon to include
stories from many parts of the world.
- The addition of musicals—classic and
new—to the OSF repertoire.
- Living Ideas, our art and community
dialogue series.
- The Black Swan Lab, an in-house play
development program that brings
playwrights to Ashland to work with
OSF actors as they develop their plays,
whether commissioned by OSF or not.
The thread that runs through all these
changes is a commitment that every human
story is worth telling, and that diversifying
the stories and the storytellers of the
American theatre is the key to its future and
vitality. While Bill has been a leader in these
efforts, he has also come to know that part
of leadership is to step aside and let other
leaders share the gift of inspiring people to
change. The commitment is company-wide,
as it should be. And while the organization
still struggles with the journey of becoming
more truly inclusive, equitable and socially
just in its artmaking and internal practice,
we persist together.
Alongside all these changes in our theatre
ways, Bill and I have also shared our lives.
Bill and Christopher fell in love during that
production of Romeo and Juliet so many
years ago, and I fell in love with fellow
Cornerstone member Benajah Cobb, who
went on to become the Green Show technical
director. Children followed, and the four
of us and our families still spend many holidays
together.
Despite all the changes we have lived and
witnessed, there are some things that have
not changed.
Sitting here at the Oregon Shakespeare
Festival in 2019, contemplating the changes
to come, it feels more urgently apparent
than at any other time in our lives that the
arts, that theatre, is essential to our communal
health. Theatre is not a dead art form.
We know that theatre helps us to think,
to problem-solve collaboratively, to love.
To make theatre, to see theatre, is to climb
into other people’s realities. Theatre is valuable
in and of itself but it also models the
only way human beings have ever dependably
made progress into more healthy, just,
equitable societies: the blossoming power
of humble learning, of the open mind, of
empathy. Society needs theatre.
So please keep enjoying the 2019 season!
Welcome to the array of voices, the breadth
of storytelling, the excellence of artmaking!
This is Bill’s last season as OSF artistic director,
and it is one to be cherished and dug
into and learned from and experienced to
its fullest.
Change is inevitable. Sometimes you make
the change, and sometimes the change
makes you. But we keep going forward,
pushed by our values and our love. Thank
you for being such an important part of us
all moving toward a better future together.
This retrospective also appears in the 2019
edition of OSF’s Souvenir Program.