Moments of Change

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Bill Rauch
2019 is Bill Rauch’s final season as OSF artistic director.
Prologue
magazine for members
2019 Edition

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.