Starting this season, OSF is embarking on a brave new journey to produce all of Shakespeare’s plays in just 10 years—half the normal time.

In the past, OSF has completed all 37 Shakespeare plays (collectively called his canon) three times, roughly 20 years apart: 1958, 1978 and 1997. In 2016, the production of Timon of Athens will mark the fourth.

In an interview in his office overlooking the Bricks, Artistic Director Bill Rauch said that he and Director of Literary Development and Dramaturgy Lue Morgan Douthit were equally motivated by practicality and artistry to create what they call “canon in a decade.”

“As curators of our programming,” Rauch says, “committing to doing the canon within a very confined period of time allows us to—and frankly forces us to—make choices about what stories we want to tell and the order we want to tell them in.”

One reason behind the move is that they believe those audience members who keep track of the plays they’ve seen will love it. OSF has created a Canon Passport to help people monitor their “journey with the Bard,” available in the Tudor Guild gift shop. 

“We know a high percentage of our audiences return often,” Rauch says. “There are so many multiple generations of families—people who are brought here by their parents and grandparents—so 10 years is a manageable chunk of one’s life to imagine. It felt like a gift to the audience.”

The commitment to producing the canon in a decade has hugely shaped the 2016 season-selection process in terms of increasing the depth of OSF’s engagement with each Shakespeare title. “Now that I know what the Shakespeare plays are in 2016 and I’m pretty confident about what they’re going to be in 2017, we can start to commit to a director, we can start working on the text with the dramaturg,” Rauch says. “We might be able to cast in advance a leading actor in a role. That would give the actor two years to develop the role instead of only six months. So I think the benefits are ongoing.”

Hitting all the bases—and then some

In 2016, OSF will present five Shakespeare plays, one from each of the four major genres—comedy, tragedy, history and romance—plus the play that is most overdue for production.

• Twelfth Night will run all year in the Angus Bowmer Theatre. “Twelfth Night has been done like clockwork every five years for quite a while, so we skipped a year,” Rauch says. “Of course, 2016 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, so it’s the last major milestone of our lifetimes. We wanted to be really thoughtful about Shakespeare in 2016 for that reason. Twelfth Night was one of the two plays that were first performed by the Festival in 1935, so to produce it in that anniversary season is very meaningful.”
• Richard II will open in early July in the Thomas Theatre, with Rauch directing.
• Hamlet will run in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre.
• The Winter’s Tale, also in the Allen. “The Winter’s Tale,” says Rauch, “will be a thoughtfully cast and interpreted production that highlights the gifts of Asian-American company members. It will be set both in China and on the West Coast of the United States.”
• Timon of Athens, which was last produced in 1997, nearly 20 years ago, will open in late July in the Bowmer. “Timon is a notoriously difficult text,” Rauch says, “but it’s a very compelling story and such a timely story in terms of who’s got the wealth and how the wealth should be distributed. Obviously, it’s a very emotional issue in our society, so I think we’ll look at it as Shakespeare’s story of wealth distribution and wealth inequality. And it will be an election year. So that’s a big deal.”

Presenting five Shakespeares in one season is a first in Rauch’s tenure as artistic director and comes a year after OSF is doing three. He says that the aim is to have four Shakespeares on average, with some years doing more, some less, as OSF works its swift way through the canon.

“The people who really want to complete their canon take it very seriously, and I love that,” he says. “So many people come to OSF on pilgrimage, and the ritual of coming here has such emotional weight, so I think completing the canon is one expression of that kind of emotional commitment.”

While Rauch is a full year away from announcing the 2017 season, he did drop one hint. “Certainly launching the history cycle of this 10-year canon with Richard II—the first in the eight-play series of kings who ruled in successive order—does invite the rest of those history plays to be told in chronological order, so I’ll say that.” Rauch went on to note that King John and Henry VIII are separated from the rest of the history cycle by many years, and both have been produced by OSF relatively recently, so may not appear until later in the decade.

Balancing the season

Mounting all 37 plays in a compressed time frame is a complex undertaking and presents some artistic challenges. One change is that the comedies won’t be repeated as often. “I think in some ways that’s going to be a relief to the audience,” Rauch says, “but it does put more pressure on the rest of the playbill to bring the right tonal balance. So if we’re doing a history that’s really intense and a tragedy and a problem play and one comedy, then obviously we’re going to need more comedy in other kinds of work.”

But new writers, he says, are not always writing comedy. In OSF’s American Revolutions history cycle, American Night (2010) was extremely funny, but much of the new work has been grittier. “I think that does create an interesting challenge,” Rauch says. “At the same time, of course, we’ve had a wonderful deep dive into the classic American musical canon, so much of which is comedy, so that helps us achieve some balance.”

Artistic Associate Dawn Monique Williams, who is associate director for Pericles and Antony and Cleopatra and was present at this interview, chimes in:  

“I learned at a recent Shakespeare theatre conference that some Shakespeare theatres are not concerned at all with completing the canon,” she says. “Some of them say, ‘Hey, we don’t want to touch the Henry VI’s; we don’t want to touch Timon of Athens.’ That’s not what we at OSF are here to do. I think it takes a certain artistic rigor to make that commitment and to say, ‘You know what? We know some of the plays are messier or more challenging, maybe they’re co-written, but we’re going to undertake all of them because that’s our commitment to that artist.’ ”

Williams adds: “I am a canon-clicker. I have a spreadsheet that says when and where I saw which play. So it’s exciting for me to know I will get to see all of these plays, because I may not ever in my life see some of the more obscure ones otherwise.”

For more information about the 2016 season, click here.