Playwright Tanya Barfield, author of Blue Door and an American Revolutions commission, recalls her first introduction to theatre when OSF brought two professional actors to her school to perform Macbeth. “It changed my life. Right there,” she says. “I left the auditorium a different person.” So much so that she talked her school, the Metropolitan Learning Center in Portland, into putting on a play. What play did she choose? Macbeth, of course. “The only reason I chose Macbeth was that it was the only play I’d ever read!”

Barfield went on to attend the OSF Summer Seminar for High School Juniors in 1986, on a scholarship generously provided by her principal. The experience persuaded her to pursue a career in theatre, first as an actor and eventually as a playwright. She is now the Literary Manager at The Juilliard School, helping young playwrights develop their own writing craft.

She is far from alone. Scores of theatre professionals—actors, writers and artists—who work at OSF and other theatres around the country and internationally got their earliest exposure to theatre and Shakespeare through OSF’s diverse offering of educational programming. Every year OSF offers around 22 different Education programs that serve more than 130,000 people. Youth, families, adults, educators and OSF members flock to the campus to take part in the age-old ritual of critical discourse, discovery, analysis and hands-on experience.

Bringing Shakespeare to students from the beginning

Angus Bowmer, who founded the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1935, began his career as an educator, first coming to Ashland to teach at Southern Oregon Normal School (now Southern Oregon University). Under his guidance, OSF brought actors into schools to perform and teach Shakespeare. In 1949, Stanford professor Dr. Margery Bailey created the first Shakespearean Summer School at OSF, the earliest incarnation of today’s Education Department.

Today, the Education Department consists of the following programs:

• Summer Seminar for High School Juniors: Founded in 1981, it now serves 65 students a year. Students from all over the country spend two weeks at OSF taking workshops and forums, seeing plays and talking with Company members.
• OSF School Visit Program: Angus Bowmer started this program of taking Shakespeare into schools throughout the West and as far east as Kansas and Arkansas. For many students this is their first and sometimes only exposure to Shakespeare. Last year the SVP performed for approximately 53,600 students.
• School field trips to OSF: More than 500 schools and student groups come to OSF each year to see plays and participate in post-matinee discussions and workshops.
• Free and discounted tickets for local schools, funded by OSF’s Bowmer Society, which raises around $300,000 each year for students to attend plays.
• Teacher training opportunities: OSF offers Inside Shakespeare, Shakespeare in the Classroom and fall Partnership teacher trainings.
• Programs for the community: Includes Festival Noons, Living Ideas: Art and Community Dialogue Series, weekend classes, week-long classes, such as the Shakespeare Comprehensive and Backstage Tours.

OSF provides a banquet of ways to engage. And for some it’s more than engagement; it’s life changing.

Laura Forbes, now the Arts Education Program Director at the Alaska State Council on the Arts, distinctly remembers OSF performing Shakespeare for her high school in Kenai. “It was the first time I had ever seen him performed,” she recalls. “Even with minimal costumes and two actors, it highlighted the possibility of what Shakespeare can look like.”

Forbes applied for the Summer Seminar for High School Juniors the next year and remembers being in an environment for the first time where peers came together from all different places and backgrounds, bonding around the work. “The idea of a cohort, and the conditions that support the creation of one, has served me well throughout my work,” Forbes says.

Discovering theatre as an art form

Shana Cooper, director of OSF’s Julius Caesar, grew up in Ashland, watching outdoor rehearsals in the Elizabethan when she was six years old. “Watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, A Winter’s Tale as a young person exposed me for the first time to theatre as an art form. It formed the foundation for my adult perspective as an artist.”

Cooper also participated in the Summer Seminar. “I remember one exercise in particular, which took place after dark on the SOU campus,” she says. “I was with a partner, exploring themes from Romeo and Juliet that completely changed my understanding of the way you could work on a play and the concept of risk-taking in the rehearsal process. I still use elements of what I learned that night in my work now as a director. For example, as part of the rehearsal process for Julius Caesar we explored Shakespeare as a ‘new work’ to create a unique vocabulary of violence as both dance and stage combat.”

Many alumni of OSF’s Education programs have started Shakespeare festivals or create curricula in their hometowns. Greg Reiner, theatre and musical theatre director of the National Endowment for the Arts and former executive director of the Classic Stage Company in New York City, went back to his hometown of Lompoc, California, after his junior year summer at OSF and convinced his high school drama teacher to start an outdoor Shakespeare festival. “I distinctly remember," Reiner says, "because the festival was in May at the end of the school year, and we had to bring in heat lamps because it was so cold.”

Deb Vaughn, Arts Learning and Poetry Out Loud Program Coordinator for the Oregon Commission on the Arts, was invited by her high school drama teacher to teach a week of advanced acting classes her senior year using the ideas and techniques she’d learned at OSF.

Kyle Anderson first came to OSF with his Klamath Falls high school drama class in 2000. The trip was funded by the Bowmer Society. Years later, as a middle school English teacher at Golden Eagle Charter School in Mt. Shasta, California, he is “flipping the script” and bringing his own students to the Festival. “Now I get to introduce students to their first exposure with Shakespeare.”

For OSF Voice & Text Director Rebecca Clark Carey, a text course with longtime OSF dramaturg and actor Barry Kraft in 1983 and a visit with Bowmer’s wife, Gertrude Bowmer, brought to the surface her nascent love of text and planted a seed for what would later become a career. “I vividly remember standing on the Bricks after seeing Death of a Salesman for the first time, sobbing and shaking, completely moved by a powerful story, beautifully told,” she says. Carey’s first experience at OSF was a school field trip on a bus from Seattle. Later that summer, she convinced her family to make a second trip, remembering the buzz and excitement of being in the Elizabethan theatre and experiencing the proper size, scope and largeness for Shakespeare’s world.

The stories go on. OSF lighting designer Kate McFarland first came with her family on summer vacation in 2005, then again the following year on a 9th-grade school trip from Davis, California, eventually enrolling in the Summer Seminar. “You can do this; you can be here one day,” she remembers saying to herself. McFarland eventually attended Southern Oregon University, studying stage lighting and production and got accepted as an intern in the FAIR program at OSF her senior year of college. “Since 8th grade, all roads led to OSF,” McFarland says. “It kept me motivated to put myself out there and be the best I can be; I developed a sense of responsibility to keep my foot in the door, to push, to learn more, do better. I really look up to my colleagues and bosses. I want to keep going up and succeeding.”

Several of the alumni, including McFarland, Carey and Vaughn, now teach sections of the Summer Seminar. “I still remember [Education Director] Joan Langley’s words of wisdom, to always give back,” says McFarland. “That’s why I teach lighting now. I want to give back.”

For more information on how you can support arts education at OSF, visit www.osfashland.org/bowmersociety.