The Bard rises from Ashland

I have had a long relationship with this corner of southwest Oregon; my grandfather and uncle served as mayors in two neighboring towns. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, running this year to Oct. 29, always provided me with an acre or two that felt like my own, where I could meet proverbial kindred spirits. The festival attracts not people looking to fill a Saturday night but theatergoers with an abiding love of drama. It is not an ivory tower. It's a wooden one. Where nature and artifice meet.

This town of 20,000 is slotted between the steep walls of Bear Creek Valley 15 miles north of the California border. It has been steeped in a decades-long experiment with Shakespeare, begun in 1935 by local teacher Angus Bowmer. There are just enough Elizabethan touches -- crenelated parapets on the drugstore, trumpet banners hanging from the streetlights -- to tart up the place but not so many that it seems forced. Wild rivers, historical gold rush towns and skiing lie within 20 miles of Ashland's main thoroughfare and its three state-of-the-art theaters.

Sometimes in a place like Ashland, visitors succumb to the temptation to treat it like a cultural vending machine. They drop in their change, pull the lever, consume what drops and return home. But Ashland and its environs, even the festival itself, is a richer place when you indulge your curiosity.

For my part, I talked my way backstage into the costume and design shops and spent time conversing with several of the actors to get an insider's view of the festival, the town and the area.

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Painting the scene

THE scene shops at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival were cavernous bays filled with a controlled confusion of men (and a few women) rolling great "carts" or sections of sets, back and forth. The air was filled with the whine of wood saws and the hiss of paint guns. The shop was building the set to one of the first plays "The Diary of Anne Frank," due to open Saturday. The festival's scene shop is busy 10 months of the year.