Where’s the real OSF, the long-term actors, the great playwrights?

By Arnold Lipkind

We all know COVID’s not the reason the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is suffering from lack of attendees and community enthusiasm. Why would long-term loyal attendees prioritize saving this version of OSF? Who wants to pay to be preached to endlessly — to be “taught a lesson” that most Ashlanders, a premier liberal and intellectual community, learned long ago? Who wants to leave the theater insulted yet again?

Where’s the real OSF? Where are the long-term actors of the years 1990-2017 so precipitately gone — without accolades, fanfare, expressions of gratitude for years of devoted service? Why is there no loyalty to, no recognition of, these actors who were OSF for decades?

Where has the OSF ethos disappeared to? The ethos of a Shakespeare Festival, conveying the prime value of “eternally magnificent, globally lauded” works that will endure. Where are, for starters, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter (a Nobel laureate), Polly Stenham, David Hare, Lucy Prebble, Nina Raine, Tony Kushner, Tom Stoppard (the Shakespeare of our times) and August Wilson all over again?

Where is the real Shakespeare, one he’d recognize? The real Green Show — company performers contracted for the entire season to complement the Bard’s themes with authentic Renaissance music and dance? Where is the host of community volunteers who used to work the Tudor Guild and other community-drenched OSF venues? Where is Daedalus, the busloads of students, the post-performance meet-and-greets?

For decades OSF was America’s most important regional venue for classic theater. I remember: Derrick as Othello and two New York Times critics behind us murmuring “The best damn Othello I’ve ever seen!” A Thomas Theatre performance of “Tracy’s Tiger” when I in the front row and Miriam standing before me on the stage stared into each other’s eyes and both started to cry. Dan Donahue as Hamlet sitting silently in front of his father’s coffin long before the show started, my mind awarding a Tony for his sangfroid. Rodney out-Sinatra-ing Sinatra in “Guys and Dolls.”

I remember standing up too abruptly in the aisle at the Elizabethan and being swept onstage by actors involved in the farewell rites of the last show of that season — David grabbing my sleeve and declaring: “You’re one of us now.” Working out with him at Anytime Fitness, along with K.T. and Kimberly. Martino’s giving me the OSF discount for hanging around company actors. Sitting on the Black Swan stoop with the actor playing Duke Orsino, soon to be replaced by an understudy, soon to die of AIDS.

When I was in the Navy in a command where super-responsible officers stood watches day and night, we already had the expression “Not on our watch.” When President Johnson called with an urgent issue, we contacted watch-standers from the recent and remote past for advice and help. As for OSF? Smoke, heat waves, COVID, fiscal mismanagement, and obsessive-compulsive play selection — taken together — have proved a super-threat. So why didn’t the board and management team go into Super-Response Mode at once? “Not on our watch” is a coda that must be operative from Day One: You must dig in, retrench, conserve, hark back for guidance to the more stable past.

Everyone knows, dear OSF, that you have squandered vast resources preaching political viewpoints to the Ashland choir. And now, despite the monetary proceeds from decades of sold-out performances and two recent $10 million grants, you dare to beg for another $2.5 million to stay alive?

Perhaps you’ll dismiss me as a conservative. I, with Students for a Democratic Society and union creds who will adore Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez till the day I die. But the most authentic application of that term has nothing to do with systematically eschewing “progressive” ideas. What “conservative” denotes is the mandate to preserve the best of present and past — to preserve what’s true, valuable, beautiful, and what actually works.

In any event, thank you for letting me vent. If any of this even matters anymore. With actual demise, death, extinction around the corner. Alas! Next time I Google Cedar City, Utah — their Shakespeare Festival — in search of some semblance of the OSF that once shone so brilliantly, I may have to commit.

Arnold Lipkind is an Ashland resident and has been an OSF member for 35 years.

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