Ojai Festival Looks for an Expanded Role in Area’s Drama Scene

Late on a Saturday afternoon, in the spacious back yard of a home on the outskirts of Ojai, cast members of “Macbeth” were busily in rehearsal for Act I.

Dressed in lightweight and comfortable street clothes, swordsmen clashed and witches invoked their spells.

Some yards away, director Paul Backer sat on a throne--a prop from “The Winter’s Tale,” which he directed for the company two years ago. Over at the side of the yard, well within earshot, nails were being hammered and planks being sawed as the set for “Macbeth” neared completion.

During a break in the action, the actors took time out for pizza, and Backer and managing director Mary Wolk discussed the future of the Ojai Shakespeare Festival.

Wolk’s background includes a stint as host of a daytime television show, “Home Faire,” in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She has been, by all accounts, the prime motivating force behind the Ojai Shakespeare Festival since she took its reins in 1988. At the time, the company was known as The Royal Shakespeare Revels of Ojai.

She is quick to give credit to the Revels’ former president, Chester Phelps. “He was the one who started everything going,” Wolk said. “He felt that the (Revels) should go somewhere.” Phelps, who became ill shortly after Wolk’s association with the group began, is back this year, playing Banquo in “Macbeth.”

Backer, the company’s first artistic director, also joined the group three years ago. He is an actor and director who currently teaches speech, acting and movement at USC (where he’s an adjunct associate professor), and at Santa Monica College and Los Angeles City College.

Together, Wolk and Backer have expanded the Ojai Shakespeare Festival’s activities beyond the annual play to include educational programs such as an annual actors’ workshop, a free stagecraft internship program and an elementary school Shakespeare workshop program.

But their main thrust, it seems, is an attempt to enlarge the festival itself.

“We’re looking to produce two Shakespearean plays each summer,” Wolk said, “moving to a guest artist contract status with the actors’ union, which will allow us to hire professional actors in some roles, and to eventually become a semi-professional theater company, branching out to renaissance, Jacobean and medieval drama as well as Shakespeare. Which, for this area, would make us unique.”

“The city of Ojai and Shakespeare are well matched,” added Backer, who commutes from Santa Monica for rehearsals, workshops and performances.

“For one thing, part of the joy of doing Shakespeare in relatively rural communities is that a lot of the situations were written for people who grew up in environments like this, and even now, people who live out in the country are likely to recognize many of the strong rural images that city audiences might not get.”

In January, Backer and Wolk traveled to Washington to ahelp form the Shakespeare Festival Assn. of America. There are 60 to 70 such festivals across the country, Wolk said, from a group in Minneapolis with 10 actors to the Stratford (Ontario) Festival in Canada, with a budget of $30 million a year.

The well-known Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, she added, sits somewhere in the middle, with an annual budget of about $10 million.

When Wolk and Backer started with the Ojai group, their annual budget was $9,000; it has since tripled. While sales figures for this year’s show were not available at press time, advance sales for last year’s “The Merchant of Venice” were close to 3,500, with members of the audience coming from as far away as San Francisco and San Diego.

“We were one of only three groups at the Washington meeting who had money left over at the end of the season,” Wolk said with pride. “But then, Paul and I went out for coffee, and there went the profits.”