THE BARD IS BIG : Century-Old Study Club Is Forerunner of Current Ojai Shakespeare Festival

The Ojai Shakespeare Festival is an offshoot of the Shakespeare Club, an organization that celebrated its 100th anniversary last year.

“It was formed at the Thatcher School by a group of women who had large ranches on the east end of town,” former club president Patricia Winkworth explained recently.

Originally a study group, the club met once a month at members’ homes. They started to mount a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” But when it was decided that the play’s costumes were too revealing by the day’s standards, men were forbidden from seeing the shows and the group reverted to being a study club.

“When I moved to Ojai in 1979,” said Winkworth, “I saw a notice in the paper that a Shakespeare club was meeting. The woman who answered the phone asked how old I was. When I told them 57, she paused and said, ‘Well, you’re awfully young.’ At the time, I was the youngest member of the group, and one by one most of them have moved or passed away. They were a bunch of wonderful, well-meaning ladies.”

The club isn’t entirely gone, said Evelyn Lambert, who has been with the organization for several years. “But it is definitely in hibernation. At one point, we had a membership of 20 to 25 people.

“We never said that the Shakespeare Club has disbanded. We still have lunch at a restaurant on Shakespeare’s birthday. . . .”

Lambert explained that the Ojai Shakespeare Festival sprang from the Royal Shakespeare Revels of Ojai, performing arm of the Ojai Shakespeare Club.

The current Libbey Bowl presentations began in 1983, with club president Winkworth as producer, and a professional director, Charlotte Bronstein, at the helm of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Winkworth’s dream, Lambert said, “was to have Shakespeare put on in Libbey Bowl by qualified actors. We hadn’t any money, but we wrote letters to people we knew who might be interested: small theater groups, colleges and so on. We begged until we built up a treasury of $300 to $400, enough to print some flyers. Then we were lucky, and some people in Agoura Hills suggested putting on an Elizabethan fair.

The Elizabethan fair has been discontinued, though festival participants dress in period costume and the group has formed a group of madrigal singers.

In 1991, the Ojai Shakespeare Festival is operating on a budget of $25,000 to 30,000, said managing director Mary Wolk, with income sources including tickets to the plays, private and corporate donations, and a grant from the California Arts Council.