Rain Plots the Demise of ‘Julius Caesar’ at Shakespeare Festival

The audience reminded me of my street in La Quinta the night before the trash men come.

I was lucky enough to be at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

The reason the outdoor theater looked like trash night is that a large number of the theatergoers were wearing black plastic trash bags, holes cut for their heads. Some had more bags for their legs.

There was a soft mist falling when we sat down to enjoy the convolutions of “Julius Caesar.”

Jean Erck and I were visiting our dear friend, Peggy Zwick, a retired English teacher, who lives in Medford. To get the theater tickets, Peggy had gone weeks ago to Ashland, where the festival plays every season to capacity audiences of 1,100 each night of its run from June through September.

The theater is a reproduction of the Globe, where Shakespeare’s plays originally delighted, frightened and lifted audiences. The stage is a two-story half-timbered structure with a flight of curving stairs leading to an upper playing area. The technical director does wonders with a platform suspended on pulleys and a series of drops.

Before the play began, a cast member popped his head out of the window in the top story and raised the house flag. Then he opened an umbrella, laughed and popped back inside the high window.

The artistic director came out and said he had just talked to the weatherman, who had promised that the rain would pass over in half an hour. “But we haven’t trusted him in years,” said the director. “Please stay with us. We will do the play in costume unless the rain gets too heavy.”

After 15 minutes, the rain was coming down harder and the stage was filled with cold, wet toga-clad men, all earnestly plotting the demise of Caesar.

Jean and Peggy and I were in raincoats and those dreary and practical plastic bonnets that tie under the chin. But after about 45 minutes, as the rain poured down, we left.

I was already on a chummy footing with Caesar and the boys around the capital because I spent a semester with them under the leadership of Sister Marie de Lourdes at Mount St. Mary’s College. If you’ve done that, you feel as though you know the Romans at least as well as the family next door.

The other production we saw was the first half of “Henry VI.” They are doing the second half next season.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival began in 1935 when Angus Bohmer, a professor of English at Southern Oregon State College, put together the first two plays. The reproduction of the Globe Theatre was built in 1959.

In the complex, in addition to the Shakespearean theater, are the Bohmer Theatre, which does modern productions--Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” when we were there, and a third theater, the Black Swan, where the festival presents experimental and contemporary productions.

Each of the Shakespeare plays is preceded by the “Green Show” of songs and dances on the platform at the entrance of the theater area with the performers in Elizabethan dress. These are authentic and delightful and include the traditional long sword dance. Some of the musical instruments are the dumbeck, kemenche, dielle and shawm, recorders and a dozen percussion instruments.

It’s almost impossible to find anyone in Ashland who is not affiliated with the Shakespeare Festival. It is highly esteemed wherever the Bard’s works are known.

One hundred and fifty volunteer women operate the Tudor Guild, which manages and staffs the gift stall and more formal gift shop.

The festival has a second theater in Portland with the season from Nov. 2 to April 18. In 1992, it will close with “King Lear.” The other productions are contemporary.