Shakespeare fest gets L.A. theater director

Bill Rauch, co-founder and former artistic director of Los Angeles’ Cornerstone Theater Company, has been named artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

“I’ve got so much joy in my heart about this appointment, but my one sadness is leaving L.A.; this has been my artistic home as well as my literal home for 14 1/2 years,” Rauch said Friday. “But I started working in Ashland in 2002 and was very moved by the eclecticism of the programming. Despite Shakespeare being the foundation of the work, there is an across-the-world canon, contemporary work and new plays being commissioned by the company.”

Rauch will assume the post in June 2007, when he will begin planning the 2008 season. He succeeds Libby Appel, who will retire at the end of the 2007 season.

Rauch, 43, stepped down in March from his 20-year post as artistic director of the community-based Cornerstone company, which moved to L.A. in the early 1990s. His last project for the company was directing “As You Like It: A California Concoction” that month at the Pasadena Playhouse. He is continuing his association with Cornerstone by co-directing the company’s production of Jeffrey Hatcher’s play “The Falls” with Cornerstone’s new artistic director, Michael John Garces, at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. “This is my first Cornerstone project as ‘former artistic director,’ and I certainly hope that it is not my last,” Rauch said.

Rauch added that he would like to expand on the Ashland company’s experimental Shakespeare productions. “There has been a great variety of aesthetic approaches up in Ashland, but I don’t think there’s ever been a production of Shakespeare that has dealt with an adaptation of his language,” Rauch said. “But given my work at Cornerstone over the years, that is something we definitely have to try.”