Oregon Shakespeare Festival Announces Combined Digital and Live Season for 2021

Ashland, OR. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) announced the Festival’s 2021 season; it’s an array of programming with digital and live productions. The combination of multi-format programming is evidence of OSF’s continued commitment to presenting world-class theatre on stage and its recent foray into digital programming, which introduces fans, supporters, and new audiences worldwide to the company’s artistry. (Above is a photo from OSF’s 2020 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photo: Jenny Graham.) Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and uncertainties associated with it, OSF will hold off announcing specific dates and ticket sales for onstage productions until there is more clarity around reopening, gathering, and social distancing guidelines. All onstage events are subject to change.

Here’s a video about the announcement:

The 2021 season features classics and new works streaming from the OSF archives, new works presented on OSF’s digital platform, O!, and a Fall 2021 live season on OSF’s campus in Ashland, Oregon, extending into January for the first time with OSF’s first winter special. All live performances will be subject to health department guidelines and government restrictions on large gatherings.

“2020 marked a paradigm shift in which OSF was catapulted into different ways of creating and supporting artists and art-making. In launching our digital platform, O!, nearly a year ago, the initial goal was to provide an exploratory space to intersect theatre with other forms of media,” said Nataki Garrett, OSF artistic director. “Now joined together with a compelling schedule of Fall and Winter onstage programming, O! has evolved into a marquee fourth stage, where new and innovative projects will play alongside some of OSF’s most beloved and well-known productions.”

“I could not be more excited and honored in partnering with Nataki to introduce this extraordinary combination of digital and onstage programming as the OSF 2021 season,” said David Schmitz, OSF executive director. “This unique first-ever multiformat season reflects OSF’s commitment to innovation, agility, and progress throughout the most extraordinary global circumstances we are all facing. And we are eager to get back to creating live performances when the health authority and governmental restrictions allow us to do so.”

The 2021 digital on-demand streaming season includes a limited-run schedule of favorites from the OSF archives beginning with Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, directed by Shana Cooper; Manahatta by Mary Kathryn Nagle, directed by Laurie Woolery; and Snow in Midsummer by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, based on the classical Chinese drama The Injustice to Dou Yi That Moved Heaven and Earth and directed by Justin Audibert. Tickets are now available for all three productions.  More streaming productions curated from OSF’s digital archives will be announced in the coming months.

“Along with our archival streaming shows, O! will continue to present exciting new programming—digital theatre, film, and immersive projects—throughout the year, bringing OSF’s celebrated artistry of OSF into homes around the world,” added Garrett.

OSF 2021 On Stage programming includes a repertory of four productions: August Wilson’s How I Learned What I Learned, featuring Steven Anthony Jones and directed by Tim Bond; the West Coast premiere of unseen by Mona Mansour, directed by Evren Odcikin; the American Revolutions world premiere of Confederates by Dominique Morisseau, directed by Nataki Garrett; and the season will culminate in OSF’s first winter special, It’s Christmas, Carol! by beloved OSF actors Mark Bedard, Brent Hinkley, and John Tufts.

Visit the season announcement for all of the show details.

OSF is known for its large-scale productions like this 2018 production of Romeo and Juliet directed by Dámaso Rodríguez. Emily Ota (Juliet) and William Thomas Hodgson (Romeo) joined a large cast in the timeless story of love as seen in the video below.

From OSF:

Our mission statement helps guide us in all of our endeavors here at OSF: Inspired by Shakespeare’s work and the cultural richness of the United States, we reveal our collective humanity through illuminating interpretations of new and classic plays, deepened by the kaleidoscope of rotating repertory.

A major theatre arts organization, OSF offers a diversity of plays as well as events and activities to enhance your overall experience.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a not-for-profit professional theatre founded in 1935. Our eight-month season runs through the month of October, and we have three theatres: our two indoor stages—the Angus Bowmer Theatre and the Thomas Theatre—and our flagship outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theatre, which opens in early June and runs through mid-October. We offer up to 11 different plays that include works by Shakespeare as well as a mix of classics, musicals and world-premiere plays. When you visit you can see one or two plays or up to nine plays in one week!