Learning Theater: From Audience to Critic at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Carta Details | Photos from past years

TAPS 11SC

Who doesn't love going to a play: sitting in the darkened theater, a member of the audience community waiting to be entertained, charmed, and challenged? But how many of us know enough about the details of the plays, their interpretation, their production, and acting itself, to allow us to appreciate fully the theatrical experience? In this seminar, we will spend 14 days in Ashland, Oregon, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), where we will attend these plays: Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV Part One, and The Taming of the Shrew;  Come From Away, book, music, and lyrics by Irene Sankoff and David Hein; Kate Hamill's play, based on Jane Austen’s novel, Emma; August Wilson’s King Hedley II; David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face; and Smote This, A Comedy about God…and Other Serious $h*t, created and performed by Rodney Gardiner.  (To read more about these productions, go to www.osfashland.org). We will also spend time backstage, meeting with actors, designers, and artistic and administrative directors of OSF. Students read the plays before the seminar begins, attend these productions together, and have the time to study one play closely through a second viewing.  In Ashland, students will produce a staged reading and design a final paper based on one or more of the productions. These reviews will be delivered to the group and turned in on Thursday, September 17.  This course is designed for all students who are interested in theater.  All levels of experience are welcome; only enthusiasm and interest are required!

Important Logistics

This seminar will convene in Ashland, Oregon, on Monday, August 31, and will adjourn to Stanford on Sunday, September 13. Students make their own arrangements to arrive in Ashland by 4:00 p.m. on Monday, August 31. (The Medford Airport is close, about 18 miles north of Ashland.) The class will return to campus for the third week of SoCo, and students will move directly into their academic year housing. Room and board in Ashland and transportation back to Stanford will be provided and paid for by the program. Please note: The Rogue Valley can be smokey from distant fires during September. Though we haven’t experienced difficulty in several years, we’re prepared to keep all of us comfortable and healthy.

This course may have expenses not covered by the program fee, as for some students it will be more expensive to travel to Ashland than to Stanford. If Financial Aid recommends that you receive assistance with the program fee and you are accepted to this class, we will also invite you to request financial assistance with the difference between the cost of arriving in Medford versus going directly to Stanford (if higher).  Consult our page about money for more information.

Examples of Field Trips and Guest Speakers

We meet daily with members of the OSF company.  We’ve had wide-ranging and specific conversations with Tim Bond, OSF artistic director; Rosa Joshi, Associate Artistic Director (and founder of upstart crow, director of 2025’s production of Julius Caesar); Ryan Callahan, head of automation at the OSF Production Facility; Josh Horvath, resident sound designer; and many members of the acting and musical company.  These daily behind-the-scenes conversations are paired with seeing the productions whose history, background, and details we come to understand. 

Our “field trips” take place daily (see above, under “Course Description”) as we attend productions once, twice, sometimes more and spend time discussing the thoughtful artistic presentation of a shared human story.

During our one day off in Ashland, we offer the chance to white-water raft on the Upper Rogue close to nearby Gold Hill.

Sample Titles of Student Projects

Students’ write brief “theater reviews,” which they present when we return to Stanford.  These reviews are the result of several viewings of a single play (students choose their own play and their “angle” on it) and can be as varied as:

• An analysis of the chessboard set in King John
• The impact on the stage of the cross-gender casting in upstart crow’s production of King John
• The staging of secrecy in Born with Teeth
• The use of lighting and color in a starkly staged Macbeth
• The manipulation of color in Lizard Boy
• The theatrical design of novelistic romance in Jane Eyre
• The presentation of self in a one-person show, acted by the first-person writer

While in Ashland, the group works together to produce a final production, which traditionally brings together a few of the season’s plays with a humorous – frequently an hilarious – twist.  One group incorporated the irreverence and raunchiness of Revenge Song and the musicality and romance of Once on This Island into Shakespeare’s King John, daring to ask the question:  what if instead of waging war, the kings of England and France had fallen in love?
Another group was inspired by the misadventures in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and took a different look at Macbeth – in which the tragedy becomes a series of slapstick accidents showing that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth don’t mean to kill anyone, but end up caught in a web of their own and everyone else’s misunderstandings.

What Comes After SoCo?

Ashland SoCo students spend two weeks living, breathing, talking, eating theater. What could be more fun – and more bonding?!?  Students who are already experienced in theater work become more knowledgeable about the offstage complexity of every single onstage moment. Students who come in with little experience quickly gain an understanding of the central importance of theater to the human community – and sometimes become actors, stage managers, producers, lighting designers back on campus. The Ashland environment is the definition of immersive, and the result is students’ vastly expanded appreciation of theater, and, maybe just as important, their equally expanded group of friends and colleagues nurtured in the small town of Ashland, Oregon.

Meet the Instructors

Rush Rehm

Rush Rehm, professor emeritus of drama and classics, works extensively in the area of Greek tragedy. His books include Aeschylus' Oresteia: A Theatre Version; Greek Tragic Theatre; Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy; The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy; and Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World. He teaches courses on dramatic literature of various periods, as well as teaching acting and directing to drama students. He is the founder and Artistic Director of Stanford Repertory Theater.

Linda Paulson

Linda Paulson is Associate Dean and Director of Stanford’s Master of Liberal Arts Program.  She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and has taught at Stanford since 1985. Her research focuses on the Victorian novel and on the development of a British woman’s novel. In 1989, she received Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education. She frequently lectures for Stanford Travel/Study groups in England and France and has been taking Stanford undergraduates to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival since 1995.