Ashland New Plays Festival 2011 (staged readings of the four winning plays)

If you’re like me, and seeing David Kelly as the Imaginary Invalid and the Modern Major General in “Pirates of Penzance” just left you wanting more, you’re in luck.

Kelly, along with 20 OSF equity cohorts, will be reading roles in the four winning plays being performed this week by the Ashland New Plays Festival at the Unitarian Center at 87 4th Street. Eight readings of the plays will be held over four days.

The winning scripts were chosen from among more than 200 submissions.

Kelly, along with 20 OSF equity cohorts, will be reading roles in the four winning plays being performed this week by the Ashland New Plays Festival at the Unitarian Center at 87 4th Street.

Tickets are $15 per performance are available at www.showtix4u.com, emailing tickets@AshlandNewPlays.org, calling 541-488-7995 or at Paddington Station at 125 East Main St. in Ashland.

For more information, including bios of the playwrights and synopses of the winning plays, click on www.ashlandnewplays.org.

P.S. Having seen all of the OSF plays early to write my reviews, I’ve been suffering from Shakespeare Festival withdrawal for many, many long weeks, so I’m particularly grateful for the New Plays Festival…

The photo above of the winning playwrights features left to right, Steven Haworth (“Fernando”), Thomas W. Stephens (“Countdown to the Happy Day”), Gary Dontzig (“Couples”), Host Playwright EM Lewis, Artistic Director Douglas Rowe, and Carol Verburg (“Spin, or Twilight of the Bohemians”).

• Steven Haworth, “Fernando”
• Thomas W. Stephens, “Countdown to the Happy Day”
• Gary Dontzig, “Couples”
• Carol Verburg, “Spin, or Twilight of the Bohemians”

A note on the record, since this page gets cited as a reference. The Ashland New Plays Festival (ANPF) is a nonprofit founded in 1992 and, at the time of this notice, run entirely by a volunteer board of directors. Its own 2011 description of itself was plain: it "encourages playwrights in the creation of new works through public readings" and offers "an educational forum to the community through discussions and workshops." The flagship event is an international script competition that ends with public readings of four new plays, with professional actors from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival sitting alongside community players at the music stands.

The winnowing is done by a Reading Committee. In the 2011 cycle, volunteer readers trained in the fall, read blinded scripts through winter and spring, and scored several hundred submissions down to roughly 35. Discussion narrowed that to 10 to 14 semifinalists, and the artistic director, Douglas Rowe, plus four theatrical directors picked the final four. The board then built a five-day festival around them. Rowe told the Ashland Daily Tidings that 2011 "was the best year for submissions so far," and that readers look for "scripts that would adapt well to a reading. Not all pieces have that quality, even if they're great."

The Daily Tidings preview of October 13, 2011 confirms the outline of this notice: readings Wednesday through Sunday, October 19 to 23, at the Unitarian Center, 87 Fourth Street, each play read twice, tickets $15. Its photo caption shows David Kelly in rehearsal for Carol Verburg's "Spin, or Twilight of the Bohemians," directed by Lenny Neimark. Verburg, visiting from San Francisco, said she "loved the idea that there was this small town so wholeheartedly devoted to the arts."

The David Kelly in question is the long-serving Oregon Shakespeare Festival company actor, not the late Irish film actor of the same name. His theatre bios count 28 OSF seasons as of 2023, and the Internet Shakespeare Editions performance database traces the arc: Launce, Bardolph and Lear's Fool at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in 1986, then OSF credits including the Duke of Cornwall in "King Lear" (2004), Touchstone in "As You Like It" (2007), Benedick in "Much Ado About Nothing" and Archbishop Cranmer in "Henry VIII" (both 2009), and Falstaff in "Henry IV, Part One" (2010). The two roles Rosey mentions above, Argan in "The Imaginary Invalid" and the Major-General in "The Pirates of Penzance," belong to the 2011 OSF season.

Beyond Ashland he has appeared in "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" at the Huntington in Boston, "Manahatta" Off-Broadway at the Public Theater, "The Taming of the Shrew" and "The Book of Will" at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, and regional stages including the Guthrie, Berkeley Rep, La Jolla Playhouse and South Coast Repertory, with a television credit on Showtime's "City on a Hill." He has also taught at Southern Oregon University, Ashland High School and Walker Elementary. In other words, when ANPF put him at a reading stand in a church hall for $15 a ticket, it was borrowing one of the valley's most familiar faces.

The reason a small Oregon town can field twenty Equity actors for a volunteer play festival is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Per the Oregon Encyclopedia, OSF began on July 2, 1935, when Angus L. Bowmer, a Southern Oregon Normal School instructor, staged "Twelfth Night" and "The Merchant of Venice" on Ashland's old Chautauqua site, with the city insisting on afternoon boxing matches to cover costs; the plays ended up paying for the boxing. The festival incorporated in 1937, built a larger Elizabethan stage in 1959, opened the indoor Angus Bowmer Theatre in 1970 and the Black Swan in 1977, and by 1979 was running a nine-month season for more than 265,000 people a year. It won the Tony Award for Regional Theatre in 1983 and moved to a full Actors' Equity contract soon after.

ANPF is what happens when a theatre town has a long off-season and a company of actors who like to read new scripts out loud.

That resident company is the pool ANPF draws from every October, after the OSF season has thinned and before the actors scatter. Rowe put it this way in 2011: "This is a community whose main industry is theater, and thanks to the seasoned playgoers, the talk-backs after each show can be amazingly helpful to writers."

The festival's track record is the real argument for it. Karen Zacarias won ANPF in 2000; her "The Sins of Sor Juana" went on to a Helen Hayes Award, and in 2018 OSF gave her "Destiny of Desire" a full production while she returned to the festival. Martyna Majok's "Cost of Living" was selected for ANPF's 2016 Women's Invitational and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2018. Jiehae Park's "Hanna and the Dread Gazebo" was staged at OSF in 2017. Beth Kander won in both 2015 and 2016 and came back in 2018 to lead the talk-backs. EM Lewis, the host playwright in this 2011 photo, was still hosting workshops for the festival in 2014.

• Karen Zacarias, 2000 winner; Helen Hayes Award; "Destiny of Desire" at OSF, 2018
• Martyna Majok, 2016 Women's Invitational; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 2018
• Jiehae Park, "Hanna and the Dread Gazebo" at OSF, 2017
• Beth Kander, winner 2015 and 2016; festival dramaturg-host, 2018

ANPF kept going, and grew. Jefferson Public Radio's 2014 preview describes a nine-day 23rd season opening with a Theatre Talk featuring OSF's Dan Donohue and readings of four plays, one directed by OSF actor Barzin Akhavan. By the 2018 festival, billed as 25 years, readings were still at the Unitarian Fellowship on Fourth Street, tickets had risen to $20, and executive director Kyle Haden and associate artistic director Jackie Apodaca were casting from professional companies, community theatres, students and local artists; the festival now described itself as a "dramatic maker's space."

American Theatre reported the 31st annual fall festival for October 19 to 22, 2023, moved to Southern Oregon University, with four winners drawn from 350 submissions, among them "Ashland" by Ashland native Isabel Estelle, "Lyons Pride" by Bleu Beckford-Burrell and "A Long Time Coming" by Weston Gaylord; the organization's 2022 budget was listed at about $130,681. Still volunteer-scaled, still four plays, still OSF actors at the stands. The same recipe Rosey was grateful for in 2011.