Angus Bowmer was the guiding spirit of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from its first season in 1935 until his death in 1979. His tremendous legacy continues to infuse the work of OSF to this day.
Angus Bowmer was born in Bellingham, Washington in 1904, and attended school in Bellingham and then the University of Washington in Seattle. It was there he met B. Iden Payne, the Englishman whose ideas for staging Shakespeare’s plays provided inspiration for the Festival and its Elizabethan Stage.
After several years of teaching in the schools of Washington and continuing his studies at the University of Washington, Bowmer was invited in 1931 to become an instructor in English at Southern Oregon Normal in Ashland, which today is known as Southern Oregon University. He organized theatre activities on campus and continued to teach there until 1970.
The presence in Ashland’s Lithia Park of a Chautauqua building, or the remains of one, sparked the idea of an Elizabethan outdoor stage which would allow the kinds of productions that Bowmer wanted to stage. In 1935, he persuaded the Ashland city fathers to revive a tradition of July 4th celebrations with an important addition: a Shakespearean Festival.
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) helped construct a makeshift stage on the Chautauqua site and Bowmer, college students, teachers and Ashland citizens mounted two plays, The
Merchant of Venice and
Twelfth Night for three performances July 2, 3 and 4. Angus Bowmer directed the two plays and played the roles of Shylock and Sir Toby Belch. He remembered that several hundred people attended that “First Annual Shakespeare Festival”.
Over the ensuing years, Bowmer directed thirty productions and performed 32 Shakespearean roles in 43 separate stagings, in addition to producing all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays. He was a member of the National Council on the Arts and received awards and honors from universities, specialists and the federal and state governments. Among his favorites was a commendation from the U.S. Institute for Theatre Technology, which stated “His dreams have brought high standards to many performers, designers and technicians. His life has enlightened his community, his profession and, indeed, all of American theatre.”
In 1970, OSF opened a 600-seat indoor facility named the Angus Bowmer Theatre. When asked by a visitor if he had dreamed that his creation would grow to this size, Bowmer replied, “All my dreams are open-ended.”
In the later days of his life, Bowmer enjoyed strolling on the bricks before show time and chatting with the Festival’s growing family. He admired the new theatre and gardens, and noted the ticket buyers queuing up at the box office while others walked the area with ticket-searching signs on display. He would shake his head with a smile, “Isn’t it amazing? Just incredible. You know, we never expected this, but we were ready for it!”
Quotations from Angus Bowmer
“The dome had just been taken off and it gave me the impression of a 16th century sketch of the Globe Theater. I began to do some research and got excited about the possibility of producing a Shakespearean work there.”
“A local furniture store had kept weather records for 40 years. They indicated it was possible to have an out-door theatre here during the summer. The other was a federal report on the economic prospects for this area. Agriculture had gone about as far as it could go. Lumber had reached its peak. The only hope appeared to be the tourist industry.”
“That’s why we settled on a festival, and not a play. A festival would draw people to stay for a time, and to spend money in the community.”
“A good many people felt I was a peculiar young man, but harmless. Others regarded me as a nice young man trying to bring back the good old days.”
— The Oregonian, 1979
“Perhaps one reason why the Festival has been able to grow over twelve seasons and look forward to many more is the fact that it has had one primary purpose—public entertainment. It has always been held here that scholarship is a means to an end, not an end in itself. To an audience who pays admission to be entertained, the scholar should be as unobtrusive as the electrician.”
— 1952 OSF Souvenir Program
“I am fully convinced that one of the reasons why so many of our audience members comment about the excitement and satisfaction they feel in our productions is that they have caught the joy of discovery which they share with our company. The discoveries which each company member has worked so hard to find all through the long rehearsal periods he reveals to his audience with the same exultant exuberance as the tyro-bicyclist who shouts, “Look, Ma, no hands!””
— From As I remember, Adam
“We are not a museum…not an antiquarian display place. The past is certainly our nurturing source and continuing inspiration, but we are in no way bound by the past. We don’t stand still. We are a living, breathing, changing and growing theatre, with a future still to discover. Theatre is always a living art, with open arms for the new. The legacy of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival will continue to enrich the future because our beginnings are strong, sound and sure.”
— From As I remember, Adam
Jerry Turner on Angus Bowmer
"My first impression was how small he was. Not that he was diminutive, but his fame and reputation led me to expect someone at least as tall as Tyrone Power and as imposing as Orson Welles. Yet here he was – the Producing Director of the Oregon Shakespearean Festival, laughing at feeble Scotch jokes at the popcorn counter, a weaving, bobbing figure somewhere between Groucho Marx and Jiminy Cricket."
"He was generous beyond belief. Talent was not to be hoarded, but used. He surrounded himself with the most gifted people he could get and tackled the most difficult problems with a zest only the truly confident could muster. And when we failed, as we all did a lot, he was there with unabashed support for a job well done, however inadequate and humiliating the results."
"I hope that we who continue here can carry on Angus Bowmer’s greatest legacy: his humanity. I hope we can work with the same dogged enthusiasm he always had; the same openness; the same faith, the same sincerity. The theatre’s a place where, in Thornton Wilder’s words, people can show most vividly what it’s like to be a human being. That doesn’t seem like much, sometimes, but Angus Bowmer showed us in his life and in his work, that it’s everything."