Midsummer Night's Spectacle

As twilight slips over the hilly college town of Ashland, Oregon, the sweet summer evening seems too balmy and starry for whiling away indoors, even to the holiday throngs who have journeyed to attend the theater here. Fortunately they need not choose between pleasures. Night after night, vividly costumed Shakespeare -- preceded by madrigals and heralded by a flag raising and trumpet fanfare from the topmost gables of a Tudor stagehouse -- unfolds beneath an open sky, turning edification into festival.

The scene takes place at the largest U.S. regional theater and one of the oldest (founded in 1935), a three-stage jamboree built on Bardolatry that draws 370,000 spectators a year, 90% from more than 125 miles away. With minor variations this scene also takes place in Boulder, Colorado; Cedar City, Utah; San Diego; Houston; Dallas; Orlando, Florida; an inner-city park in Louisville, Kentucky; the grounds of a legendary mansion alongside the Hudson River; New York City's Central Park; and dozens of other locales. According to Felicia Londre, secretary of the Shakespeare Theater Association of America, the U.S. has about 100 outdoor Shakespeare festivals. Some have grown, like Ashland's, into major institutions offering varied repertoires. Others operate just a few weeks a year. Nearly all rely on a lot of novice, non-Equity players. But almost all are thriving. Americans seemingly cannot get enough of the Bard in open air in summer -- though they are conspicuously less eager to see his work indoors at other times of the year.

For many theatergoers, the experience of Shakespeare outdoors takes on an almost sacred character. When Richard Devin of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival moved this summer's staging of The Winter's Tale to a new indoor space and installed outdoors an adaptation of Sheridan's The Rivals, he quickly realized he had goofed. Not only did The Rivals prove an unusually tough sell, but subscribers wrote in fury. "They told me they would never come to Shakespeare indoors or accept another writer outdoors," Devin says. "They spoke of Shakespeare's universality and of what it meant to see these plays under the stars with their children. They felt we were stealing an irreplaceable opportunity from them."

Other theater executives have noted a similar, almost fetishistic audience passion for Shakespeare. Even his problem plays have much more box-office appeal than masterpieces by almost anyone else. Says Bill Patton, Ashland's executive director, who has overseen its rise since 1948: "Some of Shakespeare's popularity may be that it's certified as good for you, so audiences can congratulate themselves on their intellectuality, even though this was popular entertainment for its time and still is. Also the plays are taught in school, so people feel familiar with them."