(soft music) - Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a national treasure.

It is destination theater that is one of the largest budgets and seasons that is done in North America.

(soft music) What OSF does and what plays do is create a sacred place where people can come and reconnect to their humanity.

It's about joy.

It's about empowering people's imaginations and doing plays that really touch people's hearts.

My name is Tim Bond and I'm the artistic director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

This is my 17th season overall, but I spent 11 seasons as Associate Artistic Director.

(bright music) OSF started in 1935.

Angus Bowmer created it with the idea from the very beginning that it was gonna be an annual Shakespeare Festival, which was a very bold choice to believe that here in Southern Oregon, up in the mountains, in a very small town, that they were gonna, one, want to see theater, much less Shakespeare.

- I hope you'll join the thousands who have turned Ashland and the Oregon Shakespearean Festival into an annual vacation adventure.

- And it grew every season until the pandemic, really.

We just kept growing and growing and growing.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival like many theaters nationally has been struggling with coming out of the pandemic, which for theater was really a tough blow.

We had almost two years of absolute stoppage and then people got out of the habit.

So our membership numbers are growing again, but they suffered significant losses in the pandemic.

We went from 17,000 members to below 7,000 members.

I came back at the end of the '23 season and what we've really been working on is getting back to rotating repertory theater, which has been the real hallmark of Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

- This is so exciting, I love this play.

I just have to say, I love "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

I have loved it ever since I first encountered it.

- We do three Shakespeares every year minimum, and that's out of nine shows a season.

There's probably three or so that are either American classics or other world classics.

And then three other plays that are very contemporary.

♪ I'm an islander, I am an islander ♪ ♪ I'm an islander, I am an islander ♪ ♪ I'm an islander, I am an islander ♪ - We sold out opening weekend.

It was a phenomenal experience, like the energy was unlike anything I've ever experienced truly in all my years.

So that's the good news.

The good news is our audiences are happy.

Our artists are feeling really supported.

Our attendance is up more than 100% of what it was in 2023.

We're up 20% so far this season over last season.

(audience applauding) And there are people still just coming back after the pandemic, just this year.

I've talked to many people who are like, "I haven't been back since 2019 and I didn't know how much I missed it."

(soft orchestral music) I don't know if it's in the water.

I don't know if it's the mountains here, but storytelling and making this a pilgrimage to kind of tap back in to what matters about being human, our indomitability, the human spirit, is just something that really is alive here in the Rogue Valley and in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

(bright orchestral music)