Shakespearean Festival Ashland, OR
Carey Perloff
Shakespeare’s plays remain immediate because their language is so breathtakingly alive. Much of our contemporary speech comes from his writing; the very way we structure our idioms and expressions owes a vast debt to his poetic imagination. For Shakespeare, language was malleable, always ready to be reinvented and expanded upon. Hundreds of words and phrases we use every day—from assassination to lonely, foregone conclusion to fair play—are Shakespearean coinages. His plays still feel vivid to us because the verse is muscular, experimental, and startling. Listening to them, we sense a poet reveling in the infinite possibilities of his miraculous mother tongue. He makes us rethink the way we express our deepest thoughts and thorniest ideas. And he wakes us up to the experience of being alive in the world today.

My husband was involved in the remodel of these two theaters, Ginger Rogers and the Elizabethan Theater.