The Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced its 2024 lineup on Wednesday. Next season will feature nine different plays, with an emphasis on one-person shows.
OSF’s next season will have four more plays than the current year.
A performance of the Three Musketeers at OSF's Elizabethan theater during their 2023 season.
Joe Sofranko / Oregon Shakespeare Festival
The company faced a tighter timeline to plan their next season than in previous years. Planning was delayed as OSF hired new leadership and worked on emergency fundraising to keep this year’s season alive amid financial troubles as ticket sales plummeted during the pandemic.
2024 will be the first full year led by OSF’s new Artistic Director, Tim Bond, who started at the beginning of September.
“It’s pretty miraculous, actually, that we’ve been able to put this season together in the short time frame that we had,” he said.
Bond said he’s been helping to guide the development of this season since before he arrived, and calls it ‘a love letter to our audiences, [our] company and to our artists.’
It will feature a slate of four, one-person shows created and performed by long-time OSF alumni.
“Two of those pieces are also odes to Shakespeare,” said Bond. “And so, that was another way to get Shakespeare in without doing a large, 14 character play.”
Two of the shows were also developed at OSF through the theater’s Black Swan Lab, an incubation project the theater launched in 2009, said Bond.
The other plays include Born With Teeth, a dark comedy depicting William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe collaborating on a history play cycle. Lizard Boy is a quirky, indie-rock musical that previously showed at TheaterWorks Silicon Valley in 2021, when Bond was the artistic director.
Bond hopes the 2024 season will show that theater companies are resilient despite a slow recovery from the pandemic.