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Remaking the Green Show setting Renovating the brick courtyard at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is part of a $5.1 million project to add accessibility to the grounds and two theatres. Daily Tidings / Denise Baratta Sunday Nov 6, 2016 at 3:48 PM Nov 6, 2016 at 3:48 PM By John Darling For the Tidings Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s wildly successful Green Show — staged outdoors on “The Bricks” before evening shows — has outgrown its modest space and will undergo a $5 million expansion that will give it five times the ledge seating it has now. Work on the remodel requires fencing off Pioneer Street between East Main and Hargadine during business hours, as well as the center of the OSF “campus” between its three main theaters. Access to Angus Bowmer Theatre will be restored when the indoor season opens Feb. 17, says festival General Manager Ted DeLong. It will be completely done in late spring, with access to the outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theater and the Green Show stage. The project, carried out by Adroit Construction, will make the grassy area slightly larger and steeper to improve sightlines to the stage. New ledges will be sprinkled around the area in an attractive and useful fashion. It will have new spaces for handicapped seating and wheelchairs, as part of OSF’s multi-year “Access for All” campaign. Longtime local archaeologist Jeff LaLande, who did digs during the recent Plaza redesign, is digging several test pits, looking for Native American and pioneer history, as well as pre-contact fauna, but hasn’t found anything yet, he says. “I don’t expect to find any Native American artifacts,” he said, poking a few feet under the bricks. “This is a hill and we found native stuff on the flat, below, where their village was. Over a century ago, the OSF site was occupied by the Chautauqua dome, where the Elizabethan theater is now, and the Hotel Park, where the Bowmer Theater is. It was perched above Chautauqua Park, later renamed Lithia Park, he says. The digs may turn up remnants of the dome.  The Green Show started in the mid-20th century as Renaissance dance and piping by performers in period costumes, adding atmosphere as theater-goers filed in. OSF Artistic Director Libby Appel in the late '90s and early 2000s began to open things up with Dance Kaleidoscope and live music, says DeLong. Community Producer Claudia Alick in the past decade enlivened the dimension to include just about any kind of music and dance — all of it free and open to the public. “Modern, folk, traditional, you name it,” says OSF Associate Director of Communications Eddie Wallace. “It’s become quite the community event — and we’re making it more comfortable and accessible and increasing capacity to sit on something firm.” DeLong adds, “It greatly improves the Green Show experience, but the wonderful part , the overarching benefit is that you can’t come to the Festival without traversing this space. We wanted a more comfortable and safe experience for all patrons.” The grass will be about 100 square feet larger. The ledges will be all concrete, buff-tinted and more durable, he says. The bricks get a lot of vehicle traffic but needed to be set on concrete to keep from cracking and exposing sharp edges. The grass will be all new. “It’s going to be more aesthetically pleasing and much safer and more accessible,” says Wallace. The renovation design team is led by Walker Macy Landscape Architecture in association with Hacker Architects, both of Portland. John Darling is an Ashland freelance writer. Reach him at [email protected].