Allen Elizabethan Theatre
The Allen Elizabethan Theatre in Ashland, Oregon, is part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It has gone through three stages of development.
The first outdoor Elizabethan Theatre opened in 1935. It was sketched by Angus L. Bowmer and built inside the shell of a ruined Chautauqua theatre with WPA funds. It featured a thrust stage with a balcony and improvisations like stagehands who acted and lighting kept in coffee cans. Seating mixed benches and folding chairs. It was torn down during World War II.
A second outdoor theatre opened in 1947, designed by John Conway. It had a trapezoidal stage and better sightlines, but it was torn down in 1958 for safety.
The current outdoor theatre opened in 1959 and was renamed Allen Elizabethan Theatre in 2013. It was patterned after London's Fortune Theatre (1599) and designed by Richard L. Hay. The stage layout includes forestage, middle stage, inner stage below and above (the old balcony), and a musicians’ gallery, with wings that have second-story windows. The façade is three stories high with a pitched, shingled roof and a gabled center.
The old Chautauqua walls remain as the outer perimeter, now ivy-covered. The theatre seats about 1,200 on a hillside for good views. In 1992, the Paul Allen Pavilion was added, housing a control room and audience services. The pavilion also moved some seats to a balcony and two boxes to improve sightlines, added vomitoria, and replaced old lighting with modern, side-stage lighting. The venue keeps a traditional signal of a play in progress by a flag raised from a gable window with a trumpet fanfare.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 12:59 (CET).