All Ashland’s a stage

Leaders of the small town of Ashland, Ore., were so dubious of a professor’s request for money to help fund a Shakespeare production over the Fourth of July that they insisted one day be devoted to boxing matches.

The boxing never really caught on. But Angus Bowmer’s idea did. Sixty-nine years after his initial production of “Twelfth Night,” the Oregon Shakespeare Festival sells more than 381,000 tickets to theatergoers in Ashland, population 20,000, during its 81/2-month season.

Getting there: Ashland, Ore., is about 500 miles south of Everett. Where to stay: The lowest-priced rooms at the Ashland Springs Hotel (212 E. Main St., 888-795-4545, www.ashlandspringshotel.com) are small, but for convenience, it’s a good choice. Doubles begin at $109. The Plaza Inn and Suites (98 Central Ave., 888-488-0358, www.plazainnashland.com) has less charm but bigger rooms, and is also within a few blocks of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival theaters. It also offers amenities, such as an outdoor hot tub. Doubles begin at about $139 during the theater season, mid-February through October. Charming luxury suites a few blocks from festival theaters are available at the Ashland Creek Inn (70 Water St., 541-482-3315, www.ashlandcreekinn.com). Prices begin at $195 in high season, May through October. Bed and breakfast inns with widely ranging prices are a good and plentiful option in and around Ashland. Contact the Ashland B&B Clearing House (541-488-0338, www.bbclearinghouse.com) or the Ashland Bed and Breakfast Network (800-944-0329, www.abbnet.com). For seniors, Elderhostel has extensive operations in Ashland, in cooperation with Southern Oregon University’s Senior Ventures program. The university has built special dorms with double beds and private baths, usually sold as part of a theater package, and also offers regular dorm-style rooms with shared baths. Details: 800-257-0577, www.sou.edu/siskiyoucenter/seniorventures. Theater tickets: Plan well ahead for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival because the theaters routinely operate at well over 90 percent capacity. You can order tickets online (www.osfashland.org) or by phone (541-482-4331). Prices generally range from $29 to $55. Information: Ashland Chamber of Commerce, 541-482-3486, www.ashlandchamber.com.

In three state-of-the-art theaters, Equity Guild players strut on the stage close to 800 times each year between February and October. A little more than half the plays performed these days are classic and contemporary, the remainder are by the Bard.

Yet the kind of crowd that would be attracted to boxing will still find Ashland to their liking, and not just for the blood and gore that sometimes spills onstage during Shakespearean tragedies.

While the finely bred and highly cultured come and go, talking of beauty over high tea or daintily picking their way through bookstores and art galleries between the matinee and evening performances, coarser visitors made of sterner stuff can climb the peaks of snow-capped Mount Ashland, or shoot whitewater rapids, or Jet Ski a nearby lake, or hike ancient tablelands, or mountain bike, or ride extensive trails, or gallop through orchards and rolling foothills on horseback or – from early winter to late spring – ski.

For the soul who equally embraces the pleasures of mind and body, Ashland is like a dream. This has got to be the only place in the world where whitewater rafting outfitters volunteer the information that they guarantee to have you back in time for Shakespeare.

At first glance, Ashland is just a particularly prosperous small town surrounded by exceptional natural beauty. But keep walking.

You’ll stumble over more than a dozen art galleries and several stellar bookstores within a few blocks. You’ll discover there are six more theater companies in town besides the Oregon Shakespeare Festival company, which is one of the nation’s largest nonprofit theater companies in the world.

You’ll also meander past dozens of restaurants, at least two microbreweries and a college campus. And during a stroll through town, you’ll naturally wander at some point into a 93-acre park designed by John McLaren, the landscape architect famed for his design of San Francisco’s Golden Gate State Park.

Ashland is quite simply the biggest little town you’ll ever see, and wish you never had to leave.

You can fly within about 15 miles of Ashland, landing in Medford, Ore., home of the pear and apple orchards that fill the Harry and David’s gift baskets. Alternately, Ashland, in southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley, is about an eight-hour drive from Everett.

I’m already manically happy by the time I reach Ashland. Both the town and the hotel I’ve chosen, the Ashland Springs Hotel, simply feed my natural high.

The hotel was built with great fanfare in 1925 by entrepreneurs convinced that the town’s mineral springs could make Ashland more famous than Germany’s Baden-Baden or New York’s Saratoga. Wishing to be ready for a wealthy clientele, they built a luxurious structure laced with crystal chandeliers, gilt and stained-glass windows. The crowds were slow in coming. World War II made it worse. The hotel fell on hard times, and even closed for a while. But after two years of lavish restoration, it reopened in 2000.

I dine and stroll the few blocks from the hotel to the Elizabethan Stage. The 1,200-seat open-air theater is patterned on London’s 1600 Fortune Theatre and is so acoustically acute that actors don’t need microphones.

On a cool summer’s night beneath the stars, I’m treated to Broadway-quality acting as scheming characters unravel the plot of “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Each season, the festival produces 11 plays – five Shakespeare and six classic and contemporary choices, including a world premiere or two. But the plays are rotated in such a way that a visitor can take in a maximum number of shows. Stay three days and you can see, or at least choose from, eight or nine different plays, since the festival’s theaters generally offer a matinee and an evening performance daily.

I’m ready to grab tickets for “Topdog/Underdog” and “Raisin in the Sun” when I learn of the nearby Britt Festivals, in the historic town of Jacksonville. The festival, which is housed in an outdoor amphitheater, happens to be hosting Garrison Keillor and his Hopeful Gospel Quartet. Can’t miss that.

As long as I’m driving 15 miles or so over to Jacksonville, it makes sense to do a little winery tour and some tastings along the way. Plus I need time to visit some of the two dozen art galleries in Ashland, and I want to see the Japanese gardens in Lithia Park, so named because its naturally carbonated spring water is loaded with lithium, which could explain its supposed healing powers. About all that leaves time for today is the Backstage Tour.

The tour begins in the $21 million New Theater, the most intimate of the festival’s three theaters. Opened in 2002, it holds between 200 and 300 audience members, depending on how the moveable seats are configured. Stagehands are changing the set from the past evening’s performance, preparing it for a matinee.

I’ll start out my final day in Ashland on the Rogue River, hitting the rapids with one of the half-dozen whitewater rafting outfitters in town.

Within a short drive of Ashland, I’m in sparsely populated areas of rolling hills, mountains and orchards. Outfitters offer half-day rafting adventures on the Rogue, which intersperses mellow floating with bursts of adrenaline-kicking rapids about a half-dozen times. For those with an entire day to spare – even so you’ll be back in time for evening performances – you might want to choose the more challenging Klamath River. A one-day trip takes you through 42 major rapids; a two-day campout takes you to a remote and uninhabited canyon, and through 74 rapids.

I pick the half-day option, spending the afternoon shooting the rapids of the Rogue. Then it’s back to civilization, for another dose of culture, and beauty of another kind.