23 Jul Playwrights Walk plaques: from 2 to 100 in 10 years?
Art to boost our “theater city.”
Photos of the first two plaques.
How and why were they chosen?
Find out here.
The photo above shows the first bronze plaque of what will become the “Playwrights Walk,” which is a new series of art installations that will celebrate our rich and dynamic theater culture. This massive ten-year art project was initiated by Barry and Kathryn Thalden, then embraced by many in the community. Two plaques have been installed as of July 2025. The goal is an astounding 100 Playwrights Walk plaques around town by the 100thanniversary of Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2035!
“Ashland is a theater city.”
Barry Thalden
You might wonder how Ashland became a “theater city.” Though Ashland was a small, isolated Southern Oregon pioneer town, our early citizens had an abiding interest in education and culture from the late 1800s into the 20th century. This led to Ashland becoming the cultural center of Southern Oregon as long ago as the 1890s.
The first Shakespeare play performed in Ashland was in 1887, when the 35-year-old town had little more than 1,000 residents. In 1890, locals presented the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta H.M.S. Pinafore, “with a chorus of 30 voices.”
Shakespeare’s plays were also performed by student productions during the late 1800s and early 1900s at the local college, and by New York theater touring companies at the downtown Ganiard Opera House.
The “stage is set,” so to speak: Angus Bowmer arrives in Ashland
Thus, the soil was ripe for a cultural flowering when English teacher Angus Bowmer got a job at Southern Oregon Normal School in 1931. Bowmer loved theater, and most of all he loved to present the plays of William Shakespeare.
During the next three years, he developed friendships and allies at the college and among the Ashland business community. By July 2, 3 and 4, 1935, he had the courage to present two Shakespeare plays in a primitive “Elizabethan Theater in Lithia Park” – and the optimism to call it “The First Annual Shakespearean Festival.” In 2025, we reached the 90th anniversary of this glorious adventure called Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), and local creativity continues to find new ways to flourish.
Our rich theater culture – OSF and more
With more than 300 company members, and three theaters in downtown Ashland, Oregon Shakespeare Festival is one of the largest non-profit theaters in the country, as well as one of America’s oldest regional theaters. OSF has become a key element of the Ashland economy, as the plays attract tens of thousands of visitors each year from all over the country.
Another Ashland theater with a long history is the smaller Cabaret Theatre, located in the beautifully renovated 1911 First Baptist Church at the corner of First and Hargadine streets. In “cabaret” tradition, it offers delicious meals before the show and desserts during intermission. According to the Cabaret website: “Starting out with 30 performances in 1986, OCT has steadily grown and now annually presents more than 270 performances of 5 shows in our year-round season (early February through December 31).” Each season has a mix of musicals and plays.
The Rogue Theater Company, founded by Jessica Sage in 2019, could be described as “small but mighty.” Many of the actors in their challenging plays are past (and present) Oregon Shakespeare Festival actors. The intimate venue at Grizzly Peak Winery brings the audience very close to world-class actors, for a powerful, immersive experience of theater.
Southern Oregon University has an active Theatre program, offering both Bachelors and Masters degrees in Theatre. According to the website: “The Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University Theatre program offers educational and practical experience in all areas of theatre, including acting, directing, playwriting, costuming, stage scenery, lighting, sound, makeup, management, dramatic literature, and theatre history. The Theatre program maintains a close working relationship with local professional theatres such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), Oregon Cabaret Theatre (OCT), and Ashland New Plays Festival (ANPF).” Many plays are presented each year for the SOU community and the larger community.
“Ashland New Plays Festival (ANPF) assists playwrights in the development of new works through public readings and offers an educational forum to the community through discussions and workshops,” as described on their website. Since 1993, ANPF has held an annual international playwright competition that now draws several hundred entries of newly written plays. Four plays are chosen for a series of play readings and talkbacks at the ANPF Fall Festival.
Ashland High School theater department produces two or three dramas, comedies or musicals during the school year. Thanks to relationships with both OSF and SOU Theatre program, Ashland High students have an unusually rich theater experience. Through the years, more than 25 graduates of AHS Theatre program have worked professionally at OSF.
Playwrights Walk plaques: the origin story
“What writers have said, or what playwrights have said, are powerful messages. So if you only stop to read one plaque, for instance, you get a powerful life message. Maybe that one plaque was the one intended for you to read.”
Barry Thalden
You can thank Kathryn and Barry Thalden’s granddaughter Hannah for the genesis of the Playwrights Walk idea. As Barry put it, “We were in Iowa City because our granddaughter was graduating from the University of Iowa. She attended the Creative Writing program there and, as she told us, it’s the number one creative writing program in the United States. While there, we were enamored with seeing all of these plaques [with quotes from authors] in the sidewalks. They connect with the university’s outstanding program, and also with literature, something the city has taken on as part of who they are.” The downtown sidewalk plaques in Iowa City are called “The Literary Walk.” As the Thaldens walked downtown Iowa City reading the literary quotes in bronze, an idea percolated – Ashland is a theater city. Maybe something like this would be exciting and meaningful in Ashland.
When Kathryn and Barry returned home, they “floated the idea” for a “Playwrights Walk” in Ashland to a few community leaders – people affiliated with OSF, SOU, Ashland Chamber, City Council and the Public Arts Advisory Committee. The response was uniformly positive. Based upon this positive response, the Thaldens agreed to fund the creation of twelve plaques to jump-start the long-term art project.
Community collaboration – OSF, SOU and artist Jack Langford
“I think the idea of this Playwrights Walk is brilliant.”
Tim Bond, OSF Artistic Director
In this article, I hope to share the initial enthusiasm for this concept expressed by many within our community. I’ll begin by quoting Tim Bond, Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Tim told me that “the idea of this Playwrights Walk is brilliant. It is really apropos of Ashland, given our long history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, now going into its 90th year. It’s the right time for more connection between the community and OSF.” Tim added that quotes from a variety of playwrights, both classic and contemporary, will reflect not only OSF’s wide repertoire, but also plays performed at SOU Theater Department and many local theater companies. He envisions quotes on the plaques that are “inclusive of the different voices that we celebrate as a community.”
“The Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Southern Oregon University’s Theatre Department are both well known in our region, and I love the idea of marking our shared art form in such a meaningful way.”
Jackie Apodaca, SOU Theater Department Chair, and Artistic Director of the Ashland New Plays Festival
“For students in school right now, they might not think it’s a big deal. But years from now, when they have children or bring their family to Ashland, it may mean a lot that their work is still here. Then it becomes a legacy thing that people can be proud of.”
Sam Hayes-Hicks, former SOU Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Digital Arts
Southern Oregon University faculty and students will collaborate with the Playwrights Walk project. Jackie Apodaca and others in the theater department will help choose quotations for the plaques. A 2024-2025 graphic design class participated in creating visual designs for a number of plaques. Their two-dimensional (2D) designs, if chosen, could be turned into three-dimensional (3D) models and eventually into molds for bronze casting. In the future, students might even be able to utilize 3D design software. Former SOU Professor Sam Hayes-Hicks said this was a special opportunity for the students to do “real world” design work that is more than just a classroom learning experience.
“I’m a big believer that the spirit is madly creative and each of us are individual expressions of that spirit.”
Jack Langford, artist and sculptor
Jack Langford, a local artist and sculptor, will do bronze casting for the Playwrights Walk plaques at his studio and foundry in Phoenix, Oregon. Jack has been a professional sculptor since 1980, and has operated bronze foundries in Israel, Maine, and now Southern Oregon.
Jack Langford and Barry Thalden have both expressed enthusiasm about making new connections between the university art programs and the professional art community. Jack said, “When Barry was here at my studio recently, he told me how excited he was for the university students to have access to facilities and technologies that are not on campus. So the students would actually have access to bronze casting.”
When I asked Jack what most excited him about the project, he replied, “My principal excitement in this is the opportunity to participate in the university having more technical capacity, for the students to have exposure to professional means and methods.”
Community collaboration – rippling outward
“The Playwrights Walk can accomplish so many things if done well, to its highest potential. My dad and his two brothers were among the original founders of OSF, so I feel a connection there. This is an opportunity to do something dramatic for Ashlanders and for people who visit Ashland.”
Susan MacCracken Jain, Playwrights Walk Planning Committee co-director, and Public Arts Advisory Committee member
“I think the Playwrights Walk is a magnificent undertaking and will bring a variety of benefits. It will bring tourism; it will bring education; a kid [or adult] may see a quote that inspires them at the right time.”
Ken Engelund, Playwrights Walk Planning Committee co-director
Ashland’s City Council unanimously approved the project to become part of the city’s public art collection in May 2024, following approval by the Public Arts and Historic Preservation committees. Based upon the council’s approval, Playwrights Walk plaques will become part of Ashland’s public art collection.
While the Thaldens “birthed” the idea of the Playwrights Walk, and will fund twelve of the initial plaques, long-term development of the concept will require community enthusiasm and participation.
With support so far from the city, SOU, OSF, the Chamber business community, and others, “the stage is set” for a new creative community adventure – as it was in 1935 when Angus Bowmer and his collaborators bootstrapped the “First Annual Shakespearean Festival.” Since this is a massive ten-year project with many moving parts, Susan MacCracken Jain and Ken Engelund formed a Playwrights Walk Planning Committee to coordinate the process and keep it moving. As of July 2025, the first two plaques have been installed. Six more should be cast in bronze and ready to install by the end of this year.
First Playwrights Walk plaque installed has a Shakespeare quote
Choosing a famous quote from a famous Shakespeare play was a no-brainer for the first Playwrights Walk plaque. From the play Hamlet, the quote is:
“This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
This plaque with a Hamlet quote was originally intended as a demo, like a model home in a new housing development. When the Thaldens saw how beautiful it was, they decided it should be the first plaque installed. Chamber of Commerce Director Sandra Slattery suggested placing it in the newly renovated area just in front of the Chamber office, and that’s where you’ll find it now.
Creating the first plaque
Barry Thalden emailed a proposed design for the first plaque to Jack Langford. In order to proceed from design to bronze casting, Jack needed a 3D model of the 2D design. Jack reached out to one of his clients for assistance in that area of expertise. His client transferred Barry’s design to 3D software. With the software, he made a model with letters of the quotation and edges of the plaque raised up to have 3/16 of an inch relief. Jack sculpted the image of William Shakespeare in wax, also with 3/16 of an inch relief.
I will simplify the process description by saying that Jack uses the client’s model to made ceramic shell molds for bronze casting. For a spectator, the thrilling part is watching Jack (and Kevin Christman, in this case) pour 2,000 degree liquid bronze into the mold, and then break the ceramic shell away from the now-solid bronze a few minutes later.
Concrete specialist Joshua Bong installed the plaque in the sidewalk in front of the Chamber office, with Jack’s help.
Second Playwrights Walk plaque installed has a Lorraine Hansberry quote
“One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world.”
Lorraine Hansberry (1930 – 1965)
“As a resident of Ashland, not wearing any of my ‘committee hats,’ I hope for our community to feel welcoming and belonging to all people. I like the way this plaque connects with our Shakespeare Festival and the plays we love so much. In fact, OSF is performing “A Raisin in the Sun” next year.”
Cassie Preskenis, Chair of the Public Arts Advisory Committee
(New York Public Library digital collection)
Lorraine Hansberry was the first black female playwright to have a drama performed on Broadway: A Raisin in the Sun. She spoke the words on this plaque at the First Conference of Negro Writers in New York City, a few days before the play’s March 1959 Broadway opening. Cassie Preskenis described one of many ways this Playwrights Walk plaque connects with Ashland’s past, present and future.
This is the second of many Playwrights Walk plaques to be installed around Ashland. The quote and artwork on this plaque have a social justice theme, which relates to the Say Their Names memorial that was in Railroad Park for about four years.
“Say Their Names” memorial
“This is a commemoration of the fact that the ‘Say Their Names’ memorial happened, that people came together to create that in the first place.”
Micah BlackLight, artist
Say Their Names was a community-created memorial in the form of T-shirts placed on the fence along the railroad tracks at Railroad Park. The shirts were put up after George Floyd was killed by a white policeman in Minneapolis in May 2020, a death that was captured on videotape and shocked the country. The T-shirts bore names of Black and Brown men, women and children, many of them killed by police during the past century.
Gina DuQuenne, a Black woman and City Council member, spoke of the first time she saw the memorial: “”The next morning, I went and there they were, and that was one of the proudest moments I have experienced living here in Ashland.” She was deeply moved that local residents would create this memorial to Black lives ended due to racial injustice in our country.
Months later, Ashland community members had an additional shock in November 2020, when local Black youth Aidan Ellison was killed by a white man in the parking lot of the Stratford Inn. His name and likeness joined the others on the memorial at that time.
“I am enthusiastic for many reasons about this plaque being where it is, when it is, and what it represents. When I think about Railroad Park, I think about the beginning of Say Their Names memorial, and then how many times that was torn down.”
Gina DuQuenne, City Councilor
Sadly, the memorial T-shirts were vandalized – ripped, damaged or completely torn down – four or five times. Gina went on to say that she saw the resilience of the people of Ashland, as they came together and replaced the memorial each time it was vandalized, even before the sun went down the next day.
Gina is moved by the generosity of Barry and Kathryn Thalden to bring the vision and the gift of a Playwrights Walk art project to the city. For the Lorraine Hansberry quote plaque in particular, she stressed the collaboration and the partnership between Barry and Kathryn Thalden, the city, the artist, and many others. From such widespread community support of this plaque, she feels deep down: “I do live in the right place. I am in the right city.”
Artists Micah BlackLight and Jack Langford
“It’s about brother and sisterhood. It’s about caring and empathy.”
Micah BlackLight, artist
Local artist Micah BlackLight based the plaque artwork on faces of People of Color, “hearkening back to the fact that at the basis, this is about human lives. It’s about brother and sisterhood. It’s about caring and empathy. When we see stats, when we see names, when we see lists of people who are no longer with us – they’re not just names, they’re not just stats, they are actual lives that aren’t with us anymore!”
That is why the design includes a few names of individual people who have been killed, to bring out the fact that this is personal. The Say Their Names T-shirt memorial recognized individual Black and Brown lives, and the plaque refers specifically to that.
Sculptor Jack Langford took Micah’s artwork and turned it into a bronze casting at his foundry and studio.
Ashland history and social justice
“The location creates ties between Ashland’s early history and its recent history, shining a light on ongoing issues of social justice.”
Susan MacCracken Jain, Playwrights Walk Planning Committee co-director, and Public Arts Advisory Committee member
Several weeks before the plaque installation, I walked with Emily Simon to the plaque’s future site on A Street. A member of Ashland’s Social Equity & Racial Justice Advisory Committee, Emily was one of many volunteers who worked passionately to bring this new public artwork into being. She reached out to the Lorraine Hansberry trust for approval to use Hansberry’s quote. She was proud to report, “They said they were not only just happy to give the sign-off, but that they felt enthralled by it.”
When we reached the site of the plaque, Emily pointed out how this location connects historical Ashland with our town today, a theme Susan MacCracken Jain also emphasized to me.
Just about fifty feet from the Lorraine Hansberry quote is a bronze plaque about Ashland’s railroad station that transformed the town in the late 1800s. Nearby in Railroad Park is the large “Golden Connections” sculpture, which remembers Ashland’s 1890s economic boom and equally highlights a social justice theme. Golden Connections honors the thousands of Chinese railroad workers who built the tracks, bridges and tunnels over the Siskiyou Mountains and into Ashland between 1884 and 1887. Inscribed on the sculpture are these words: “In honor of the Chinese men who laid these tracks despite discrimination and without recognition. Today, with regret, we offer our belated gratitude.”
Emily helped me see that the Lorraine Hansberry quote links our town’s early history, our recent history of the now-gone Say Their Names memorial, and our community values. Here is the quote again: “One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries that afflict this world.”
Emily spoke emotionally about the value of this permanent bronze artwork for future generations. “I get a little teary about this one. ‘Circles in the Sand’ [beach labyrinth designs] in Bandon, Oregon is an example. I spend hours helping make this beautiful artwork in the sand, and it’s gone when the tide comes in. And there are so many things in your life that are like that. Great works of art in terms of theater – you can see the greatest play in the world, and then it’s over. But a plaque that’s in the ground lives at least for a hundred years, and will impact people you don’t know. One day in the future, there may be a little ‘Emily Simon’ who’s got all this energy, and she comes around, she looks at this plaque, and she asks: ‘Who is that, what’s that about?’ People get tied in when those things happen.”
Community-led action created this plaque
Creating and installing this public art plaque is a story of community-led action, and of collaboration between artists, students, and local organizations. Supporting organizations for this plaque with the Lorraine Hansberry quote include Ashland’s Social Equity & Racial Justice Advisory Committee (SERJAC) and Public Arts Advisory Committee (PAAC), with funding for this plaque from the City of Ashland.
Playwrights Walk project long-term non-city sponsors include:
Barry and Kathryn Thalden,
Playwrights Walk Planning Committee,
Oregon Shakespeare Festival,
Southern Oregon University Center for the Arts,
and the Ashland Chamber of Commerce.
Emily Simon, who has been active in community activities for many years, said it is rare to have so much collaboration on a community project. She added, “You really should credit the City of Ashland for giving us the money for this plaque [$4,500 plus the installation cost]. Everyone on the City of Ashland staff, particularly Brandon Goldman, has been very, very helpful in making this happen.”
Long-term goal for Playwrights Walk plaques
“We already have another 14 Playwrights Walk plaques in process [as of July 2025].”
Ken Engelund, on the steering committee of the Playwrights Walk project
To summarize, the Playwrights Walk plaques are a series of bronze artworks being installed throughout Ashland to celebrate the city’s rich theater culture. Initiated by community members and supported by local institutions, the project aims to honor playwrights and significant cultural figures. Each plaque features a quote from the honoree, serving as a lasting tribute to their contributions to the arts and society. The goal is to have 100 Playwrights Walk plaques installed by 2035, the 100th anniversary of OSF.
How can this happen in ten years? Only with community enthusiasm, plus financial contributions from many. Here are some examples of current enthusiasm. Some of the Ashland Parks Department staff have suggested, “Why not have some in Lithia Park?” SOU staff have spoken up, “Why can’t we have some on the university campus?” Individual business owners are considering sponsoring quotes to be installed in the sidewalk in front of their businesses.
I believe excitement will grow as the first 10 to 20 plaques are installed around town during the next year or two. As the number installed grows, an online Story Map will be created that people can access on their mobile phones as they walk around town. Each plaque will be shown on the Story Map, with information about the quote, playwright and related stories.
Here is one example of the viewpoint of a possible private sponsor. Susan MacCracken Jain’s grandfather came to Ashland in 1915 from Chicago. He opened his medical office in the 1910 First National Bank of Ashland building on East Main Street, where OSF now has its gift shop. The bank occupied the ground floor and leased second floor professional offices, which was where her grandfather practiced. Susan hopes to sponsor a plaque near the building that might have a quote from a play that related to doctors or to the practice of medicine. People who read the quote could pause and wonder about the quote. Then they could go to the online Story Map explanation and learn some lesser known Ashland history such as her grandfather’s office in the building, as they also learn about the play and its author.
As momentum builds, I expect that more and more people will be inspired to contribute toward creating and installing 100 by the 100th anniversary of OSF – that is 100 Playwrights Walk plaques that could last 100 years. As Susan MacCracken Jain told me, “There is an opportunity to create a legacy.”
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