When your grandfathers were a sawmill laborer and a coal mine boilerman, as mine were, your first and possibly last exposure to Shakespeare’s Hamlet came on Saturday mornings.

The Bard’s classic play was among several lampooned in Bugs Bunny’s 1959 cartoon, A Witch’s Tangled Hare.

With its famous lines “To be, or not to be” and “Alas, poor Yorick,” Hamlet is the kind of moldy “Culture with a capital C” that most Americans ignore. Me, too. My daughter’s heart-felt desire that we spend an expensive three hours watching it last month during our annual Ashland trip struck me as a noble mistake that only a youth could make. I imagined us abandoning the matinee at intermission, sharing a wry chuckle about how people fool themselves into pretending to be entertained by self-important crap.

In fact, finishing a play where everyone of any consequence has just been conclusively poisoned, stabbed, drowned and executed, imagine my astonished surprise in finding that this Hamlet is among the most sparkling, moving and deeply funny experiences I can recall.

Angus Bowmer, who started the Oregon Shakespeare Festival 75 years ago, was an irrepressible and pragmatic evangelist for live theater. After he floated his festival idea to Ashland town fathers in 1935, he promptly accepted their counter-plan – that he share the program with boxing matches to appeal to a rougher demographic in the 4,500-population Rogue Valley settlement. Shakespeare outdrew the pugilists and OSF is now among the largest theatrical enterprises in the world, attracting a yearly audience of up to 400,000.

Bowmer understood the necessity of making theater relevant and useful to his hometown patrons. At the start of his career, he produced one of his first plays to raise funds for the Pacific County championship basketball team, which he coached at Chinook Grade School. The Chinook Observer printed this report in 1930:

“Angus Bowmer and his ardent group of would-be actors and actresses of Chinook’s noted talent, are practicing three nights each week for the three-act farce comedy, Never Touched Me! The play is scheduled for April 15 in the Chinook hall and is being sponsored by the Chinook P.T.A. The comedy is a scream with a touch of drama thrown in occasionally for a bit of spicing.”

If Bowmer hadn’t lost his money in an Astoria bank failure, perhaps today I would be writing about the Washington Shakespeare Festival in Chinook.

Nowadays, OSF holds auditions for its dozen or so acting openings each year in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Twelve hundred aspirants try out for these precious opportunities to perform before packed houses night after night for two-thirds of the year.

Jeff King, the versatile and friendly actor who plays Claudius, rightful king of Denmark in Hamlet, led our backstage tour. He told us that OSF jobs are among the most sought-after in American theater. This is evident in the skill and joy the company brings to each season’s diverse classical and modern offerings. (In response to a question from my daughter, Jeff related a hilarious story about an actor trying to escape backstage for a quick costume change while trying to free an actress’ wig from one of his buttons.)

I have seldom felt my money was so well spent as in Ashland. We didn’t so much watch as participate, two 13-year-olds and I leaning forward to catch every nuance of Dan Donohue’s portrayal of a prince splintered by grief into a tightly wound hurricane of humorous fury.

This is Hamlet rebooted for the 21st century, reimagined as fresh as the day it was written. The language is still all Shakespeare’s, but this version somehow brings fresh meanings and emotions upwelling through a kind of creative wormhole from 1601. Although it may sound obnoxiously trendy, part of the production is performed hip-hop style. Damned if it doesn’t work just dandy.

Playing Hamlet’s beloved Ophelia, Susannah Flood also deserves special mention. She is deliciously amusing both as Ophelia and as Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. She brings searing despair to the former role. She and Hamlet each lose their fathers – she at Hamlet’s sword hand – and I cried with them.

Our family loved nearly everything we saw in Ashland this year – though Merchant of Venice in the evening after Hamlet proved to be “a Bard too far.” Maybe six hours of Shakespeare in any one day is just a tad too much, or maybe the humorous potential of Jew-baiting has long outlived its time, if it ever can be said to have had a time.

It’s about a seven-hour expedition to Ashland from Astoria. But that’s nothing compared to getting east to Broadway, and the shows you see will be as good and quite possibly better. Even The Wall Street Journal says so. Their reviewer loves OSF’s Hamlet as much as I do.

– M.S.W.

Matt Winters is editor of the Chinook Observer.