Advertising for OSF always needed

Mary Tsui’s factually challenged letter (Sept. 4) must be corrected. I have spent many hours in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival archives researching aspects of the Festival history for chapters in some books, most recently a history of OSF for the forthcoming “Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare.”

From Angus Bowmer’s autobiography, old budgets, the annual reports of former OSF publicity director Carl Ritchie and beyond, many documents make clear that the public outreach is not just as old as the Festival, but continuous.To take up Tsui’s specific point, the public would not have known about the “quality plays” had not the publicity brought in people from all over the West coast and sometimes nationally to see that quality.

Advertising certainly was needed then and is needed in our post-COVID world to bring back audience numbers to pre-pandemic levels.

Michael P. Jensen / Ashland