With a $40 million annual operating budget and three stages - a 1,200-seat outdoor venue, a 600-seat modified thrust and a flexible black box that ranges from 270 to 360 seats - and a nine-month season of 11 plays, OSF’s level of activity is on par with major New York nonprofits like the Public Theater and the Roundabout. “It all creates a kind of momentum, and everyone just starts paying attention a little differently,” notes OSF executive director Cynthia Rider. The theater group’s higher profile has also attracted new interest from the audiences, creatives and donors that sustain the nonprofit. Neither “Sweat” nor “Indecent” is tipped to win the Tony on June 11 - the front-runner is “Oslo,” with “A Doll’s House, Part 2” the dark horse - but the awards attention nonetheless points to the scope, ambition and reach of new plays coming out of Ashland since director Bill Rauch (“All the Way”) took the reins as artistic director in 2007. Sweat: Joan Marcus Indecent: CaRol Rosegg Henry: Jenny Graham Shows commis-sioned by OSF include “Sweat” (left, on Broadway), “Indecent” on Broadway (center) and “Henry IV Part I” (right) from the fest’s current season. Paula Vogel’s Tony contender “Indecent,” a backstage drama about a Yiddish theater production that touches on censorship, homophobia and anti-immigration sentiment, also was a product of the program, as was Robert Schenkkan’s “All the Way” - the historical drama that went on to star Bryan Cranston on Broadway, win best actor and best play Tonys and inspire an HBO movie adaptation. “Sweat,” which chronicles the pressures that pull apart a group of friends in the dying factory town of Reading, Penn., is one of the plays that grew out of American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle, OSF’s ambitious initiative to commission 37 works that dramatize moments of change in America’s past. “But now they’ve commissioned a cross-section of playwrights who touch every single region of the country and who are wonderfully diverse across gender and ethnic lines, and I think that the fact that they’re so inclusive is being rewarded because the work feels fresh and immediate and in conversation with our time.” “I used to think of them as a place that did second, third or fourth productions of plays, not a place that was generating new writing,” says Lynn Nottage, whose OSF commission, “ Sweat,” won the Pulitzer in April and is in the running for the best play Tony.
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