The Oregon Shakespeare Festival will open its 2019 season beginning with previews on March 1 and opening officially the weekend of March 8-10. The season will run through Oct. 27.

It’s an important season for the festival, which has been contending with significant challenges over the last few years.

Rampant wildfire smoke from southern Oregon and northern California has affected summer attendance. The festival said last September that it had lost $2 million after smoke forced the cancellation of 26 outdoor performances. In October, it laid off 16 employees, citing wildfire losses.

In addition, both of the key leaders at the company – artistic director Bill Rauch and executive director Cynthia Rider – announced their departures. Rauch plans to depart this summer for New York. The festival announced in October that Rider had decided not to renew her contract.

Rauch, in particular, has been a significant force for change at the festival since his arrival in 2007, taking the programming in a direction that has encouraged more diversity both on- and offstage. He has produced more plays written by women and artists of color, and in 2008 he launched the “American Revolutions” series, a multi-decade program of commissioned plays sprung from moments of change in U.S. history that has garnered critical acclaim, as well as Tony and PEN America Literary awards. Oregon Shakespeare Festival “has been my home since I first worked here as a guest artist in 2002,” says Rauch. “The excellence of artistry, the commitment to innovative classics as well as new work, and the unparalleled synergy of rotating rep have all made it a thrilling place to work.” In 2019, the festival will feature a diverse range of productions, from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” to be helmed by director Rosa Joshi, to Oregon playwright Octavio Solis’ “Mother Road.”

Bill Rauch, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's artistic director, is also directing the play "Mother Road," a sequel of sorts to "The Grapes of Wrath" by Oregon playwright Octavio Solis, (Kim Budd)

According to Rauch, who will direct Solis’ play, the production “is a masterpiece, a modern-day sequel to ‘The Grapes Of Wrath.’ It will grab the hearts of everyone who loves Steinbeck, everyone who cares about economic justice, and everyone who is engaged in the crucial questions that face us about our national identity.”

Rauch will also direct his and Lydia G. Garcia’s bilingual adaptation of Christina Anderson’s translation of Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors,” incubated at the festival’s “Play On!” series, a project spearheaded by festival dramaturg Lue Morgan Douthit to transmute the Shakespeare canon into modern English. In what is to be Rauch’s last directing effort for the company as artistic director, he describes “La Comedia of Errors” as a “revolutionary project for OSF, with its cast comprised of the same nine actors who are in the cast of Mother Road. We will share this bilingual adaptation with our own neighbors in Southern Oregon, as well as on our campus. In many ways, it summarizes all that I love about OSF, a new play based on a classic that is a playful exploration of cultural collision.”

Some other notable productions will include the directorial debut of longtime company actor Sara Bruner with “Alice in Wonderland,” which Rauch promises is a "project that welcomes in multiple generations of families,” and a return engagement by director José Luis Valenzuela, the creative force behind 2018’s telenovela-style “Destiny of Desire,” for a new production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” bringing what Rauch terms a “unique epic sensibility” to the open-air Elizabethan Theatre.

Other productions that will feature at the festival in 2019 include Lauren Yee’s "Cambodian Rock Band," billed as an audacious mixture of tragedy and comedy that is permeated by "indelible" rock music, as well as the Broadway stalwart "Hairspray," to be directed by Christopher Liam Moore and featuring a special-needs youth ensemble. The West Coast premiere of Christina Anderson’s "How to Catch Creation," which explores creative process through the experiences of a black, queer, feminist writer, will feature in the Thomas Theatre.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2019 production of "Hairspray—The Broadway Musical:" includes (from left) Katy Geraghty as Tracy Turnblad, Jonathan Luke Stevens as Link Larkin, Jenna Bainbridge as Penny Pingleton and Christian Bufford as Seaweed J. Stubbs. (Jenny Graham, Oregon Shakespeare Festival)

The festival will also present "Indecent" by Paula Vogel as part of the American Revolutions series, as well as "Between Two Knees," an unapologetic and brazen vision of U.S. history conceived by the Native American sketch comedy group the 1491s. Shakespeare's "All’s Well That Ends All" also will play.

Rauch will be moving eastward in August to assume the artistic leadership at the new Ronald O. Perelman Center for the Performing Arts at the World Trade Center in New York City. In bidding farewell to his artistic home of the last 13 years, Rauch says, “I am moved by the passion and intelligence of the audience, both those who travel to Ashland and those who reside here in the Rogue Valley. I leave the company with a profound sense of pride in all that we’ve achieved together, unfathomable gratitude for everyone’s generosity, deep sadness about leaving, and great curiosity and excitement about all that lies ahead for the festival under new leadership.”

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

When: March 8-Oct. 27.

Where: 15 S. Pioneer St., Ashland.

Tickets: Prices vary; osfashland.org or 800-219-8161.

A previous version of this post incorrectly identified the creators of “La Comedia of Errors.”