February 16, 2004

Prelude to Shakespeare

By Robert H. Miller
Tidings Correspondent

If Ashland today is the home of the prestigious Oregon Shakespeare Festival and of many "Little" theaters offering a diversity of plays, it is due in part to the Vining brothers (Irving E. and Robert L.). For, almost 90 years ago, they built their Vining theater on the present-day site of the Washington Mutual Bank on Main Street. It was really Ashland's first legitimate theater, done in style with no expense spared.

	The audience is listening - and watching - in this interior shot of the Vining Theatre in this early 20th-century photo. Submitted photo

It mattered little that, far across the world, Europe was about to become a theater of war, the so-called war to end all war, that would eventually embroil the United States as well.

So, on May 14, 1914, the Vining theater staged Gounod's 1859 grand opera "Faust," hitherto presented in the famed opera houses of Paris, London, and New York.

The Vining brothers

Who were these Vining brothers, so beneficent to the city of Ashland? Their mother, Mary, an Oregon pioneer, born in Attica, Ind., in 1837, came to the Rogue Valley in 1853, married George T. Vining two years later and had eight children. Robert was born in 1873 and Irving in 1875, both in Tacoma, Wash., making them respectively 41 and 39 years old when their theater opened. Their mother became a teacher, lost her husband in a shipwreck, and the boys did their schooling in Ashland.

Irving, in fact, went on to become a professor at the "old Normal school," a long-defunct ancestor of Southern Oregon College. Besides teaching Shakespeare, he acted in and directed several productions for that older institution. He was quite the orator, too, frequently heard at dedication ceremonies and the like, as at the unveiling of the Butler-Perozzi memorial fountain in Lithia Park on June 6, 1916. Interestingly, the Vining genealogy has been traced back to 17th century England.

For his part, Robert's future lay in Alaska. He lived in Skagway, founded in 1897, a boom town in the Klondike Gold rush in 1897-1900, and a starting point over the Chilcoot and White passes to the Yukon goldfields. He acquired much property there, ran a hardware business, owned the Orpheum theater in Fairbanks, and was a wholesale grocer. It is tempting to speculate that he may also have been a prospector.

Whatever, the two brothers had plenty of money for their project, motivated by the desire to give the hometown they loved something they felt it really needed - a theater. Particularly, perhaps, because the Ganiard Opera House, one of the first brick structures built in 1889 in Ashland, had been burned to the ground in a voracious fire in 1912. Basketball matches, the annual gathering of the Literary Society, and motion picture shows were held there. It housed, besides, a grocery store and a cigar and confectionery shop, while in the rear were sample rooms used by the Oregon Hotel.

Opening night of the Vining theatre, then, was a glittering occasion. The "beautiful little theater," as it was described, with its brick and cement exterior, cost $35,000 and had a seating capacity of 570, not far short of the Bowmer theater's 601. The ornate, chandeliered interior comprised orchestral stalls and balcony, with five boxes (each with six seats) on either side of the stage. Centered at the back of the balcony was the projection box for the photoplays (the then word for movies).

Comfort and convenience were the hallmarks of the retiring room for the ladies and smoking room for gentlemen. The theater was said to be entirely fireproof, the five exits by builder A.D. Helms, the well-known orchard owner and capitalist, assuring the emptying of the theater in two minutes. I wonder: would that be effected in today's Bowmer?

The New York Grand Opera Company that performed "Faust" included Richard F. Parks singing the bass role of Mephistopheles and a certain tenor, Chev. Salvatore Giordano, Caruso's protégé, as Faust. If many who witnessed it did not expect "to fully appreciate the opera, they were agreeably surprised and pleased with the splendid performance and high character of the play," as reported in the Daily Tidings. Certainly it brought out the social notables, charmingly or handsomely attired.

The Vining Theatre was considered a "combination house" because it offered photoplays, vaudeville, touring and stock shows, and local amateur entertainment through the 1920s. In January 1921, its facilities were enhanced by the installation of a Robert Morton organ at a cost of $15,000. This attracted a packed house at the first performance, with hundreds being turned away.

As to the photoplays, the Vining presented the work of Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865-1932), one of the greatest American actresses of the period, who specialized in plays such as Ibsen's "A Doll's House" and an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." Other photoplays were provided by the Famous Players Company, in which Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart," got her start. She was just 19 at the time and a niece of Judge R.B. Watson of Ashland. Her father, W.W. Watson, lived in Ashland 1878-79, but Mary was born in 1893 when her father had left the city. One of her early film successes was "Poor Little Rich Girl" in 1917.

Inevitably, change and competition came with the turnover in managers and the viability of the cinema as entertainment. Thus, in 1917, George A. Hunt took over the Vining and, because he already operated the Page and Star theaters in Medford, it gave him control of the largest theatrical enterprise in Oregon outside of Portland.

Early in the 1930s, the Vining showed pictures such as "The Millionaire" (1931), based on a story by Earl Derr Biggers (creator of Charlie Chan), that starred George Arliss who had won an Oscar the year before for his portrayal of Disraeli. Then, in December 1932, the Vining became the Lithia theater when H.B. Hurst relinquished his operation to Walter H. Leverette who owned an independent chain of cinemas in Medford, Grants Pass, and Weed, Calif. He would later become business manager and vice-president of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Association.

Five years after, a chain of motion pictures built the Varsity theater just across from the Lithia theater. Later it owned both Ashland theaters and, being able to rule out competition, eventually closed the Lithia.

At this point, the prospects for live theater were hardly promising. But waiting in the wings, as it were, was a young man with theater in his blood who was destined to write the final chapter of the Vining story and realize his dream of an outdoor theater in Ashland to house a Shakespeare Festival. This was Angus L. Bowmer, who at 27 came to Ashland in September of 1931, in the depths of the depression, as a teacher of speech and theater at Southern Oregon Normal School, only to find that the school had neither a speech nor drama department. Not that this would daunt him, as we shall see. He was where he needed to be and in a place and at a time when he was needed.