Ben Iden Payne - Inspiration On Other Theaters

Inspiration On Other Theaters

As a Guest Director at The University of Washington in the summer of 1930, he staged Shakespeare's Cymbeline and Love's Labour's Lost on an Elizabethan style, on a temporary Thrust stage. The productions inspired a young graduate student, Angus L. Bowmer, who acted in and staged managed the productions. Bowmer went on to incorporate these staging concepts when he founded the Oregon Shakespeare Festival five years later. Payne directed Shakespeare's Cymbeline at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1956, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1961.

In 1934, Payne and Thomas Woods Stevens edited and produced sever short (one hour) productions of Shakespeare plays that were presented during the second year of the Chicago World's Fair (Century of Progress) at a crude reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe Theater. This recreation of the Globe, and these short Shakespeare plays, inspired the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition to build a recreation of the Globe there as well, designed by Stevens, and stage their short 50 minute Shakespeare plays The exhibition was such a success that the recreated Globe in San Diego was preserved following the exposition, and became the home of the Old Globe Theatre. Payne returned to the Old Globe in San Diego in 1949 to direct its first Summer Shakespeare Festival, a production of Twelfth Night in 1949, and directed there several summers through 1964.