Angus L. Bowmer
American theatre director (1904-1979)
Angus Livingston Bowmer (September 25, 1904 – May 26, 1979) was the founder of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, United States. During his tenure as artistic director, he produced all 37 of William Shakespeare's plays and performed 32 Shakespearean roles in 43 separate stagings.
Biography
Angus Livingston Bowmer was born in Bellingham, Washington, on September 25, 1904. He was the only child of Charles C. Bowmer (born August 19, 1880, Nevada; died February 1967, Portland, Oregon) and Florence "Flora" Priest (born Dec 1880, Wisconsin; died June 5, 1958, Portland, Oregon). He moved with his family at least twice, living in Mount Vernon, Washington, in 1910 and Oak Harbor, Washington, by 1920. He graduated from the Washington State Normal School at Bellingham (now Western Washington University) in 1923.
Bowmer attended the University of Washington in Seattle in the 1930s, acting in at least two of its Shakespeare productions, Love's Labor's Lost and Cymbeline under guest director Ben Iden Payne, an Englishman whose ideas for neo-Elizabethan staging of Shakespeare's plays provided inspiration later in Bowmer's life as he began producing the plays that became the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
In 1931, Bowmer was invited to become an instructor in English at Southern Oregon Normal School, a predecessor to Southern Oregon University, in Ashland, Oregon. Bowmer married Gertrude Butler prior to enlisting in the Army July 20, 1942, where he served as a Warrant Officer. After serving his country and returning to Oregon, Bowmer organized theater activities in Ashland and continued teaching at the college until he retired in 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “Angus L. Bowmer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.