Attending the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland is made easy for Napa theatrgoers who join the annual tour June 24-27, led by Susan Powers Kennelly.

This tour offers roundtrip transportation from Napa by deluxe motor coach; tickets to four plays, all in prime seating; and a three-night stay at the four-star Plaza Inn and Suites, within walking distance of the Festival grounds.

Special features of the tour include a private lecture just for this group that highlights one of the productions they will see and a choice of backstage tour or Q&A session with a company member.

In addition, there is a welcome dinner before the first show and a luncheon at the Victorian Winchester Inn. A daily European breakfast is served at the Plaza Inn, together with late-night post-theater snacks of hot chocolate and fresh-baked cookies.

The tour begins just after the opening of the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre and permits the group to see three productions in this celebrated space. This theatre is patterned after the Globe Theatre in London where Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed. The fourth show will be staged in the indoor proscenium-design Bowmer Theatre, named for the Festival’s founder Angus Bowmer who started it all in 1935.

The 2008 tour’s four plays include both sides of Shakespeare: his mad mix-up “Comedy of Errors” in a musical setting, and his powerful tragedy “Othello, the Moor of Venice.” The other plays are Thornton Wilder’s American classic “Our Town” and an ancient play from India “The Clay Cart.”

The cost of the 2008 Ashland Festival Tour remains the same as last year: $1,095 per person sharing double occupancy. Kennelly can provide additional information at 257-1804 or e-mail: spk@napanert.net. Space is limited and the reservation deadline is April 24. The tour has sold out each year.

For “Our Town,” it will be the first time a contemporary play is presented on the Elizabethan stage. In Wilder’s work the ordinary pieces of life — love, disappointment, joy, heartbreak — are transformed into extraordinary universal expressions all set in the homespun Grovers’ Corners.

Quite a contrast is found in “The Clay Cart,” a lush production of a 2,000-year-old classic from India attributed to a playwright named Sudraka. Multiple story lines are woven into a rich comic drama with mistaken identity, political intrigue and romantic figures all creating an exotic tapestry.

“Othello” brings a muscular interpretation to the tale of love, jealousy, betrayal and revenge as some of the Bard’s most famous characters — Iago, Desdemona and the Moor of Venice — play out the story. This is an opulent production of the larger-than-life tragedy.

In the OSF production of “The Comedy of Errors” two sets of twins, master and servant, shake up a wild Old West town — a rough-hewn, lawless place where townsfolk break into song and the Bard’s characters bring about mayhem in a hilarious, music-infused brawl. It is Shakespeare as you probably haven’t seen it before.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is the largest professional company of its kind in the United States. Now celebrating its 73rd year, it operates over an eight-month season and employs approximately 450 theatre professionals from all over the country. It has the oldest existing full-scale Elizabethan stage in the Western Hemisphere, built on the site of the old Chatauqua theatre established in 1893.

For more information, visit www.osfashland.org