Hip-hop at a Shakespeare festival? It may be a stretch, but Bill Rauch seems prepared to try many things to attract a more diverse audience to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he is the new artistic director.

The festival, located in the small town of Ashland, has like many arts institutions been in some ways a victim of its own success. What in the 1960s was a summer event, with one outdoor theater – where the average playgoer might have camped by nearby Emigrant Lake and come to the theater unshowered – has turned into a 10-month repertory company, with three theaters, a resident acting company of over 90 people, and an annual attendance of almost 400,000. The audience has gotten steadily older and wealthier: Between 1991 and 2004, the mean age increased to 56 from 48, and the mean income to $95,250 from $68,600. Although the acting company is 25% people of color, the audience is 95% white.

Enter Mr. Rauch, 43, who has many ideas about to make the Festival not only artistically better but also more welcoming to audiences of all ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds. Bringing in hip-hop is one. Another is a Latino festival, to take place next summer around the opening of a production of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” interpreted with a largely Latino cast. A third is his plan to replace the current format of the Green Show – free outdoor performances, prior to the evening curtain, which currently feature a modern-dance company – with a rotating schedule of diverse local and national artists.

“It’s the only art that we offer free of charge,” Mr. Rauch said in a recent interview in his office in Ashland, “so that art belonging more to the community is really appropriate. I think it can be a way to build nontraditional audiences.”

Mr. Rauch, who succeeds Libby Appel, 70, started his job full-time in June. He is currently in the midst of casting for next season – no mean feat, since the season involves 11 plays with overlapping schedules. He acknowledges that attracting a more diverse audience to Ashland will be a major challenge. Ninety percent of the audience comes from out-of-town, including around 20% from the San Francisco Bay Area. Mr. Rauch hopes to establish a connection to the growing Latino population in the Rogue River Valley, through events like the Latino festival, which will include Spanish-language play readings and performances where Spanish speakers can hear simultaneous translations of English-language productions over headsets.

For this fall, he is planning what he calls “a hip-hop boot camp,” which will bring hip-hop artists to town to generate ideas for future projects. “At first blush a Shakespeare festival doing hip-hop may sound absurd,” he acknowledged, “but I think there’s a real connection between theatrical movements that are about celebrating language and combining slang with elevated poetic forms. Shakespeare grabbed vernacular from the street.”

When he graduated from Harvard in 1984, Mr. Rauch had little interest in pursuing a career in the mainstream theater. With a friend from Harvard, he founded the Cornerstone Theater Company, which goes into rural or low-income communities to develop productions based on local issues and with amateur casts. But other friends eventually lured Mr. Rauch back into the mainstream theater world, and last year he left Cornerstone to pursue his blossoming freelance directing career. In addition to directing five productions in as many seasons in Ashland, last fall he directed the acclaimed production of Sarah Ruhl’s “The Clean House” at Lincoln Center Theater.

Whether Ashland’s traditional audience will embrace hip-hop seems questionable, considering that some still object to contemporary stagings of Shakespeare. But Mr. Rauch has shown he’s not afraid to make changes that may in the short-term be unpopular. He has reorganized the artistic staff, letting go two associate artistic directors, a producing director, the resident set designer, and the director of the Green Show. He replaced them with young people whose professional backgrounds (some with Cornerstone) align with his goals. Claudia Alick, who will produce the Green Show, for instance, is the artistic director of Smokin’ Word Productions, a New York-based nonprofit dedicated to supporting hip-hop and spoken-word theater.

Mr. Rauch wants to produce non-Western classics, beginning next season with an adaptation of the Sanskrit epic “The Clay Cart,” which he will direct. He also wants OSF to play a greater role in developing new plays. Next season’s schedule includes the world premiere of “Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter” by Julie Marie Myatt, about a female Marine returning from Iraq. It will head afterward to the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.

Mr. Rauch has hired his Cornerstone co-founder, Alison Carey, to run a commissioning program called the U.S. History Cycle, loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s own history cycle. Shakespeare’s history plays “were an artist’s response to the anxieties of his age,” Mr. Rauch said – foremost anxiety among them, who was going to succeed Elizabeth, who didn’t have an heir. The goal of the U.S. History Cycle is similar: “to look at the anxieties of our age [by examining] episodes in our nation’s past.” He expects to make the first commissions later this year; he expects the first full production to be mounted in 2010, the festival’s 75th anniversary season.

While he believes strongly in the resident company model, he said that a company “is only as healthy as there is turnover and change from year to year.” He has brought in 17 new directors, designers, choreographers, and composers for next year’s productions. There will also be more than usual turnover in the acting company, though that is common for an artistic leadership transition.

“If you look at OSF’s history from 1935 to today, each artistic director has striven to raise the bar artistically,” Mr. Rauch said. “And I’m trying to do that also in my own way.”