300 S. Boundary St.
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
In 1916, the university celebrated the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death by holding outdoor dramas in Battle Park, an old growth forest on the edge of Carolina’s campus on Country Club Road. Several years later, when Frederick Koch joined the faculty to teach playwriting, the University built a permanent stone amphitheatre, Forest Theatre, in the southwest corner of Battle Park. With funding from the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the theatre was rebuilt in 1940. In 1953, the university dedicated the theatre to Koch, who founded PlayMakers Repertory Company, calling it “an open air palace of light and sound, haunt of birds and breezes and human voices, home of natural beauty, poetry and drama, set upon the warm earth, in enduring stone, to commemorate an ardent genius. The Forest Theatre is surrounded by Battle Park’s 93 acres of mostly primordial forest. The outdoor theater has hosted folk dramas written by famed Carolina alumni Thomas Wolfe and Paul Green, and groups continue to perform at the theatre to this day.