"It's about a lifelong love of Shakespeare and theater, regardless of whether you can come to Cedar City," says Law. "It's the core of what we do."

The man in the middle of all this, with his hand in everything, is Adams, who claims he retired in 1997, but adds, "I only work eight hours a day now. I was doing 14 or 15 before." Mostly, his job is to raise money, but he also has been known to vacuum the costume shop or plant flowers in the courtyard, and he oversees everything from billboards to the photos that are used in the program. In the early years, he directed the plays as well.

All this because of the words a man wrote 400 years ago and a man who read them as a child.

Adams likes to tell this story: When he was in the second grade, his teacher asked the kids if they had read "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." He was the only one in the class who didn't raise his hand. He'd never even heard of it. Nor had he heard of "The Three Little Pigs" and other traditional children's stories. The teacher accused him of lying, and he went home in tears.

The next day, at his mother's urging, he told the teacher he had never read those stories, but he could tell her the entire plots for "Macbeth," "King Lear" and "The Taming of the Shrew." He had read most of Robert Browning's poetry and several of Shakespeare's plays by then.

Born in Cedar City, Adams moved to Clifton, Idaho, as a young boy after his father Paul lost his land and sheep in the Depression. Years later, the family moved to Delta, where his father, who had gone back to school to become a pharmacist, opened a drugstore and his mother, Louise, worked as a teacher.

Adams studied theater at BYU — he was named the school's top actor — and spent his summers serving as an assistant in the direction of the LDS Church's Hill Cumorah Pageant in New York. He was drafted into the Army and served as a Russian translator and later was appointed director of overseas entertainment (USO tours) in the Pentagon.

After quitting the Army, he finished his degree at BYU and then served a three-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Helsinki, Finland. It was there that he had an epiphany.

One night when he was depressed by the gray winter and 40-below temperatures and two months without sunlight, he and his companion rode their bikes across town to a church youth activity, which, they learned, consisted of hiking to a cabin through the woods outside of Helsinki.