Like the theater troupe of yore, Island Shakespeare Festival is packing up and moving on down the road.

Its new location is only a two-minute drive down the road. The now-sprawling 31-days across three months, three-play festival is moving less than two miles away from the Langley Middle School field to a larger, less-crowded lawn at South Whidbey Academy on Maxwelton Road.

“Not very far, but it’s a pretty awesome location,” said Rose Woods, the festival’s founder and artistic director.

“It creates more of a home for us,” she added. “I feel like we’re growing up and having a home, at 6 years old.”

The festival is in its sixth season. It has grown from a two-weekend affair at the Whidbey Institute amphitheater in Clinton to an eight-weekend extravaganza in Langley proper. Now, Island Shakespeare Festival is located just beyond city limits buffeted by a pair of green belts, a school community Good Cheer garden and open field.

“We’re sad that we’re not in walking distance,” said Peggy Juve, the non-profit festival’s board president. “The fact of the matter is we’re a mobile home, it’s not hard for us to be in a new location.”

Added Woods: “We’re still so close, we might even put up a sign that says, ‘Langley this way.’ It’s as close to Langley as you can be.”

One of the great necessities was the precipitous growth of the festival over the years. Like an infant elephant, the festival needed more and more space. Back in 2013, the festival purchased a 2,400-square-feet, 18-feet-tall tent that organizers affectionately named Henry. The tent fit about 200 comfortably the past two seasons when visitors sat on blankets or on the lawn, with some limited seating available, and the organizers are bringing in risers to offer better seating this season.

Woods said hundreds of visitors were turned away because the tent reached capacity for most of the 2014 dates.

“We fill it for almost every single performance,” she said.

“If we turn people away again this year, then we’ll look at more performances or stacking performances,” she added.

With an estimated 4,000 visitors in 2014, and an expected growth this season, finding a place to call their own was paramount. At Langley Middle School, they were coordinating shared use of precious parking space and the field with other groups for sports, plays at Whidbey Children’s Theater and Whidbey Island Center for the Arts, as well as the Whidbey Island Area Fair and the one-day Ragnar Relay.

“We’re encroaching on their territory there on the field,” Juve said.

The change of location also required a contract change with the landowner, the South Whidbey School District. In exchange for using the public space, the festival offers in-kind services to supplement arts education in the schools with tours of the tent. In the future, Juve and Woods said, an expanded season with an earlier start and a later end could allow for students to attend the performances, which are already free of charge.

“We imagine that that relationship will continue,” Juve said.

Moving closer to the highway was a benefit as well. Instead of seeming like a long, winding road away from the ferry, the festival is now just a right turn off Highway 525 on Maxwelton Road.

The festival’s departure from Langley Middle School means patrons can’t park at the lot and enjoy a stroll through Langley’s commercial core as they once did. Juve said they may consider in coming seasons offering shuttle service into Langley, noting that many businesses help fund the festival’s production. But for now, visitors can take themselves there with the Village by the Sea just beyond the bend.

“We’re only two minutes around the corner,” Woods said.