In the face of criticism, OSFs Nataki Garrett is building a company for the future – Medford News, Weather, Sports, Breaking News

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Nataki Garrett

Nataki Garrett joined the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as its artistic director in 2019, taking the helm of one of the countrys largest arts organizations as a pandemic waited in the wings.

But it wasnt just a world-altering virus Garrett would have to contend with there would be weeks where the air was too smoky to breathe, fires bearing down on the city of Ashland and waning theater attendance.

Shes also had to deal with a small group of naysayers who question her every move and the kind of harassment that requires her to travel with security.

About this last challenge, Garrett is clear-eyed.

Im a Black woman, she said Thursday. Im Black-identified. I like being a Black woman. I dont think that there was a mistake in my birth.

I dont spend any time apologizing for it or making up for it in these ways that allow for white comfort. We live in a society in which its normal to consider me to be a kind of threat. And so of course my presence is threatening because it upsets the status quo just through my existence.

Garrett has faced serious harassment in her role, and a recent NPR story noted she had received death threats.

And she has also been criticized in columns on Ashland.news and letters to the editor in The Oregonian.

That criticism has taken a familiar tone her stagings are too woke, she doesnt trust Shakespeare, and, from the same Ashland columnist, Herbert Rothschild, OSF shouldnt stage so many modern plays or use such diverse casting because it will turn away the mostly white audience .

Part of the problem with these complaints is that many of the things these people are upset about started long before Garretts tenure, and certainly arent unique to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Acknowledgments that theaters are built on land that once belonged to Indigenous Americans, for example, were happening before Garrett came to Ashland. She notes that these acknowledgments are standard practice in many theaters in the country.

Creative casting of Shakespeares work is as old as Shakespeare, and the idea that his plays are immovable texts that should uphold the dominant paradigm is historically inaccurate.

Shakespeare, Garrett said, actually subversively moved against the dominant power structure, even in writing plays that were about the history of that power structure.

Then there is the question of staging new plays.

It was in the 1950s, Garrett said, when Angus Bowmer, the then-artistic director and founder of the festival, started doing new plays.

So this idea that Shakespeare should be at the center, she said, its not what I inherited.

What she inherited was one of the top three funded theaters in the United States. And, she said, a national theater, not a local one.

My primary purpose here at OSF is to create a thriving enterprise, Garrett said. So that in the future, when another group of people 25, 30 years, 50 years, 100 years out comes to OSF, that its sustaining, that they use whatever platform we create so that they can have a future.

Keeping a theater running effectively during a pandemic and as climate conditions worsen in the area is not easy, and the theater has had to shrink the 2023 season to save money.

But Garrett has focused on paying her staff well, developing digital work, like a 10-episode Cymbeline project, experimenting with new technologies, reaching out to new audiences and building the foundation for an organization with a mandate to give people access to the life- changing power of art. Not just the people with the biggest platform or the most money, but also the people without those resources.

Actually, I think the purpose of an organization like OSF is to serve largely the more dominant population and then utilize the support and the resources from that 1% to help make sure that everybody has access, Garrett said.

Thats how I got access to the theater, she said. My junior high, Willow Junior High, got free tickets so that we could go to Berkeley rep and see plays there.

And while some local commentators might not realize it, that mandate is bigger than Ashland or even Oregon. Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a national organization with a national mandate.

But that doesnt mean Garrett doesnt consider the festival to be part of the Ashland community.

We are an interdependent community, she said. We rely on one another for our future.

During the 2020 Almeda Fire, for example, Garrett led efforts to house people in theater buildings after they had lost their homes in nearby Talent.

When I was asked if we could open up our housing, my first answer was, Yes, she said, and then, How quickly, and what do you need? And what else do they need? Do they need Pampers and formula?

And while the loudest voices often get the coverage, much of the Ashland community and the wider theater-going audience is behind Garrett.

Like many, we are outraged that Ms. Garrett, OSFs first Black artistic director, has been subjected to threats against her life, wrote members of the Oregon Shakespeare Festivals board Diane Yu, Sachta Card and Mary Wilcox in a recent letter to The Oregonian.

After this maelstrom that came with the NPR article, Garrett said, the thing that Im most excited about is the amount of support, not just for me, but for the industry as a whole.

And I was reminded that the work that Im doing is not just about me, she continued. Its about the work of the artists, and its about centering the work that they do. And if I am being threatened, its because of that. Thats at the center.

And while theater audiences may be down, dont count them out just yet. Confederates, a new play directed by Garrett, running through Oct. 29 in the Thomas Theatre, and notably not about white people, is selling out.

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