Tony and I weren’t the first pilgrims to southern Oregon who fell for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and imagined ourselves living here. The wild mushroom vendor at the Rogue Valley  Growers Market and a hike to the top of 7,000 foot Grizzley Peak, with its gracious views of the valley, offered additional charms—along with my best friend from high school, whom I’d barely seen in 50 years and had settled here a decade ago.

If you’ve followed this blog, you know Tony and I returned to Brooklyn after our visit, proceeded to buy a house long distance on Zillow and, by the following spring, arrived in Ashland with four suitcases and two cats. Our East coast friends thought we’d lost our mind. When we told them that Ashland was home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), with the culture and worldliness that suggested, they saw our point.

While I wouldn’t call us diehard theater buffs, theater had been a constant in our lives. We were season ticket holders at the acclaimed Trinity Repertory Company in Providence and took in Broadway and off-Broadway shows as our pocketbook allowed. Our first summer here, we filled up on OSF, from Romeo and Juliet to Manahatta, a new play about a Lenape female lawyer squaring Wall Street with her Native roots. 

When the news broke six weeks ago that OSF’s new artistic director, Nataki Garrett—the first Black female director in the theater’s 87-year history—had been receiving death threats, I was both stunned but not surprised.

I’ve written about Oregon’s dark history with race and how Ashland was once a “sundown town,” meaning “colored people” had to leave town by nightfall. In a city of 21,000, where 90 percent of the population is white, only 322 residents identified as Black in 2017. I have learned that no matter how “liberal” white Ashland feels itself to be—in contrast to the smaller towns and rural dwellers that ring Ashland—the small slice of Black folks who live here feel chronically vulnerable. 

The fact that racist threats and acts have caught fire across today’s America makes this “Ashland” story stretch beyond its borders.

Reports that OSF’s director had been called “Black bitch” on her walk home from work were nonetheless gobsmacking. Determined to sort through the threats against Garrett, worthy of its own Shakespeare play, I’ve wrestled with the question, What is this story really about?

Breaking news

“My first instinct was to withdraw,” Nataki Garrett said after the death threats started. But when you run one of the country’s iconic non-profit theater companies—and are an innovative and influential national arts leader—retreat is not an option. 

Wary of engaging the City of Ashland police, who in 2019 had arrested a visiting Latino actor without probable cause and allegedly handcuffed him to the jail floor, OSF turned to a private security detail to ensure Garrett’s safety when in public.

National Public Radio, which broke the story on September 28, said that Garrett’s stalking had been an open secret in Ashland for months. It was the artistic director’s decision to share her story with NPR that set off a wave of responses and actions at both local and national levels. 

Nationally, scores of theater groups, from PEN America to the Dramatists Guild, condemned the threats and expressed solidarity for Garrett. Messages of support appeared in Playbill, Broadway World, and The Hollywood Reporter. 

A week later, Ashland’s remaining community newspaper, Ashland.news, ran a story about the death threats, coupled several weeks later with an interview with Garrett. The Mayor apologized for not taking Garrett’s situation seriously when she first heard about it. Recently, Ashland police and OSF agreed to meet monthly. “Whether or not Nataki’s been called out because of her race, I don’t know,” the police chief told the Ashland.news.

Garrett’s local supporters were passionate in her defense, while her detractors, who countered that she was abandoning Shakespeare for wokeness, foretold her demise.

Meanwhile, one of the final plays of OSF’s 2022 season, the West Coast premiere of the brilliant “Confederates,” filled OSF’s Bowman Theater. Written by MacArthur Prize-winning playwright Dominique Morisseau and directed by Garrett, “Confederates” tells the story of an enslaved woman turned Union spy and a brilliant professor in a modern-day private university facing similar struggles, though they live over a century apart. It explores the reins that racial and gender bias still hold in American today.

In a brief video interview, Garrett explains why Morisseau’s play means so much to her.

“There aren’t a lot of plays that actually just focus on Black women and how we live our lives and what we experience,” she said. “This play makes me extremely vulnerable because it’s so reflective of my actual lived experience. There isn’t a moment in this play, particularly on the modern day side, that I haven’t experienced.”

The audience at the production I saw at the end of October gave “Confederates” a standing ovation.

Precedent

Combining Shakespeare with 21^st century plays had become the custom at the Oregon Shakespeare Theater, which before the pandemic produced eleven plays on three stages during a ten-month season. In 2015, the OSF welcomed its 20-millionth visitor, drawing more than 300,000 theater-goers a year who filled the city’s restaurants, hotels, and shops.

It had grown to become the oldest, largest, professional, regional, rotating repertory theater company in the U.S. It alsohad become the country’s most diverse and inclusive company, with 70 percent of the actors people of color.

Nataki Garrett’s predecessor, Bill Rauch (2007 – 2019), spearheaded the move towards complementing Shakespeare’s canon of plays—all of which OSF has performed multiple times—with newly commissioned plays. He initiated a ten-year program that underwrote the development of 37 new plays collectively called American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle. Each looked at moments of change in America’s past. Morriseau’s “Confederates” is one of the last in this series.

 “I was nurtured by an extensive POC [People of Color] community of artists,” Rauch said. “And I am a white gay man with mixed-race kids and a brother who is disabled. Theater should reflect the kind of world that I live in….It builds the muscles of the actors and it builds the muscle of the audience.”

The worst of times

It would be hard to imagine a more challenging time than 2019 for Garrett to assume the reins of OSF. Wildfire smoke in the summer of 2018 had shuttered the company for unpredictable stretches; OSF’s largest stage, where most of its Shakespeare plays are performed, is outdoors. The summer of 2019 was only slightly better. Ticket revenues suffered accordingly. 

As one of four Black, female artistic directors of major theater company’s nationwide, the stakes were enormous.

Then in March 2020, the pandemic arrived abruptly closing OSF—and theaters across the country—for who knew how long. Focusing on OSF’s survival, as donors and audiences disappeared, Garrett raised $19 million through federal, regional and foundation funding. 

The closure of OSF would have been longer had Garrett not pushed OSF to put “anything” on their stages to keep the organization moving forward in 2021, as the pandemic continued to rage.  OSF was an economic lifeblood in Ashland.

“I’m in a different position than a lot of my sister-theaters,” Garrett  said in her interview with ashland.news.  “OSF is one of the economic engines of this valley. It’s certainly the economic engine of Ashland and so my responsibility is not just to get my theater open. My responsibility is to get the theater open so that people come and they spend their dollars here and we can keep these businesses going.”

The 2022 OSF season would be Nataki Garrett’s first full run. With fewer COVID-19 disruptions and little wildfire smoke—though the heat was unrelenting—the prospects were  promising: three Shakespeare plays (avowedly non-Stratfordian in their performance) and a collection of recent plays including the highly-acclaimed “Confederates” and “August Wilson’s How I Learned What I Learned” (about what it means to be a Black artist in America).

The violence and swearing in one play (“Revenge Song: A Vampire Cowboys Creation,” “a 
rousing, romping, music-filled look at the real life of Julie d’Aubigny, a queer 17th century French swordswoman and opera singer”), became a lightning rod for those who thought Garrett was too much in our face, however.

What lies beneath

I’ve been trying to untangle the different but equally important threads in this troubling narrative and have rested and have come to rest on three, intwined story lines. 

Unarguably, the “haters,” newly unleashed by today’s steady racism and culture of violence, have played a starring role. In almost all-white Ashland, as in Oregon as a whole, racism lurks, unrecognized and not. (Micro-aggressions recognized, of course, by their targets.) It is unlikely that those issuing death threats and stalking Nataki Garrett were unhinged by the plays she chose to stage. The spark was her race, compounded by her gender—double jeopardy. The fact that she walked with her head held high—Garrett is a commanding presence—no doubt added fuel.

(Note: The November Oregon ballot includes a measure that removes language allowing slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime.)

Another story line centers the ”Bardolators” (Shakespeare fans) who insist race is not an issue, but that Garrett’s choice of plays beyond the Shakespeare canon “overly” privileged the voices and lives of marginalized and oppressed Americans—today and through our history. Ashland.news columnist and board member Herbert Rothschild encouraged “OSF leadership” to be cautious, calling “the reinvention of OSF a major gamble …at a time unpropitious for gambling.” As a theater draw, “I’d bet on Shakespeare,” he concluded. 

The story from 30,000 feet takes a different shape: the importance (or threat) of an inclusive American theatre. It goes much farther than welcoming a Black King Lear or a Black Loman Family, as in the current Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman,” into roles long reserved for whites in plays that, in reality, traded in the human experience, not skin color. 

An inclusive American theater, Nataki Garrett writes in a recent essay in the Black “news and views” journal The Root goes further.

In the realm of politics and the unjust murders of Black and Brown people in America, where and how do making plays fit in? Classical Greek theater was a place for debating the social and political issues of the time. In his day, Shakespeare’s heavily political dramas were entertaining, educational, and popular, and have been used flexibly, throughout history to make meaning, and challenge cultural assumptions. This is perhaps why changes in the theater stoke the same fears and anger that … increasing diversity in an all-white town stoke: Historically, the individuals who believe they have ownership over the theater, who have been the self-appointed arbiters of “high art” are at an inflection point of change.

For those of us who seek to reflect the world we live in through the work we put on our stage… it is our mandate to uplift the voices of artists, the truthtellers and changemakers, so they can continue to hold a mirror to society. And the truth is, the reflection in that mirror has changed dramatically over the years. According to the 2020 Census, nearly every county in the United States had become more diverse in the last decade, and for the first time, the nation saw a decrease in the white population. 

Before the pandemic, it was reported that ticket sales and subscriptions—the people who actually go to the theater to see the works—were declining. We are emerging from the pandemic in a new world…and the more we fight to keep diverse voices out, the more we will fail to sustain our industry.

 My mandate as an artistic leader is clear: to place the artist at the center, create the conduit for how we engage, develop, and access new work, and how we interrogate the classics in both live and digital spaces. I see artists as thought leaders and change makers who transform culture by reflecting our current humanity back to ourselves. 

It is this third story that has opened my eyes where they have been closed. If all the world’s a stage, the actors must reflect our humanity—human beings collectively—in full.

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