#nataki garrett

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Bachelorettes, Branagh, and Biofiction

Plus: “The Fool…is replaced in this production by a turtle”

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Nataki Garrett Directing The Central Park Five at Detroit Opera

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Felicia Curry as Susannah| Jefferson's Garden|Ford's Theatre Society

Playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker explores the contradictions between our founding fathers’ ideals and the realities of freedom in America.

Christian, a Quaker pacifist, defies his family to fight in the American Revolution. Susannah, an enslaved woman, is tempted to fight for the British when they promise her liberty. On their travels, Christian and Susannah cross paths with Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and Sally Hemings.

These encounters force them to confront the compromises America makes after the promise of equality. Wertenbaker takes us from Revolutionary battlefields to Paris to Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello.

Director: Nataki Garrett (Woolly Mammoth’s "An Octoroon")

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Overhauling systems at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

At Oregon Shakespeare Festival, securing a future means focusing on the stuff that most audience members don't see, much less think about: overhauling systems behind the scenes.

At a recent company meeting, interim executive artistic director Nataki Garrett explained how Oregon Shakespeare, founded in 1935, planned to correct years of deficits and declines in revenue.

"I have to change the way we do development, the way we market, the way we do finance, the way IT functions, instead of sort of plugging in the holes and filling in the gaps, which is what we've been doing," Garrett said at an all-staff meeting recently. "We didn't want to disturb the art. We have to disturb the art now."

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Oregon Shakespeare Festival focuses on expansion – but is not without its critics

After two years of pandemic closures, audiences are back at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, to find a season of diverse plays. But for many, change has come too soon.

That's partly why she's focused on putting on stage both new works and new approaches to older works — because attracting and reflecting younger and more diverse audiences is fundamental to the entire ecosystem's survival.

But not everyone likes the new approach.

"My concern is that they have decided to essentially remake the OSF into something it wasn't ... instead of building on their strengths, really turning their back on its strengths," said Herbert Rothschild, a longtime OSF subscriber and local columnist, told NPR. "If so, I think they're going to drive it into the ground."

Rothschild said in a column this summer that he admired OSF's diversity efforts, but thought the drop in the number of Shakespeare plays it produced showed that the theater no longer trusted Shakespeare to draw audiences. In a second column, he added that he thought programming so many diverse, contemporary plays didn't make business sense, because the majority of the Ashland audience is white.

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A Black theater director on dealing with cutbacks — and death threats

'We don't want to disturb our patron base by telling them that they'll have to share the space with other people. What I want to do is disturb the notion…

It’s never fun to announce retrenchments; Oregon Shakespeare’s annual budget is $4 million to $6 million shy of its pre-pandemic $44 million, with a staff of 200, 125 fewer workers than it had in March 2020. But this year, Garrett has weathered more than economic challenges; in September, NPR reported that the theater hired security staff to escort her in public after she received death threats.

Q: You’re about to start rehearsals for “Romeo and Juliet.” Tell me about your approach.

A: I think Shakespeare uses the romance as a way to get us to reflect on the actions of the adults. He’s like, “You’re going to care about what happens to these kids, and then maybe you’ll take a look at how these adults set these rules. Then you’ll also see yourselves reflected in these adults, in their behavior, and you’ll do something about it.” The real impact of that story is: Is this the world you want to create for your progeny?

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Nataki Garrett Named Next Artistic Director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival

A director and administrator known for championing new work, she is poised to lead one of the nation’s leading theatres.

OSF has really beefed up its new-play producing, and that’s also your focus. But it has Shakespeare in the name, and it’s still in many ways a classical rep company. Is it going to stay that way?

It has to. Shakespeare brought us to new places in all of his plays, so I think of Shakespeare as a model for how you develop new work. It’s not just Shakespeare’s plays but his ideas which we can apply to exploring new voices. What we’re really doing is providing a platform for new voices to continually develop, to deepen their ideas and impact. The playwright’s voice is extremely important to me and to my practice. The work of the theatre is to listen to the playwright. Sometimes that’s an O’Neill play that was written 100 years ago; sometimes it’s an Ibsen play; sometimes it’s a Quiara Hudes play or a Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play. I think we stoke the fire for all our work through the new work.

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Nataki Garrett: ‘You kind of have to get out before you burn out’ -

It cannot be said definitively why Oregon Shakespeare Festival Nataki Garrett announced her resignation on Friday, but what is known is that she has been under intense pressure since she took the helm as the sixth artistic director in the organization’s history in 2019.