Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Nataki Garrett: There are not a lot of opportunities for singular experiences. The way that we do that is through live performance. You go see Beyonce in a concert and my experience watching Beyonce's Homecoming is not the same as the people who were there live in the moment, you know, who could feel each other's breath and, and feel the energy swelling in those spaces. You know, we need interaction and we need, the word that keeps coming into my head is fellowship. We need the fellowship we need to be with our fellows in connection with each other as we experience something together.

Jo Reed: That's the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Nataki Garrett, and this is Art Works the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. As we celebrate Women's History Month this March, the National Endowment for the Arts is shining a light on some phenomenal women past and present through the agency's blog, social media channels, and podcast. Borrowing from Maya Angelou's famous poem "Phenomenal Woman," we're celebrating women who have fire in their eyes and joy in their feet. And today, that woman is Nataki Garrett. When Nataki Garrett was named artistic director of the Tony Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival, or OSF, in the spring of 2019, it was a cause for celebration. Nataki was one of the few women of color in the country to hold that position, and the first in OSF's 84-year history. Add to that the prestige of OSF, its history, its reach, its $44 million dollar budget, and Nataki's track record of developing new work and her deep commitment to diversity and inclusion, her appointment seemed to herald an important moment in nonprofit theater. In fact, in early March 2020, Oregon Arts Watch ran a story with the headline "Nataki Garrett on OSF''s Jubilant Future." And then in the beginning of her first full season as artistic director, the crisis of the pandemic began. And OSF closed five productions only six days after opening. OSF had employed 600 people, which became untenable once the theaters closed. And then in October, the Almeda fire swept through the region, sparing OSF but devastating neighboring communities. It was a year to reckon with and Nataki Garrett went to work, albeit not the work she had envisioned when she accepted the position of artistic director in 2019.

Nataki Garrett: You know, 2019 feels like an eternity ago. Yeah, I had many dreams where we would be by now, of course, OSF was experiencing severe fiscal challenges in 2019, due to all kinds of factors. Ironically, a lot of the changes we have made since the pandemic began are changes that I wanted to make from the beginning. And I was preparing for a very slow three to five year process to make them happen. The pandemic closures accelerated our ability to make these shifts. So the goals that I had are actually goals that I'm focused on right now. Because there are a lot of things that you can take care of when you're dark. And these goals are among those.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I'd love to talk about that. Because I think that's true. There's this moment of pause, and God knows it's challenging, but it also presents opportunities.

Nataki Garrett: It does and really important opportunities. It also presents the opportunity to really start thinking about what is the future. Like, what do you want? And how do you want to get there? And that's something that I actually saw taking a lot longer than than the way I'm working now. I thought I would have to take a lot longer to get there.

Jo Reed: Well, let's talk about OSF. It's a Repertory Theater with a company of artists and crew and actors who work regularly together, which is expensive in the best of times. So I know in 2019 OSF employed nearly 600 Theatre professionals. Where are you now? And how is that model working for you?

Nataki Garrett: So in April of last year, we began the process to layoff over 500 people and we laid off over 500 people over 2020 in order to be able to corral our resources so that we could focus on the thing that was the most important at the time, which was saving the organization. You know, we're a ticket based organization. We make money on the tickets that we sell. And without those tickets, we were in quite a bind. I spent the whole year raising money. I haven't thought about art in a very long time because I had to dedicate myself to really focusing on where we could find resources. You know, and we were having this experience, which is my top 1% donors had retracted a little bit in their desire to really focus on supporting us in the way that we needed. The need we had was huge. It's an election year. So they were spending their resource in other ways. And there were so many needs to meet. People were giving money to food banks and choosing to do, you know, really important work as opposed to focusing on supporting this organization.

Jo Reed: On one hand, that's understandable. But on the other, it's also ironic, given how much money the performing arts generates in communities.

Nataki Garrett: Yeah, I think that in those conversations, you know, having to push that the entire arts sector is 4.6% of GDP. You know, when our industry shut down 5 million people lost their jobs. But the ripple effect across the field where it was even worse in restaurants and bars, and hotels, service workers, the people who work in big costume houses, and in near Broadway, the people who create gigantic sets across Broadway. So the ripple effects are real. And I don't think that a lot of people took that into consideration. So I spent a considerable amount of time talking about that, which led me to advocacy, you know, on the legislative level.

Jo Reed: Tell me about those efforts. What did you do?

Nataki Garrett: So last year, I did a lot of focused energy towards making sure that Oregon-based arts organizations, for example, we got access to some of the Cares Act funding last year. We put together a document, worked with a lobbyist and, and presented ourselves to the state of Oregon to say, Hey, we need to survive this pandemic, the only way that we're going to be able to restore jobs back at our organizations is if we have some sort of runway, but the most important thing was that OSF is-- you know, we contribute about $120 million a year to the economy here in Ashland, we are, you know, one of the top employees, but we are also, you know, one of the most important businesses. And so my plea was a little bit different than than my sister theaters, my sister organizations to the north, because we are really integral to the economic stability of this region. And that's what we used to buttress ourselves. We buttressed ourselves up against that idea in order to support our challenge that we actually had to have access to some resources. And so I did that there. And then last year, in conjunction with a few other organizations, I pulled together a group of 40 theaters to focus on. We could fight for legislation on the federal level. And luckily, TCG had already been doing this work. And you know, and really fighting mightily for advocacy on the legislative level, on the federal level.

Jo Reed: And TCG is the nonprofit Theater Communications Group.

Nataki Garrett: Yes. And NIVA is an organization of performing arts venues. And they had written a document that became the Save Our Stages act, and we put together our resources and hired a lobbyist to help us lobby for access to some of that resource. And that's what I've been focused on for the last six months. So instead of focusing  on doing art, you know, I focused on creating resource so that we can continue to do art in the future.

Jo Reed: What do you think OSF in particular needs, and theater in general needs, to survive and thrive? It's going to take a while for people to feel comfortable. And then for people to be able to afford theater again, even when we're on the other side of this. So how do we get from here to there? One of the things OSF did in the past year was create an online platform called "O!"

Nataki Garrett: I think at the beginning of the pandemic, one of my colleagues made a statement about you know, how if you if you do your theater in a space that is not a live venue with a live audience sitting in front of it, it's considered to be television. And actually I disagreed. Aesthetically, I also disagreed artistically, but I disagreed in this other way, which is about access. So we started a digital platform, we were going to start that digital platform anyway. It's actually one of the things I thought of when I was applying for this job-- that OSF is actually one of these one of the few theaters in the United States that could and should focus on a digital platform because of its 70,000 attendee reach. You know, we sell 350,000 tickets a year, we have the potential to be a global theater, not just a local or regional theater. We ended up having to launch it early because of COVID. It became a bridge for audiences, you know, to make sure that they knew that we were still here for them. And now, you know, we're focusing on a re-evolution of the digital platform that focuses on art. The most important thing I can say about O!, the art is tantamount to the art that we make here at OSF which is comes at a really high quality. We put a lot of resource and focus into making sure that our art is the draw, but O! is also about access. It allows me to put doors into all kinds of hands. Doors that give people access to our organization without requiring them to get past the first hurdle, which is always transportation-- you have to drive or fly to get to my theater. And so you can imagine the number of people who never come because they don't have access to transportation. And I also have people here who work at OSF who couldn't stay at night to see the shows because the buses stopped running at 8:30. So it's, it's an access issue, not just globally, it's an access issue locally. But the second one is the biggest obstacle is buying a full price ticket, which is exclusionary, right? Because you actually have to have the resource to be able to spend on that. Now, I'm not saying that people who are not highly resourced don't spend money on the things that are important to them. What I'm saying is that for some people, that is a major obstacle, and if A) you if you can't get there and B) you don't have the resource to buy the ticket, then why would you even care about an organization like mine? So the last thing is shifting the rules of engagement, if you can come in through the digital landscape, if I can provide that as a resource for you to come in, then when you have access to transportation, you might actually feel like this is a place for you. Because I'm going to spend all of my energy making sure that you feel welcome.

Jo Reed: I was going to ask you about that. Because I'm from a working class background and going to the theater was a big deal. It was you know, the birthday present each year. But I doubt if I were growing up now, I grew up in New York City, my mother could have afforded that. I was the child of a single parent, I doubt that she could afford it, because the ticket prices have just gotten so, so expensive. And I know putting on live theater is expensive.

Nataki Garrett: Yeah, it's true. I mean, my mother couldn't really afford it, either. My grandmother would, I don't know-- my grandmother would randomly have like tickets to the dress rehearsal for the ballet, you know, or the opera. And she used her connections in the Bay Area to make sure that her children and her grandchildren had access to the arts, even though she was a single parent, you know, she had four children, my grandmother. My mother  was a single parent, she had one child, me, and I grew up during Reaganomics in the Bay Area, and she was a school teacher. So all of the ways in which you know, you can be disenfranchised economically. And yet, I went to a high school that came to OSF every single year I was not invited on those trips. And so there's another thing about exclusion that we're trying to break, which is there was a sense that somehow I wouldn't be interested in what was happening at OSF. That's what my friends told me later, when I asked, why did you never invite me? So we have to shift access across the board. For me, what's going to be most important is access. My older audience members whose bodies might be a little bit more fragile, people who have immunodeficiencies, that require them to be very vigilant in the way that they're dealing with their bodies and spaces. All kinds of people may not be able to walk through the doors of our theaters for a while. And I want to make sure that they still have access to the stories and to the artists that continue to inspire us by telling stories about who we are, and will continue to remind us how we're going to survive. And that's really integral to the future of of our industry. What a gift it is, to now be able to have survived, you know, our organization will survive. The way I'm going to repay that gift is by making sure that I create a space for the artists where they can respond to a multiplicity of impulses through whatever modality they want. That's part of how we were able to create that film ASH LAND with Shariffa Ali, a budding and aspiring filmmaker who's a really well-established and very well-known theater director and VR maker, but decided that she wanted to spend her time in a residency that I created for her making a film, and I was like, that's a great modality. Let's see if we can shift our resources to help that happen. Because we can't make theater right now, let's make something else. What she created was a film not not a theater piece that was filmed and then we use other resources to work with several other theaters, PlayCo, Woolly Mammoth, the Guthrie, ART, and OSF supported a production called This Is Who I Am by Amir Zuabi that was directed by Evren Odcikin and it was a play that was created for Zoom; it was live every single night. And so both of those were important responses to the question to the artists, "What is it that you want to do right now if this is the circumstance?" And I want to continue that questioning.

Jo Reed:  2020 also brought the trauma of George Floyd's murder, Breonna Taylor's murder, Ahmaud Arbery, and so on, unfortunately, and in significant ways, OSF has been in the forefront of diversity, which is not to say of course that everything is all rosy in Ashland, but you know, a lot of work had been done, and you're the first woman of color to lead OSF and one of the few to lead a major Theater in the country. So I'm curious how OSF particularly is meeting that moment this moment.

Nataki Garrett:  Yeah. So we actually just published our commitment to the continuation of this work in equity, diversity, inclusion, and access. We See You, White American Theater sent us its demand statement asking us to commit to the demands that they sent last summer. And it's actually taken us this long to really comb through and really figure out what we've done and what we want to continue to do. Here's what's really important about the work at OSF. So OSF is touted as being a leader, a thought leader in this work in our industry. And yet, you know, when our teams went through the document, a number of the demands are based on experiences that people had at OSF. And so we actually had to own how we have been active in creating spaces of harm because we've adhered to the construct of white supremacy, and how it permeates the way we do our work here. We had to start there by acknowledging what it is that we've done, so that we could move through a space of  how we were going to atone for that and what our action was going to be. And so that is at the center of I think what our new responses to equity, diversity, and inclusion. Right now we've just recently hired a new director of IDEA, which is one of the few, it might be even the first transition of that position at a theater arts organization, at a nonprofit theater arts organization, and the person who has held that role held it in an interim basis. So now we have a permanent equity, diversity, and inclusion person, and we'll announce that person fairly soon. And then we just, you know, posted on our website, our response to the demands, and our ongoing commitment to making sure that we are creating a space a theater space in which we are doing everything in our power to be anti-racist, to mitigate anti-blackness, and to try to eliminate the harmful actions that we have perpetrated over 85 years of this institution. And to try to create spaces where again, how do we serve the artists? We serve the artists by at least the very first thing we should be doing is creating a space where they could rely on our desire to have no harm done to them as they are trying to do their work and harm is enacted in so many ways. And I think the most important way is by the way, we silence the global majority, you know, people who are marginalized in this country, but are a part of the majority, if you if you count the numbers globally, we silence them in these rooms, and ask them to participate in things that harm them. So that's the beginning. Over the course of the year, there's been a lot of talk about the We See You document, and there's been a lot of avoidance, you know, there's been people have said things to me like, well, I don't think we can afford most of the things on the list. And I my question is like, well, what what can you afford not to what is the consequence of not doing that work, you're going to create a space in which you're going to be known as a space that has not mitigated the way in which you've created harm. And then those artists aren't going to come and work with you. Is that the world that you want to create?

Jo Reed:  And I also think it's so urgent for the vitality of theater diversity and equity and inclusion. If you want a vital living theater, it just has to be front and center.

Nataki Garrett:  I do too. I believe it does. You know, I think about Woodie King Jr. penned an article in the 60s, it's saying the same exact thing, August Wilson in the early 90s said the same exact thing. It's not a new conversation. And yet, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation, BIPOC theater artists have experienced the same kind of harm over and over and over. So now I actually think that what we have to think about is not just the vitality of our individual theaters, but the vitality of our industry, you know, the coming generations see themselves in more diverse ways, and are not interested in what we're doing on our stages. Because we're not opening up our pathways to include what they're interested in. We're still talking to previous generation and telling them that they're at the center and important and supporting the ways in which they have felt supported for the last 100 years, 400 years. We have to shift. And I don't know if if my peers and colleagues across the field really understand what's at stake for the industry as a whole. I think they think it's an individual problem, but it's not.

Jo Reed:  And I think oddly at this moment, again, this incredibly challenging moment, and I do not mean at all to suggest otherwise. But because it's a moment of pause and we all know things are going to be different on the other side of this, it's also a real opportunity to begin doing work on inclusion and diversity. I mean real work.

Nataki Garrett:  Yeah. Now is the time I keep saying I have colleagues who've said well when we go back and I keep saying there is no back. Back ended last last April, there is no place to go back to. we are in a new paradigm. And we actually have to figure out what we're heading forward to not going back to something. One of the things that I keep asking my teams at OSF is how well were our systems functioning before the pandemic, and before the social uprisings of last summer? How well? I think we could we could get away with it, you know, we could get away with it for probably another decade. But it was on the decline. Now is the time to shift, we actually have to do this shift. And I hope as an industry, we do make these shifts, but there's a lot of fear, people are afraid to change because they're going to lose something. And what they're going to lose, they're more afraid of losing than what they might gain. We think of EDI as charity as opposed to, as a way of of allowing our theaters to really thrive and meet our mandates, our missions. All of that has to shift that has to shift now, or we will be irrelevant to the generations that follow.

Jo Reed:  Tell me, what drew you to theater, Nataki?

Nataki Garrett: I think it's what I said before, a little bit of you know, I come from a family of performers, my mom took me to see Swan Lake when I was a little kid. And we were at Lincoln Center, Sorry, at not Lincoln Center, we were at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., which is where I was born. And we were sitting way up in the rafters and I actually do recall the little dots twirling around. And the next day she took me to ballet class. When we moved finally back home for my mom, which is the Bay Area, my grandmother would take me to all kinds of plays and performances. My aunt was a ballerina in the Oakland Ballet, my uncle was a violinist, my other uncle is an architect, my mom is a carpenter. You know, so it's always been embedded in what I do. I performed for my family and church plays and it was always a part of me. And also, I grew up in Berkeley, and it was the one thing that I could do, where my identity wasn't central to every way in which I existed.  I didn't always only have to be, you know, the one black kid in the theater room. You know, I could transform into these characters, I started as an actor, and then a director—I directed early too-- but I could transform or I could transform my understanding of identity through exploring my directing skills, and so I just sort of fell in love with it. So here I am. Thirteen to now, there was a lot of decades in between.

Jo Reed:  I was going to ask you. So, there wasn't a moment where you were thinking of doing something else. It's always been theater.

Nataki Garrett:  Well, of course I never thought I'd have it as a career because, you know, I grew up in a very, even though they were artists, at some point they all shifted towards very practical careers that could sustain. I come from, you said working class, I come from a working class educated family resembled middle class but without any of the resources that go with that.  So, the values were middle class, but the money was definitely just coming out of poverty. So my mother said to me when I was going off to college, “yeah, yeah, you could study theater, as long as you get a non-theater degree, you have to get a degree that you can actually use to get a job.” And so, I went for an English degree, I'm still not sure what I thought job I was going to get with that degree. Okay, it was the closest thing I could get to theater. And I did a minor in theater at my undergrad. And then that's actually when I made the decision, like, I'm going to go into this field. I ended up with an internship at the Alliance Theater working under Kenny Leon in his second year of leadership there.  I actually did two internships in one. I was a stage manager and a director, always the fallback. You know, if I can't be a director then I could be a stage manager. And then it was a conversation with somebody who's now one of my colleagues who said, why don't you just be a stage manager? You could do that just fine. And you could make a living and I was like, No, I'm a director. And I saved my pennies for a month and moved to New York with $500 in my pocket, and the rest is, you know, I ended up going to Cal Arts for grad school after being in New York for a year, and, I went to Cal Arts I ended up teaching there and being an administrator there. And that is sort of the beginning of how I got here. So humble beginnings did lead to, you know, I didn't know what path I was on but it did, the path did lead me to something I could have never dreamed of, which is running, you know, this formidable very well-established, very well-known theater. You know, I couldn't have imagined myself here when I was that 13-year-old kid.

Jo Reed: Let me ask you about your 2021 season because it's very ambitious. It's a mixture of previously produced work that's now online and new work that's live. It's extraordinary. Tell me about it and how you came to.

Nataki Garrett:  So, I was I'll be very honest, that the way we came to it is that I think I have become through the course of this pandemic, more pragmatic and more pessimistic and my new executive director is actually really optimistic. So, our partnership is actually how we birth this idea of launching a season. So, if we are able to go in the fall, we wanted to make sure that we had already decided on some plays that we could actually produce in the most nimble way possible. So, if you know these plays, you know, we're looking at doing, August Wilson's How I Learned What I Learned, which is a one person show; Unseen, which is, I think has three characters, by Mona Mansour; it's going to be directed by Evren Odcikin. And then Confederates, which is slightly larger. I think it's got five people. in the cast, by Dominique Morrisseau and I'm directing that. So, we have two in-house directors. We have these smaller plays. And then the largest possible thing that we could do, which is a play called It's Christmas, Carol! which is being written right now by three of our in-house very beloved artists, Mark Bedard, Brent Hinkley and John Tufts, is going to happen closer to the end of the year where all the forecasting models are showing that we might be able to open. And then the here's the thing is that we might do two things, we might be able to do just one thing, but we needed enough out there so that if we had to remove something we could put it in, in the 22 season, the season is nimble enough. And then where we know we can stick to things is as on the digital piece O.  So we're doing Manahatta by Mary Katherine Nagel, and Julius Caesar, which is directed by Shana Cooper. And then Snow in Midsummer by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. These are recorded, beautifully recorded, multi camera shot archived productions of our work from previous seasons. And these are the first three we're launching.  We're hoping to do a few more over the course of the year. That's where we know we can rely on having being able to have some sort of offering to our audiences. And so, the tickets are inexpensive. I think it's $40 for an O season membership, it's $15 a play so you can watch it with your whole family for 15 bucks and have access to live theater, recorded live theater, but it was it was live at the time. So, we're really excited about it. And then we have a couple of projects that are just built for O. Another film with Shariffa Ali called You Go, Girl. And then we're doing a piece that I conceived called The Cymbeline Project, which is an episodic Cymbeline that'll be released in episodes over the course of '21 and '22. 

Jo Reed: That seems really cool. There's something about serialization that's very romantic to me.

Nataki Garrett: Yeah. Our director for that project, Scarlett Kim, has all kinds of ideas and ways in which that work is going to be, the episodic part, the cliffhanger part, where it's filmed, how it's filmed, what part of it is in a live space, you know, all of that stuff, so we're really excited about it.

Jo Reed:   And let me just ask you: What are you looking forward to?

Nataki Garrett:  I think I'm most looking forward to what we're going to do on the O, because that is my offering to OSF. Like I said, it wasn't something that that I conceived because of the COVID crisis. It's a platform that I that I dreamed about, as I was applying for OSF and the access, the ability to create unlimited space and connection to OSF is really exciting for me. I had a conversation with somebody in my first year here at OSF and they said you know you have to think about OSF as a global entity as opposed to a local entity. And this allows for that kind of access. It removes those arbitrary barriers, except for one, which is a real one: who has access to the Internet, and how. But so many people have access to cell phones across the globe. So, O is in 60 countries, you know, it gets several 1000 views and millions of minutes of views and so the potential there is so exciting.  I'm also cannot wait to get back into a rehearsal room, I find myself longing for the work of the live space and feeling the deficit of having been out of rehearsal and out of the space where things are discovered in process for so long. I find myself fantasizing about sitting opposite an actor and watching them do their work and you know, thinking of ways to continue to inspire them to do things that I am not capable of doing without them. I miss my community. So, I look forward to openings. You know, I look forward to connection and I look forward to sharing the armrest again, when it's safe. I cannot wait for us to be able to do that again. I need it. Personally, I need it.

Jo Reed: And I think that's a great place to leave it. Nataki, thank you so much for giving me your time when I know how busy you are. And I look forward to a new season of O. 

Nataki Garrett:  Thank you and thank you very much Josephine for having me. I'm really excited to have had this conversation. Thank you for a chance to touch into my own emotions around what we what I feel like we're all longing for

Jo Reed: That was the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Nataki Garrett. You can learn more about OSF and their offerings on O, at OSFashland.org. Keep up with the phenomenal women we're highlighting this month@arts.gov and follow us on Twitter @NEA arts. This has been Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. Stay safe, and thanks for listening.