Talks with Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Artistic Director
On the evening of Jan. 23, 2020, the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University hosted a talk between Jeffery Riley — full time radio host at the Jefferson Radio Station since 2010 — and Artistic Director of the world-renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Nataki Garett. This was a discussion on the creative industry open free to the public taking place in Southern Oregon University’s Meese Auditorium.
Nataki Garett graduated with a MFA in directing from California Institute of the Arts and has worked as a theater administrator, director, producer, playwright, and educator for over 20 years. She has worked around the world in venues such as, but not limited to, Ford’s Theater in Washington D.C., Dallas Theater Center, Denver Center for the Preforming Arts, The Rockefeller Bellagio Study and Research Center in Italy, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and LeLabo Theater in Paris. Garett joined the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the 2019 season, where she directed the play How to Catch Creation. She is the Festival’s sixth Artistic Director and is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts and Theatre Communications Group Career Development Fellowship for Theatre Directors and a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.
The talk began with Riley asking Garett where her love of theatrics began, to which she stated, “I’ve been in love with the theater since I was 13 years old.” Accompanied with a story of when she was four, being taken to see Swan Lake with her mother — leaning so far over the railing to watch the ballerinas she could’ve fallen off. She began ballet lessons a week later. She then brought up how there are only two currently working black women at the lead of major and prominent theaters, she is the third ever. Speaking on raising others up, and how it is a much for people to work together in an industry such as theater she stated, “I’m a ladder, but also I climbed over a few people to get here.” Explaining that everybody must do their part in both lifting others up and accept the help of those around you to pull yourself closer to the top. Not sealing the gates as the gatekeeper for the castle of an evil ruler, instead holding it open, “I’m gonna hold that gate open for as long as I can, for as many people as I can.”
One of my favorite parts of the interview was when Garett went into her life as being a teacher. Both of her parents were involved in the education system in some way or another and she always expressed how that was a life that she never wanted to have. That life quickly cam for her though, as three months after she graduated from CalArts, she was invited to be a teacher. Taking the job, she described watching her students grow in the most beautiful analogy I have ever heard; she compared the moment an actor finally hits their mark, and finally gets their part just right, to a budding rose. The moment just before a rose blooms into the beautiful flower we all know, such a gorgeous and satisfying moment. She explained that many directors can’t have this moment because they hold a “puppeteers hand” over the actor — not letting them explore their role for themselves — insisting instead for everything to be done exactly their way.
When speaking on access for younger generations to the theater, Garett spoke very strong and proud about how we must do everything in our power to keep cross-generational theater active and alive. She explained how she knows that she won’t be around forever, and if now theater is kept away from younger generations, we won’t have anybody to keep it alive in 50 years. Garett then dug deeper into the job of a theater is to be a communal space, built to be a collective experience unlike any other. The seats are built close together, made to be an intimate experience, going so far that it has been found by scientists that audience members heartbeats sync up while watching a show together.
Riley asked Garett about three of the many shows that are going to be done during the 2020 season of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Bring Down the House, Everything that Never Happened, and Confederates — all three of which sound amazing and I cannot wait to see them in a few months.
Bring Down the House Parts I & II will be playing from March 3 to Nov. 1, 2020 in the Thomas Theatre. Adapted by Rosa Joshi and Kate Wisniewski, this production is all three parts of William Shakespeare’s Henry IV done in two parts. It is part of a program by the name of “Shakespeare in American Communities” and features a diverse, all-female and non-binary cast.
Everything That Never Happened will be playing from July 21 to Oct. 31, 2020 in the Thomas Theatre. Written by Sarah B. Mantell and directed by Jessica Kubzansky, “this play reveals everything you didn’t see take place in The Merchant of Venice. Jessica, daughter of Shylock, falls in love with Lorenzo, a Christian, and decides she must leave the father she loves, her culture, and her religion in order to marry him.” Taking a hard look at the Jewish perspective during the time period, filled with humor and heavy-emotion, making sure to paint an accurate picture of the life of a Jewish woman.
Confederates will be playing from April 8 to Oct. 31, 2020 in the Thomas Theatre. Written by Dominique Morisseau, co-commissioned with Penumbra Theatre and directed by Nataki Garett, this show looks at two women of color over 100 years apart. “Sara, an enslaved woman who wants to fight for the Union in the Civil War, plots an increasingly dangerous path to freedom. Sandra, a brilliant modern-day political science professor, is forced to navigate acts of hostility and the undermining of her authority at work. Leaping back and forth between the parallel struggles of two Black women living 160 years apart, MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Dominique Morisseau (Ain’t Too Proud) takes an unflinching and illuminating look at the complicated and ongoing legacies of institutional racism and gender bias in today’s America.”
The 2020 season of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival will also include:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Copper Children
Peter and the Starcatcher
The Tempest
black odyssey
Bernhardt/Hamlet
Poor Yella Rednecks
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