Ashland sits at the foot of the Siskiyou Mountains where Oregon’s Rogue Valley begins. Founded in 1852 as a gold-mining outpost, the modest city is surrounded by hiking and mountain-biking trails, but its main attraction for the past 89 years has been the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Among the largest, most prestigious nonprofit theater companies in the country, OSF is known for its dynamic ensemble of repertory actors and fierce embrace of both modern and classic texts, especially those of its namesake. Whether productions are reverent or deconstructed, OSF makes the Bard accessible without compromising his language or ideas. I began covering the festival as the theater critic for the Sacramento Bee in 2000. For 17 years, I made the five-hour drive up I-5 for the spring openings and summer outdoor performances, taking in eight or nine productions each year, from plays by international masters to original commissioned works, even a few musicals.
Last September, I returned for the first time since 2018. (The Bee laid off its features department in 2017.) My visit followed a major shake-up that saw the festival’s first Black female artistic director, Nataki Garrett, depart amid disastrous budget shortfalls and significant acrimony around questions of diversity and politics. These challenges were compounded by the lingering impacts of COVID-19 and wildfire smoke, which kept audiences away and wreaked havoc on OSF’s already-truncated seasons.
Across the country, the pillars propping up nonprofit theater have collapsed. The ticket-sales-plus-donor-gifts equation no longer adds up on either end. As OSF’s new season began on March 29, the storied festival was struggling to redefine itself in a drastically changed world.
“We gotta get that mojo back here,” says Tim Bond, OSF’s new artistic director, who helped integrate and diversify festival management when he first joined the team more than 25 years ago.
Last September, Bond took over the artistic director job from Garrett, who had resigned a few months earlier. Garrett had sought a serious course correction for the festival through diversifying and growing the dwindling audience in every way.
Garrett marketed the festival to groups beyond its traditional attendees. A vocal segment of town stakeholders, festival old-timers, and deep-pocketed donors accused her of diluting the festival with “woke” programming and abandoning or “canceling” Shakespeare.
In fact, Garrett’s selections were in line with those of artistic director Bill Rauch before her—she just had fewer slots because of the budget shrinkage. Garrett’s 2022 season featured 2 Shakespeare plays out of 8, while the Rauch-programmed 2019 season had 3 out of 11. Two of the five productions in Garrett’s 2023 season were Shakespeare.
While some saw her mission as a necessary expansion to invigorate the theater, others were less pleased. Garrett was openly harassed in Ashland and eventually resorted to hiring private security to protect herself and her family from death threats. Then in May 2023, after some OSF managerial shuffling, Garrett abruptly resigned, returning with her family to Northern California. The productions she oversaw and the one she directed would continue through October 2023, when the season ended.
Bond now finds himself running a beloved, yet underfunded, festival at the most consequential moment in its history.
“Tim is a compassionate leader,” director Dawn Monique Williams tells me. A major figure at the festival, Williams is directing this summer’s tentpole production of Jane Eyre (May 31–October 11). “I think Tim is a great choice to bridge the gap,” Williams says. “We have to name that there is a gap, that there is this feeling of old OSF versus new OSF.”
“It’s all bogus,” Williams adds. “Honestly, there’s no such thing as an old OSF.”
I attended Williams’s production of Twelfth Night on my first evening in town during my September visit. Twitchy high schoolers and stoic seniors filled the audience for her New Orleans–vibed version. Williams manifested the well-known opening line (“If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it”) with torchy ballads by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Nina Simone. “Twelfth Night is a blues play,” Williams tells me. “Blues as a Black African American art form is really about exorcising grief.” The play meditates on loss and unrequited love, intertwining those feelings with slapstick humor.
“I thought it was hilarious,” Brooke Sanders, a high school drama student from San Ramon, tells me later. “Shakespeare’s different, in a way, from seeing the musicals,” says Sanders, who sees Broadway touring musicals like Dear Evan Hansen with her dad in San Francisco. “It was really cool to see a contemporary spin on iconic plays.”
When I meet with Bond in his office the following morning, he tells me he was also in the Twelfth Night audience. “Last night, I sat next to these wonderful ladies who are having a very lively conversation,” he says. “Come to find out, they’ve been coming since 1981!”
Bond’s sparsely decorated second-story office features two oversize computer screens and a picture window looking across the valley onto ocher foothills. The administrative building backs onto OSF’s three-theater complex, which extends to the edge of quietly running Ashland Creek and 100-acre Lithia Park, a historical landmark dating to 1914.
Even though he hadn’t even been on the job for a month the night of the performance, Bond already found himself acting as the public face of the festival, connecting with attendees like the ones he met the night before. “They’re sisters, they’re Filipino,” he says. “It was a family tradition started by their parents, who are now deceased, but they still come. It’s a pilgrimage.”
As OSF board chair Diane Yu puts it, “it’s a destination theater in a rural part of a very beautiful section of the United States. It means people usually have to intend to come, and it involves travel.” Most attendees stay several days in Ashland—dining at the upscale restaurants, shopping at the patchouli-scented boutiques downtown. When the festival thrives, so does Ashland; when it struggles, the town does too.
Like it or not, the festival is Ashland’s meal ticket. City leaders make space for the event, even if they are politically averse to the progressive ambitions of the festival’s artistic directors. Even founder Angus Bowmer’s choices were not immune to second-guessing.
“When he decided he wanted to add non-Shakespeare to the festival, there was an uproar about that,” says Tyrone Wilson, a 30-year veteran of the company and an OSF historian. “The town was like, ‘No, no—you’ll ruin it, and people will stay away.’”
In April 2023, OSF had announced it was teetering financially. Garrett, who had been appointed artistic director in March 2019, appealed publicly to donors for an emergency $2.5 million cash infusion with an online post headlined “The Show Must Go On: Save Our Season, Save OSF.”
OSF is not the only nonprofit performing arts organization in financial peril. Last June, the Center Theatre Group canceled its season’s programming at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, which is expected to remain dark this year. Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company paused its entire 2023 season, as did California Shakespeare Theater (or Cal Shakes) in Orinda. When the Brooklyn Academy of Music eliminated programs and 26 staff positions last year, its president, Gina Duncan, said the cuts were needed to “weather the downturn in charitable giving for the arts, and address an outdated business model that heavily relies on a shrinking donor base.”
At OSF, ticket sales make up around 30 percent of the festival’s revenue, but attendance hasn’t yet recovered from the pandemic. And performing arts are facing another endemic problem: their audience is aging out.
“The industry is at a crossroads,” Garrett told me in November. “What is the theater to do when they haven’t been focusing on cultivating a relationship with a new audience?”
There are about 21,000 people living in Ashland; 86.8 percent of them are white, according to 2023 figures from the United States Census Bureau. Though the town promotes a welcoming facade (the high school marquee proclaims “BLACK LIVES MATTER”), it has a history of racist hostility.
In the 19th century, the town was braced by an influx of gold miners and homesteaders lured by the southern Bear Creek Valley’s 1850s federal Donation Land Claim Act, which granted 320-acre land parcels to unmarried white male citizens 18 or older. The plots were taken from the Takelma and Shasta Native communities that lived here and were forcibly removed in the Rogue River Wars of the 1850s.
A land acknowledgment noting the original inhabitants of Ashland and the atrocities committed in forcing them off their ancestral lands is read before each OSF performance, a gesture some attendees consider “political” and annoying.
In a nationally reported incident, the African American actor Christiana Clark was walking her dog in 2016 when a white man told her he could kill her. “The KKK is alive and well here,” he said.
City leaders quickly denounced the incident with “that’s not who we are” statements, but, as Clark has said, “to be a Black person walking around Ashland isn’t as safe as we want to dream it to be.”
In February 2024, a group named Ashland Together launched an awareness campaign called the Ashland Sunrise Project as part of its mission to foster unity and counteract the image of southern Oregon as racist or exclusionary.
Progress remains uneven. Omolade Wey, a New York–based actor in her first season at OSF, was in last year’s all-Black cast of The Three Musketeers and spent much of her offstage time with her colleagues. “Even though there were a lot of us, you still get noticed in a different way in a town like Ashland,” Wey tells me.
This is familiar territory for Bond, who has been roughly cast as OSF’s savior. Bond previously served as the associate artistic director at OSF from 1996 to 2007, recruited by then–artistic director Libby Appel and executive director Paul Nicholson, who led the organization at that time. “They asked me, ‘Would you be willing to come? We need help to figure out how to diversify and how to become a more inclusive theater,’” Bond recalls. He had been at the Seattle Theatre Group for 15 years doing exactly that.
Board chair Yu says that Bond “has an ability and willingness to tackle difficult situations and challenging ones and keep calm throughout it.”
“I was the first person of color on the entire staff of Oregon Shakespeare Festival when I got here in 1996,” Bond says. He bought a home in Ashland and started raising a family. “You plant your stakes somewhere eventually in life, and I planted them here.”
In his previous tenure at OSF, Bond began a fruitful collaboration with Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson, becoming one of the most prominent interpreters of his work. He has committed to directing all the plays in Wilson’s Century Cycle, which examines the African American experience in every decade of the 20th century.
Perhaps most importantly, Bond founded FAIR (Fellowships, Assistantships, Internships, and Residencies), a professional development program to create opportunities for members of underrepresented communities. “It infused this company with a lot of new energy, a lot of cultural difference that hadn’t been here,” Bond says. The program has been on hiatus for several years owing to budget cuts, but he intends to bring it back.
In 2007, Appel retired, and her preferred replacement, Rauch, overhauled OSF’s team, ultimately letting Bond go. I reminded him that we had spoken in 2007 shortly before he departed, and the usually circumspect Bond had expressed deep disappointment.
“I had forgotten I felt like that,” he says during our most recent interview. Bond takes off his Kangol cap, running his hand over his shaved brown head. He has a salt-and-pepper mustache and an open, welcoming presence. “I had helped be a part of building what was getting scaffolded up when Bill took over,” he says.
“These things happen in transitions,” Bond says. “When you lose things or you have to leave things, you learn how to let go. It’s a part of my practice in life.”
My second night in Ashland, I attended a performance of The Three Musketeers. An older white friend of mine who’d seen it proclaimed the production “too woke,” which sounded, to me, like he meant “too Black.” Playwright Kirsten Childs’s episodic adaptation drew on writer Alexandre Dumas’s Haitian lineage while also incorporating aspects of modern hip-hop culture in a winking, tongue-in-cheek way.
The production never really galvanized for me. A review in Eugene Weekly stated, “Directed by Kent Gash, the characters in this very self-conscious adaptation by Kirsten Childs of Alexandre Dumas’ swashbuckling adventure poke fun at the language of the play, but they’re not funny enough to redeem the tedium of much of the dialogue.” Add in a barrage of F bombs and some corny, unconvincing rapping, and you’ve got a slog—a three-hour endurance test.
Word of mouth around the OSF audience community was devastatingly negative. To many, the production was emblematic of Garrett’s mandate to broaden the audience. “When I was in my interview process, the board and search committee made it very clear that the audiences were waning and they were looking for a way forward to improve in that area,” Garrett tells me.
During my visit in Ashland, I meet longtime OSF company member Kate Hurster for coffee at the cramped storefront formerly occupied by Puck’s Donuts, which is now an upscale purveyor of small-batch roasted beans and baked goods. Hurster met and married her husband, actor Al Espinosa, here in Ashland. They have two children and are popular, visible members of the acting company, often hosting donor and audience events.
After Garrett’s departure last spring, Hurster went out on a limb, writing to the OSF board with suggestions about how it should proceed. OSF vets Kevin Kenerly and Tyrone Wilson helped Hurster draft the message, as did her husband. They argued for one-person shows featuring long-standing ensemble members who are popular with audiences but had been let go in recent years.
The letter, signed by current and former ensemble members, was read aloud at a board meeting. Several specific production ideas have been implemented this season, including the one-person shows. “We felt heard,” Hurster says.
Entering the 2024 season, there are some encouraging signs: the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation donated $2 million; philanthropist Louise Gund, who had rescinded a $4.5 million gift when Garrett was named artistic director, led a group contributing up to $6 million. Bond is even staffing up, hiring an associate artistic director and a director of new works. This season there will be 10 productions; three are Shakespeare, and four are one-person shows, three of those by longtime company members.
Garrett has largely avoided speaking to the press since leaving OSF. She tells me she’s clear and direct about the consequences of hiring her for prospective organizations. Their donors have never had a Black woman at the helm, Garrett explains. The donor base doesn’t “know how it feels about Black female leadership,” she says. The fundamental question is, Will donors fiscally support her agenda? “We have to be conscious as we move forward, there will be some people who don’t want to,” she says.
After speaking with Bond, I attended the production of Romeo and Juliet directed by Garrett at the Angus Bowmer Theatre. Set in a “West Coast city, sometime between the great recession and now,” the staging explored the play against “the backdrop of desperation instead of abundance.”
Nina Ball’s extraordinary set captured the despair and ingenuity one sees daily at encampments beneath freeways across California and the rest of the United States. While some of the performances were uneven, there were revelations. Catherine Castellanos as Capulet, Shauna Miles as Lady Capulet, and Caroline Shaffer as Nurse were each extremely moving.
After the show, I talked with Castellanos, whom I’d never met but whose work I knew from her essential presence throughout Bay Area theater. “I don’t know where else I get this specific opportunity to do the roles that I’m doing, particularly the demographic that I am,” she said.
“I have to give that to Nataki and whoever else made that decision,” she said of Garrett. “She exemplifies giving opportunity and throwing the rope down.”
As she spoke, Castellanos’s eyes glistened. A couple of students who’d been in the audience hesitantly shuffled toward her. She turned to them, opening her arms. Though she had another show that evening, her afternoon nap could wait. This moment was about the audience.•
