Page 46 - SOUTHERN OREGON MAGAZINE SPRING 2022

neck of the woods | prof ile

2020. One of my predecessors, Libby Appel, said to me, “You can’t
be responsible for making sure that OSF comes back and also make it
your responsibility that everybody gets hired again because it’s not pos-
sible to rebuild in that way.” I’ve done everything I can to get as many
members of the company back. Everybody had to audition. Actors who
aren’t interested in returning now needed know that this is a potential
home for them in the future. Sometimes you have to get away from
your home base to realize what you have. The people who made their
home in Ashland, who are the carpenters and the artisans and the
crews, I am most concerned about making sure that they have a home.
WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES OF PUTTING
PRODUCTIONS BACK ON STAGE AFTER YOU’VE BEEN
LARGELY DORMANT FOR TWO YEARS?

NATAKI: The big challenge is restarting a machine that has been
running for basically 50 years straight before we had to shut down.
Shutting down gave us an opportunity to explore if it worked properly
to begin with. We had to really think, “How were our systems working
before we shut down? Were we efficient? Was it serving people and
centering artists? Were our systems oppressive?” So, we’re rebuilding
and testing, testing our theories. I’m clear that we cannot bring back
a structural deficit to OSF after a pandemic, we’ll never survive. We
have to rebuild a system that we can sustain. For example, I’ve asked
the director of Once on This Island, which can be a big, oversized musi-
cal, to get the same flavor of this amazing musical but scale it back a bit. How to Catch Creation (2019) in rehearsal:
Actors Nubia Monks and William Thomas
Hodgson, director Nataki Garrett. Photo by
I did the one-person, August Wilson play, How I Learned What I Learned. Kim Budd for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Patrons, who’ve been coming here for years were telling me how

44 www.southernoregonmagazine.com | spring 2022