The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Allen Elizabethan Theatre sits just above Lithia Park in downtown Ashland. (Randy L. Rasmussen)

ASHLAND – On the surface, it's just another season for the 84-year-old Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Theatergoers, from high school students to retirees, are trooping through downtown Ashland, strolling through Lithia Park and applauding productions from Shakespeare retellings to a hit Broadway musical to new works. Directors and actors are leading tours through the festival’s three theaters. Six miles away in Talent, the festival’s production staff is crafting sets and props daily.

But beyond the surface, the nation’s oldest and largest nonprofit repertory theater company is at a pivotal moment, with change at the top and challenges everywhere. It’s bringing in its first new artistic director in 12 years and preparing to start a search for a new executive director. It’s coming off a smoke-plagued 2018 season that ended with 26 outdoor performances either canceled or moved indoors, $2.3 million in losses and 16 layoffs. It’s coping with a target audience that increasingly sees summer as a less desirable time to be in Ashland. It’s had to mend fences with local businesses unhappy about a new ticket-selling strategy for peak season. And it’s approaching a round of contract negotiations with the union that represents stagehands and other behind-the-scenes employees.

The festival announced good news in May: that longtime supporter Roberta "Bertie" Bialek Elliott, sister to billionaire Warren Buffett, had made an unrestricted $4.5 million donation, a gift that amounts to 10% of the festival's annual operating budget of about $44 million. By theater standards, it's a significant donation. According to Teresa Eyring, executive director of the national theater organization Theatre Communications Group, "a multimillion-dollar gift for any theater of any size is remarkable."

But the festival, like other U.S. nonprofit theater companies, continues to deal with concerns about attendance and audience demographics, Eyring said. Add to that the threat of another outdoor season heavy with smoke, and “it’s a big, beautiful organization that has some significant challenges that they’re navigating their way through right now.”

Don't Edit

As of August, Nataki Garrett will be the artistic director for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. (Bill Geenen/Oregon Shakespeare Festival)

Inside the Oregon Shakespeare Festival offices, Nataki Garrett's name is already on a door, engraved on a plaque above the words "incoming artistic director."

Garrett doesn't officially take over as the festival's sixth artistic director until August, when her predecessor, Bill Rauch, departs to become artistic director of the future Ronald O. Perelman Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. But she's already begun integrating herself into the festival. She's directing the West Coast premiere of Christina Anderson's play "How to Catch Creation," an ode to creativity, community, love and legacy that opens July 27. And on April 23, William Shakespeare's birthday, she joined Rauch in announcing the festival's 2020 season.

Garrett comes to Ashland from the Denver Center for the Performing Arts' Theatre Company, where she was lauded as a "change artist" upon her 2017 appointment as associate artistic director. Shortly after she arrived, the company's producing artistic director, Kent Thompson, fulfilled a pledge to resign. Garrett in turn stepped down in 2018 after Thompson's replacement, Chris Coleman, moved to Denver from Portland Center Stage, where he'd been artistic director.

Garrett said of her short Denver tenure that her original plan to stay long enough to buy a house and put down roots was “not how the universe wanted it to go.”

“I loved that organization and I really wanted them to flourish and I really wanted Chris to flourish in that first year,” she said. But, she said, she decided that her departure would allow him to focus on building his own team. “I had a lot of freelance work and I really wanted to take advantage of that … and so that’s what I did.”

Related: Meet Oregon Shakespeare Festival's new artistic director, Nataki Garrett

Don't Edit

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's incoming and outgoing artistic directors, Nataki Garrett and Bill Rauch.

Garrett continues to represent change as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s first black artistic director, as well as its first artistic director who didn’t come up through the festival ranks as a director or an actor. Asked how she emerged as the top candidate, Peter Koehler Jr., co-chair of the festival’s board of directors, said the board is not discussing details of the search. Board co-chair Diane Yu said in a press release in March that Garrett impressed the search committee with her “powerful artistic vision, proven change leadership qualities, and the ability to continue the Festival’s upward trajectory.”

Garrett said she plans to introduce changes collaboratively.

“I have grand ideas,” she said, “but I never walk into a room filled with people and act like I was the one who discovered the room. So I really do need to come and figure out who’s in the room, how things have come to this point and what other people are dreaming about, so that their dreams and my dreams can be folded together and we can do our most amazing work together.”

“She knows her way around organizational challenges,” said Eyring, who sits with Garrett on the Theatre Communications Group’s 38-member board of directors, which also includes OSF’s associate artistic director, Christopher Acebo. “She’s someone who is able to assess a situation, an organization, a culture, a series of challenges or problems, and move … in purposeful ways toward finding solutions and finding positive outcomes.”

She’s arguably helped bring about one positive outcome already: Rauch said Elliott’s $4.5 million gift to the festival is intended in part “to launch Nataki Garrett’s tenure on … firm ground.”

Don't Edit

Smoke obscures mountains surrounding Emigrant Lake outside of Ashland on July 23, 2018. (Janet Eastman/Staff)

On a clear day, Oregon Shakespeare Festival visitors can easily see the Siskiyou Mountains south of Ashland. But last summer, smoke from wildfires blanketed the mountains and the city, causing all sorts of headaches for the festival, whose showpiece theater, the Allen Elizabethan Theatre, has 1,190 open-air seats and typically hosts three productions each season.

"The air was so bad out here, it was starting to affect the inside theaters' insulation and our housing. We were sitting in a cloud of horrible air for two months," recalled Amanda Sager, a festival sound engineer who is president of Local 154 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

Sager said stage crews found themselves repeatedly moving shows between the Elizabethan and its backup, the indoor Mountain Avenue Theatre at Ashland High School a mile away, on short notice. “You’re working outside in those conditions that are unsafe to have performances in,” she said. “It’s all around an incredibly horrible experience that led to a lack of trust.”

Don't Edit

Smoke from wildfires drifts through Ashland at 8 a.m. Aug. 30, 2017. (Janet Eastman/Staff)

And, she said, it was a perplexing experience given that 2018 was by no means the festival’s first brush with wildfire smoke.

According to a recent financial audit by McDonald Jacobs, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival received $712,500 in “insurance recoveries” in 2017 “for lost revenue due to wildfire smoke, which forced the cancellation of performances during fiscal years 2013, 2014 and 2015.” The festival also canceled performances because of wildfire smoke in 2017. The audit didn’t elaborate, but in 2016 a federal judge ruled mostly in favor of the festival when it sued its then-insurer, Great American Insurance Co., for denying coverage for smoke-related losses.

OSF is “currently uninsurable for this type of coverage,” the audit says.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

The cast of "WillFul," a 2011 Oregon Shakespeare Festival production, rehearses in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre for the show's opening. (Brian Feulner)

Smoke has also filtered into public perception of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as a less desirable place to be during peak summer. In April, Travel Southern Oregon and Southern Oregon University released the Southern Oregon Visitor Smoke Survey, a survey of 1,905 people who visited the region in the summers of 2017 and 2018. About 72% of those who planned to return said the possibility of wildfire smoke would be a factor in deciding when to visit.

In response, the festival has a new strategy for selling tickets to its 2019 outdoor productions: limiting outdoor ticket sales and adding indoor performances during peak wildfire season.

From July 30 through Sept. 8, OSF is selling just 412 tickets per outdoor show – the number of seats in Ashland High School’s theater. Starting July 30, “if we are lucky because the weather’s beautiful and there’s not smoke and we can remain outdoors (at the Elizabethan), we will of course remain outdoors as long as we can, and we will try to fill all those wonderful extra seats,” Rauch said.

“But we feel like our primary bond is with our patrons, and when smoke is such that they can’t be outdoors and be healthy outdoors, then we want to make sure we can guarantee that if they purchased a ticket, they can experience the show.”

Don't Edit

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2017 production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" was staged at the festival's outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theatre. (Kim Budd/Oregon Shakespeare Festival)

Once a show moves indoors, it will likely stay there through Sept. 8, Rauch said. “We don’t want to put the audience and our company through the hourly, daily drama, which is what happened last year,” when the festival often waited until 6 or 7 p.m. to make the call on whether to cancel or move an 8 p.m. outdoor show.

To compensate for selling fewer open-air seats, the festival has expanded its August calendar, adding weekday matinees at Ashland High School for the 2019 Elizabethan productions: “Macbeth,” All’s Well That Ends Well” and “Alice in Wonderland.” The matinees will run regardless of whether the air is smoky.

And it likely will be. The National Interagency Fire Center has said the potential for significant wildfires is above normal west of the Cascades in Oregon through August.

Koehler, the board co-chair, said the new ticket-sales strategy was proposed by festival staff. The board “thought it was the right approach,” he said. He’s sympathetic to those disappointed by the decreased availability of Elizabethan tickets.

“The experience of going to Ashland and seeing the play under the stars as night is falling is iconic, and it is what draws people to Ashland,” Koehler said. “It’s what I remember as a 10-year-old coming down with my family to Ashland. So as we think about it, the long-term solution, that’s not lost on us. The solutions we’re talking about are not all about eliminating the outdoor experience.”

Don't Edit

Downtown Ashland, seen from the ninth floor of the Ashland Springs Hotel. (Randy L. Rasmussen/2009)

The new approach to peak season has not been universally embraced. For starters, although OSF board minutes show that the board discussed the strategy in detail at its September 2018 meeting, "around New Year's there was a majority of (local) businesses that were not aware of that decision," said Katharine Cato, the Ashland Chamber of Commerce's marketing director and Visitor & Convention Bureau director.

Bob Hackett, associate director of Medford-based Travel Southern Oregon and a former marketing manager at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, said the decision to cut outdoor ticket sales by two-thirds, in particular, left a bad taste. “I think a lot of hospitality people feel that the message went out (from the festival) that ‘August is going to be awful and we’re basically going to be closed in August,’ ” he said. “There’s a whole other part of the visitor economy that did not have a choice in that decision.”

Rauch said that the festival strives to be a good neighbor and that Ashland and the Rogue Valley are “a big part of the success of our theater. So if there were any missteps in not communicating as clearly or as early with some of our partners in the community, I absolutely take responsibility for that.”

Cato said that while “OSF certainly is that cornerstone to our tourism,” only about a third of Ashland’s more than 350,000 annual visitors attend the festival. The rest show up for outdoor recreation, Ashland’s wine scene, and food events such as the Ashland Culinary Festival, she said.

Don't Edit

Tourism officials say the Oregon Shakespeare Festival isn't the only visitor attraction in Ashland - many visitors come for other reasons, such as Belle Fiore Winery, shown here, and other wineries. (Michael Alberty)

Hackett said the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is just one piece of a regional tourism economy that amounts to $1.1 billion across five Southern Oregon counties. Compared to other Southern Oregon cities, such as Grants Pass, Klamath Falls, Medford and Roseburg, he said, “Ashland is a little flat – it’s a mature market, but it’s basically a flat market right now.”

The festival’s end-of-season summary in 2017 reported that the season closed with attendance of 381,378, about 82% of capacity, and that ticket revenue was $21.9 million. The 2018 season had attendance of 361,838, about 80% of capacity, according to festival spokesman C.J. Martinez. Ticket revenue in 2018 was $21.6 million, according to the audit.

OSF representatives met with local businesses in April to discuss what Hackett called “a real lack of partnership with the community that hosts all their guests. … I think that they recognize that and they are beginning to reach out and re-engage the business community.”

“The bottom line is, we want OSF to be successful,” Cato said. “We are here to partner with them however is best, given what we’re collectively dealing with. … We all breathe the same air.”

Don't Edit

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2018 production of "Romeo and Juliet" was among the outdoor shows affected by wildfire smoke last summer. (Jenny Graham/Oregon Shakespeare Festival)

When the air turned smoky last summer, Oregon Shakespeare Festival stagehands "turned to each other to figure out how to lead us through," said Sager, the Local 154 president. "We didn't feel we had that support from higher management."

Some workers haven’t felt supported in other ways, either, which led to the 2016 chartering of the union. “We turn out these amazing shows,” Sager said, so the feeling was, “why – at the time – am I only being paid $13” an hour?

“We’re done being told, ‘We don’t have the money,’ ” she said.

The festival, which employs about 600 people, paid $27.7 million in salaries, payroll taxes and benefits in fiscal 2018, according to the audit. It also paid $131,164 in “executive search fees.” Tax documents show that in 2016, the most recent year for which the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Form 990 was available, Rauch was paid $320,243 and then-executive director Cynthia Rider was paid $253,174.

Today, according to the union’s website, its roughly 75 members make $15 to $24.25 an hour.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Bill Rauch (second from left), who's been artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival since 2007, and festival staff watch a tech rehearsal for the company's 2010 production of "Hamlet." ( Fredrick D. Joe)

Sager said the relationship between the union and the festival has been “challenging.”

“This company really values the family quality and when a group of people push against that, such as we did … I can imagine it felt really personal for management to have a large corps of employees pushing back and saying, ‘You’re not handling this right.’ ”

The union contract expires in November. Sager said she expects to start negotiations for a new contract this spring or summer.

“This group of stagehands, we want to be part of the culture change that we think the entertainment industry should be growing in,” she said, referring to more inclusive ideals. “I think we have a chance to grow with a new artistic director coming in.”

Don't Edit

Donors' names are inscribed in the courtyard known as The Bricks outside the Angus Bowmer Theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. (Amy Wang/Staff)

Only four other U.S. nonprofit theater companies have budgets of $40 million or more, according to the Theatre Communications Group: three in New York City and one in Los Angeles. Which raises the question: Has the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in doubling its budget in 12 years, grown too big too quickly?

Such growth “is definitely not typical,” Eyring said. “I don’t know if they’re actually able to sustain that size,” she said, noting that theater is expensive because it’s labor-intensive and requires costly materials. But, she added, “they wouldn’t have doubled their budget unless they were also increasing their revenue along the way.”

Of the festival’s annual revenue, about 60% comes from ticket sales and other earned income, such as money made from concessions, educational programs, events and publication sales. The rest comes from contributed income, such as grants and donations, including a gift from The Oregonian/OregonLive’s Season of Sharing campaign to the festival’s education fund last year.

Most theaters have a ratio that’s more like 40% earned income to 60% contributed income, said Koehler, the board co-chair.

Don't Edit

The Thomas Theatre, the smallest and newest of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's three theaters in downtown Ashland. (Amy Wang/Staff)

Rauch said, “We’ll always be proud that earned income is the majority of our income, but that said, stronger contributed income will only strengthen our position. Part of how we’ve been able to grow a roughly $22 million to a roughly $44 million theater in my years here is that we do raise more contributed income.”

Some of that contributed income goes into the festival’s roughly $35 million endowment fund, which was the biggest line item in the festival’s fiscal 2018 cash flow. According to the audit, that year the festival dipped into its endowment fund for nearly $3 million, taking out almost 10% of the fund and wiping out the fund’s $2.4 million increase in fiscal 2017.

In addition to the endowment fund, the festival owns property and equipment with a net value of $35.8 million, according to the audit. It has about $6.3 million in mortgages and other long-term loans, lease commitments totaling $1.5 million and a $1 million line of credit that matures June 1.

Rauch said he thinks it’s “very likely” that the festival will launch a major capital campaign. The festival’s last significant capital campaign was for the Thomas Theatre, which opened in 2002.

Don't Edit

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2019 productions include the world premiere of "Mother Road," written by Octavio Solis and directed by Bill Rauch. (Jenny Graham/Oregon Shakespeare Festival)

In an 84-year-old organization, change is inevitable.

Len and Susan Magazine of Battle Ground, who began attending the festival in the 1970s as northern California residents and have seen virtually every show there in the past two decades, said they’ve seen many changes over the years, including “empty seats.”

Len Magazine said the couple always sits in the front row. At a recent performance, “we turned back and the seats behind us were empty, quite empty – less than 50% (full) in the four, five, six rows behind us, which would normally be the people who are the larger donors.”

The Magazines wondered if the empty seats were a form of protest – the show was Oregon playwright Octavio Solis' "Mother Road," a sequel to John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath" that under Rauch's direction comes down emphatically in favor of diversity and inclusion. But the couple also noted another potential factor: "Ticket prices have increased drastically," Susan Magazine said.

Tickets for indoor productions this season cost as much as $140, while tickets for outdoor shows are as much as $155. “The prices have gone up to major-city price levels, and that has really hurt some of the people who are on more fixed incomes,” Len Magazine said.

The couple note other changes under Rauch: Higher cast turnover, glitzier productions, more emphasis on new works.

Don't Edit

Jean Smart, who later co-starred in the TV hit "Designing Women," was part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival company between 1975 and 1977; here she's shown in Eugene O'Neill's "A Moon for the Misbegotten" in 1977. (Hank Kranzler)

“When we first started going, it was a true repertory company – you saw the same actors year after year,” Susan Magazine said. “It was exciting to watch a familiar face onstage doing something different. Today the bulk of the company changes year after year.”

“We’ve seen lower-quality productions because the newer actors don’t have the stagecraft that the older actors do,” she said.

Len Magazine said the couple has also observed “a tendency to overproduce a play,” resulting in shows that wouldn’t look out of place on Broadway. “It’s not necessary,” he said. “Maybe you need to cut some of your production costs instead of cutting education (programs).”

Under Rauch, the festival's programming has shifted markedly toward new works, such as his American Revolutions series of new plays about "moments of change" in U.S. history, which Len Magazine called one of Rauch's strengths. "They've done works that really make you think and hit you in the gut, and that's what we like – telling history that is ignored or glossed over."

Despite their critiques, the couple don’t plan to stop going to Ashland. But in this pivotal season, they’re prepared for the festival they’ve loved for decades to take on yet another guise.

“When Bill took over,” Susan Magazine said, “everything changed.” With Garrett’s arrival, “we pretty much expect the same.”

Don't Edit