Transcript: The Threat of An Inclusive American Theatre

If you were at our October 2023 conference, you almost certainly remember Nataki Garrett’s outstanding keynote address. In anticipation of the Annual Conference 2024: Roots Intertwined, we are pleased to share the transcript below.

The Threat of An Inclusive American Theatre 

By Nataki Garrett

Thank you so much, Meredith, and good afternoon, everyone! It feels great to be here with my people, theater people at TBAConnect, and I’m honored to be your keynote speaker. When Melissa called me to extend this gracious invitation, she told me to be myself and speak from my heart — authentically and unapologetically. And let me tell you how refreshing that was. A lot has happened so no telling what will come up. Holler if you hear me.

So here I am today, clear and unapologetic about who I am, what I believe in, and my lived experience as an artist and Black female leader in our industry and first in our field but also as Cheryl’s daughter Lillian and Louise’s granddaughter, Ayodele’s mother. As a whole human with the flaws and mistakes and accomplishments that come with a life fully lived. I am here because I love our industry, because I love collaboration and community, and I know we can move forward if we all move forward together. That means taking an honest look at where we are, together — and to do that I must take a revealing look at myself.

When I accepted the role of Artistic Director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in 2019, I did so knowing about the theater’s reputation for being at the forefront of equity and inclusion. This was an effort to evolve, to progress, and to reflect humanity. Which from my understanding began with a Doris Duke grant and an audience manifesto penned by the amazing Freda Castillas — a marketing manifesto dedicated to diversifying the audience. However, I was clear years before my arrival at OSF that I was never meant to live in Ashland, Oregon, in what began as a whites-only state with Black exclusionary laws written into its constitution. I was clear when I visited the town years before I became the first black artistic director and the first woman to artistic direct a theater at that resource level. I came with my family and while we walked down Main Street, we encountered a storefront window displaying what was advertised as “censored books”. In that collection were books that subjugated and objectified my blackness and womanness, racist books that dehumanized Native, AAPI, MENASA people were alongside books that were written by my heroes like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. It was so very jarring and clearly racist that my mother decided that we shouldn’t walk in the town again for the remainder of our visit. When I was applying for the AD position, I came across an article about the renaming of “Dead Indian Memorial Road” in Ashland, Oregon (which is one of Jackson County’s longest streets) in which an ambivalent city manager decided not to listen to the overwhelming outcry against the name. “Nationwide, in my opinion, political correctness is kind of a movement,” she said, adding that she considers it important to preserve history, “To remember, not to relive — or repeat.”

Her callous disregard of genocide and forced removal is merely white supremacy and settler colonialism in action. Preserve harm at all costs to remind people of their place in the hierarchy. These events were my welcome mat as I crossed into Ashland, Oregon to lead a $44M all-producing (non-presenting) theater. My appointment was widely celebrated as history-making — I broke the glass ceiling, I trended on Facebook. Although I am grateful for the public celebration, I decided long ago never to trust or rely on the parade. It is invariably more for those doing the celebrating than it is for the one who is being celebrated. Perhaps its my cynicism, but I have learned in my four decades in the theater to be more cautious than trusting of the applause. I didn’t come for the title, I came for the work.

When I first applied for the job, I told my husband that I was sure the American Theatre was not going to allow a black woman to lead one of its crowned jewels. Not in American Theatre, an industry whose deep, institutional racism never intended to create space for women of color in leadership, and certainly not for Black Women — I remember Debra Wicks the very first black woman to be appointed artistic director of a PWI theater in Michigan. A job she held for 6 months until her board ended the non-profit charter and started a new theatre company without her. Jeannette Harrison was just laid off from ART in Portland and her season suspended — arguably the first Native woman to helm a PWI theater. I applied for 2 reasons: first I didn’t want to be me 20 years later regretting that I didn’t reach for the stars, and 2, I knew I could do the job — I love the theater too much just to flippantly throw my hat in the ring. I knew that it would be the best platform to continue my work and vision for the theater — a vision I cultivated over 4 decades. And as one of the top three resourced of the 75 or so regional theaters in the United States there was an opportunity to do more for more artists. My vision is to return the theater to its original purpose which is to center artists. That was why these theaters were built in the first place. To provide a place for the artist and their work and to serve the public good.

I was born just as the great social upheavals of the 1960s were ending. My parents were organizers and visionaries themselves. They came to Washington DC to help start Federal City College, which now goes by UDC. My mom finished her degree there after participating in the San Francisco State student strike for Black Studies. The longest student strike in university history, which was led by my father Dr. Jimmy Garrett and the legendary Dr. Nathan Hare but was empowered by the force of the people of Hunters Point, Fillmore, Bayview, and Haight Ashbury when it was a black neighborhood. Recently the Chair of the current Africana Studies department said that at the time, all everyone needed was black liberation and black liberation was the seed for all liberation. I was born into the time when Black liberation included Pan Africanism, I grew up with a diasporic consciousness, which gave me a deep intrinsic understanding of collective power. United we stand/divided we fall — this foundation empowered me because I believed anytime and anywhere, we gathered made us stronger in the fight for collective liberation. I have always sought strength in the collective. And I have sought and found alignment and intersection in spaces where marginalized people came together for liberation. I co-founded the Professional Non-Profit Theatre Coalition (PNTC) on that principal. All boats rise at high tide.

I find it to be uncanny how marginalized artists are in the American Theatre. But in a society in which the black body is the bedrock of capitalism — my ancestors were brought here solely for extraction — I expect it. In fact at the beginning of our work in the PNTC we asked how we could be a conduit for salary support for out of work artists and we were laughed at. One lobbyist said that the federal government would never give us the money to pay artists during this crisis — that is what unemployment was for. In my experience as a freelance director, I have been exploited, underpaid, underestimated, undermined, my ideas extracted while the fruits of my labor undervalued. One time I arrived at a reputable theater in the second city for a workshop only to be told that I wouldn’t be paid on the first day of rehearsal as was promised before I arrived. I was told the finance office was not able to cut enough checks to pay me that day. I told them we would cancel rehearsal for the day because I don’t work for free. Later as a leader I was asked as confirmation bias — if I believed that it was normal for artists to have to wait to be paid. I have worked for theaters where it was normal for the artist to receive their flight and housing confirmations before their contract was finalized and the salary agreed on. These are the kinds of exploitations I used my positional power at my former institutions to try to eradicate. I once asked a finance office to create a system that paid the most vulnerable lowest paid employee first and me last. They worked on it for weeks only to tell me that it wasn’t possible with the current system and changing the system in the middle of a season would be disastrous. The systems we use to make theatre inadvertently uphold the capitalistic white supremacy this country was founded on. But across the country and globe there are so many examples of how to do this work with intentionality and integrity. Ways that center the collective and are intrinsically inclusive. Holler if you hear me!

During the pandemic all theaters were deemed unessential by the federal government and mandated to close. Which left many artists without financial security, especially those of the global majority. Still the artists came together to demand change during the so-called “racial reckoning” of 2020. Born out of the fire of the #MeToo movement of a few of years earlier, new groups formed to organize around the goal of eradicating harm in the theater in the wake of extreme anti-blackness with the public executions of George Floyd by police, Ahmad Arbery by vigilante thugs, and Breonna Taylor by systems of failure fueled by the racist War on Drugs. Again, Black Liberation is the fuel for all liberation — From Black Theatre Network to We See You to the Bay Area’s Living Document our industry had a so-called reckoning of its own. And the theaters responded with statements and hirings and promises that now ring empty. Those of us who are the most vulnerable knew those promises were empty. WE know they believed that the call for change was only for our good and not for the good of the industry and not for the good of our entire society. While some of my colleagues expressed fear that they would be outed for their bias and ambivalence, I and a handful of mostly BIPOC Artistic Leaders focused on meeting the demands and shifting the theater from extraction to intentionality at our organizations. All of us had inherited legacy theaters with huge structural deficits and now we were faced with saving them from sunsetting. I was clear that my mandate was to reform the structures and systems in order to create something new, not to rebuild existing systems of harm.

When I first arrived at OSF in 2019 every dinner every meeting with patrons centered how much they loved the company of artists at OSF. In my endeavor not to rebuild systems of harm I announced my vision to “Center the Artist”. You can imagine my surprise at the blowback I received from those same people. From letters from a group of patrons who called themselves “the old white guard” who said that my choices proved that I didn’t like white people to letters to the editor saying my calls for inclusivity were meant to exclude them. The number of conversations with people who felt that focusing on the artists didn’t leave a place for them. The local journalists who used their publications as a bully pulpit saying quote “that they admired OSF’s diversity efforts but thought the drop in the number of Shakespeare plays it produced showed that the theater no longer trusted Shakespeare to draw audiences. In a second column, they said that by programming so many diverse, contemporary plays didn’t make business sense, because the majority of the Ashland audience is white. Herbert Rothschild. And let’s be clear, that was HIM being authentic and unapologetic.

Bert Etling, the editor of the publication added, “People don’t want to lose control of things that are important to them and if they feel that something is being taken away, they’re going to protest that and they’re going to make their discomfort known.” Nothing about the pandemic that we were still in the throes of and nothing about the $19M I had raised almost single-handedly and with little support from the storied individual donor base to save the place from sunsetting.

Later they would lament that I didn’t know the difference between criticism and a threat, which I have never conflated. I know the difference. I was threatened by the 21^st century version of White Citizens’ Counsel. For the record, they threatened me by sending a messenger to tell my father that the play opening he attended would be my last. When that didn’t scare me away, they moved their very personalized criticism of me to Next Door, which is the Yelp for vindictive neighbors. When that didn’t scare me away, they conspired against my security detail and when that didn’t work, they threatened my housing which also threatened my security.

The October 2022 NPR article that was meant to be focused on the work we were doing to change and evolve the work of the theater gained national attention in large part because of one sentence: “Garrett has received death threats, and now travels with a security team in public.” I will say a couple of more things about this and leave it. First, as a woman-bodied person I live in a society that blames women for the violence they experience. As a Black person in the time of Black Lives Matter I know that my life does not matter to most people. So, I froze — I didn’t leave the house for a month. A security detail was suggested, and the rest is now history.

Like many towns across the country, Ashland is outwardly progressive and internally entrenched. That is what living in the death throes of a long history of white supremacy looks like, where efforts to alter and heal from racialized systems are met with backlash. Pay attention to the senseless murder of 19-year-old Aiden Ellison for playing his music from his car in a motel parking lot, in Ashland in 2020. Local reporting of that murder focused not on the young man who was killed, but on the humanity of the killer as a father. For the record, that murderer got Manslaughter, not murder, and was sentenced to only 12 years for taking a young life for no reason. But All Lives Matter right?

The threat left me scared all the time 24 hours a day every day for 18 months. You cannot imagine how humiliating it is to surrender your body to another human for your safety every day and it is hard to express how stressful it is to live under threat and to know that your baby, husband, mother are in danger because they are with you. I was raised by strong independent black women, and I found myself listening to a well-trained veteran of the armed forces with a deep code of conduct whose profession was to tell me where to put my body so that he could ensure I would survive the day. He had to teach me how to be a client so that I would not put us both in more danger. I have heard through the grapevine that I was threatened several times; I was not. Some folks in Ashland and some of my fellow theater colleagues across the country gossiped that I made it up because I wanted to feel famous (in Ashland? — the notion is absurd) or to cover up my short comings as a leader, which if I was a white man would be seen as normative and human. Others said that focusing on the threats were scaring people away from coming to Ashland. It’s inhumane to speculate on the value of my life, and no matter who it comes from it is white supremacist, racist, anti-black and misogynoir. You know who you are — If you are listening or watching — go fuck yourself. Holler if you hear me!

I share this with you not because I want to sit in the harm or belabor the past — but to highlight that this isn’t the past. These kinds of things are still happening now, everywhere. And sometimes it’s easy to forget that because we are somewhat in a bubble here in the Bay Area. Granted, there are people here in this room who have had similar experiences in leadership here in this bubble. Therefore, we cannot sit back just because things aren’t that bad here, or because we don’t experience these things where we live. There is no “peepee side of the pool.” If one of us has an to experience professional violence, then we are all victims of that violence. Like I said, I believe in collective power.

As a changemaker in the theater, it often feels like change is slow as the pendulum swings in both directions. We have witnessed as the reactions to change in this country have been swift and sometimes, violent. We are hypocrites — decrying war around the globe in Gaza and Israel in Ukrane, Mali, and South Sudan but refusing to act against the war we are raging against one another through mass killings and terroristic gun violence right here at home. In the realm of politics and the unjust murders of Black and Brown people in America, where and how do making plays fit in? Classical Greek theater was a place for debating the social and political issues of the time. In his day, Shakespeare’s heavily political dramas were entertaining, educational, and popular, and have been used flexibly, throughout history to make meaning, and challenge cultural assumptions. Is this why making changes to the systems of theater can evoke the same fears and anger as a black man or woman in the White House or increasing diversity in an all-white town? Historically, the individuals who believe they have ownership over the theater because they have money and power, who have been the self-appointed arbiters of “high art” are at an inflection point of change. When Breibart News writes the same article about me as the Chronicle of Philanthropy it is clear we have a problem.

And yet the theater industry has not evolved in step with the artists who are creating culture-shifting, seminal works, and the audiences who want to see them. And so, the struggle is not only with an industry that still operates as status quo but also the theatergoers and donors who are not ready to witness or share their space with the audience the artists are reflecting in their work. The entire system is being called upon to shift. To become inclusive at every level for its survival.

The challenges I have faced are symptomatic of a theater industry that has just enough global majority to make change visible, but no commitment to eliminate the systems and cycles of harm. And few People with Disabilities or Trans/Non-Binary in leadership. This is why steps toward inclusion are met with accusations of exclusion. Why people of color in the industry are applauded for bringing in new, bold perspectives, yet accused of not appreciating or understanding the theaters or their constituencies. Why criticism can give way to threats of harm.

I portend and I still maintain that instead of extractive, our theaters must be intentional spaces for artists to thrive. Intentional about the artist, the art they bring, the resources they need and where they need to come from, the developmental support that is required, the audience that is being invited, and consciousness about future of the projects they are birthing. From the producers to the technicians to the carpenters to the costumers to the marketers and fundraisers the support system that surrounds the art and the artist must be intentional with everyone pointed towards the same goal. Every demand in the We See You demands list is a call for intentionality as are all the acts of harm recorded on the Living Document. And these are some of what has driven me to work to create a more intentional practice as a producer and leader.

My current position as one of the co-artistic leaders of One Nation One Project is giving me some hope for my chosen profession. I have been given a birds eye view on the ways the rest of the country from rural Appalachia to the highlands in Honolulu to Gainesville, FL to the Bronx and Oakland, CA, in community health centers and art centers and in city government there are people using their resources to ensure that #ArtIsForEveryBody. They are employing artists in health centers and prescribing arts practice as a way to improve community health. They are cultivating a generation of artmakers who are empowered to make art without the limits or constraints of institutions. Their work feeds my soul.

My mandate as a leader in the Theater Ecology is clear: to place the artist at the center, and create the conduit for how we engage, develop, and access the work, in both live and digital spaces. I see artists as thought leaders and change makers who transform culture by reflecting our current humanity back to ourselves. I trust artists throughout history and into the present because they have their ears to the ground and their hands on the pulse of humanity. They provide their hearts to help us deepen our empathy and broaden our horizons to what is necessary and possible to make a brighter future. A future I will certainly not experience, but I will continue to bring people together to in this work to ensure future generations can have access to the tools and resources we leave behind to respond to their current experience of humanity and to further deepen their empathy. I urge you all to join me in fighting for this future for our industry. Holler if you hear me!

I believe in the power of theatre; I believe in art and artists; and I believe we have an opportunity and an obligation to reshape our industry for ALL people — authentically and unapologetically.

Thank you, Melissa Hillman and Theatre Bay Area, for inviting me to share today. And thank you to all of you for the work you do!

Ashé!

Have a great conference!