THE DECLINE AND FALL OF OREGON SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL
Or, Will it Be, or Not Be?
Theaters who refuse to tell good stories run the risk of shutting down. To that end, I'll post the link to my first cautionary tale on this topic at the end of this essay.
In the meantime, consider the Oregon Shakespeare Festival crisis.
A month or so ago I reported that this theater, after several years of battling two things it can't control -- fire and the pandemic -- and worsening the situation by mishandling the two things it can control -- public relations and season choice -- was on the ropes.
Now, it's on life support.
With barely enough money to make it through May, it has oh-so-quietly canceled its Christmas show and launched a last-ditch effort to keep the doors open with a "The Show Must Go On: Save Our Season, Save OSF" $2.5 million dollar fundraiser. (The company needs Will to pen a better title for this effort, I think.)
Doing the math, that's maybe enough money to make it a few more months, which may explain the anemic response to the campaign so far.
Put plainly, donating to this effort, as opposed to supporting smaller theaters you might actually enjoy attending, isn't a wise investment, unfortunately. The endowment fund has been tapped repeatedly; leadership at the top is unstable at best and destructive at worst, and the company still insists that woke polemic is the storytelling its long-suffering patrons, donors and sponsors need if they only weren't so racist (and also transphobic) and knew what was good for them.
Public relations. Audiences attending OSF, largely from the Bay Area, Bend, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver are the bluest of blue demographics. They marched for voting rights and against the war in Vietnam. They read My Body, My Self to their kids. They raised feminist boys and girls. They grokked the deal decades before an army of college grads, "trained" in the very, very soft sciences landed on OSF's shores and decided season after season of lambasting these good people was the way to, you know, end teh racism.
This, long after the largest issues around race have been resolved, unfortunately for these dude ranch freedom riders.
So the seasons were designed with scolding in mind. Play after play screeched about the Terrible White Man, wept about How Bad Things Are and railed about Doing the Work.
And it wasn't just audiences given the back of OSF’s hand. While they spent thousands to travel to Ashland only to be battered instead of entertained by a bitter theater company who clearly disliked its base — its only base, lest we forget — it abused its own people as well. Company and staff alike were subjected to struggle session after struggle session; trained in the words they could not utter any longer (in a theater company, no less) and were reduced to walking on eggshells to avoid being denounced and reported, as happens eventually in all Maoist states. Artist and employee churn, along with the layoffs, reduced this grand old company to a ghost on the battlement walls.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival can't fight forest fires and it can't cure Covid. But it sure as hell could have taken care of the people who have taken care of it for these past 80 years. It could have recognized that, especially coming out of the pandemic, people wanted stories that filled them with hope, with laughter, with inspiration. They wanted to feel welcomed home once again. Instead, audiences, donors and sponsors were demeaned, insulted and condescended to through the company's communications, and straight from its stages.
It could have given its artists wings; told them no ideas, no language was off-limits; that freedom OF speech and freedom FROM compelled speech were the cornerstones of spoken art. That art is dangerous and threatening and provocative, and that it was all welcome at OSF. It could have known that its staff was made up of good people working hard for low pay; people who had a right to their private thoughts and lives, and who deserved respect. That they were good people doing their best, and that that was good enough.
It's not the smoke or the flu that's put OSF on life support.
It's OSF.
Sure, it might meet its goal, aided by donors willing to throw good money after bad, hoping against hope that this story has a happy ending. But unless there is a complete turnover of leadership, a complete re-vamping of this and future seasons, and a complete change in mission, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival story will end in tragedy -- one we are seeing play out nationwide, including right here in my hometown, Portland, with its own companies.
Oh and what's Ashland without Oregon Shakes, by the way?
Medford.
I mean no disrespect to that little town. I'm simply reporting the facts. When Oregon Shakespeare Festival fails, Oregon loses, the arts lose, we all lose.
New leadership, new seasons, a new mission might make a miracle happen. But this is the last act, and a deus ex machina at this late date would be just that: a miracle.
Here’s more on the fall of American theater. Theater companies. Take heed.
Denoument Bene: On May 5, 2023, Nataki Garrett, OSF’s artistic director, announced her resignation, stating to American Theatre that “…what OSF is going to need in this next endeavor to move through a crisis may not include my skill set.” The companies’ tax documents and other legal forms required to demonstrate its financial compliance are late, with rumors of malfeasance at worst and criminal mismanagement at best swirling through Ashland and beyond. (The organization’s annual report hasn’t been produced since 2018, for example.) As one letter-writer to Ashland News put it,
“This is not about artistic choices, political rhetoric or whether OSF supporters are too set in their ways or not open to change. It’s about simple competence.
The current OSF leadership was handed a golden goose, and through a bewildering series of missteps has almost killed it. Jettisoning the 17,000 OSF members, rejecting their deep connection to OSF, viewing them only as cash cows. Eliminating the education department, only to belatedly realize how essential that program was and is. Shuttering the Tudor Guild. Shifting away from a repertory season with the old “stay three days, see four plays” philosophy that made OSF a viable vacation destination.
Experienced production staff were let go, replaced by new hires with no institutional memory of how this theater actually worked. Production values suffered. Administrative salaries are bloated with new six-figure positions that may reflect the political priorities of the new OSF leadership but have little to do with the actual process of making plays.
The result has been chaos. The turnover on the board of directors and the endowment board is stunning. Employees are voting with their feet. The only people with actual fiscal competence have left, to be replaced with people with no expertise in managing a multimillion-dollar organization. This is no way to run a railroad, much less a major theatrical institution.” (https://ashland.news/letter-osf-crisis-is-a-matter-of-competence/)
It remains to be seen what tales Oregon Shakespeare Festival will tell now: to the State, burned sponsors and resentful donors, to the town it has abandoned, and to its skeleton audience, demoralized staff, fired designers and scattered actors.
I will continue to write about this subject in new essays as circumstances dictate.
Oh and also, OSF blocked the author on all social media.
All quotes taken from artists, patrons, and Rogue River Valley residents and business owners.
Here's how former employees rate Oregon Shakes as a place to work as posted on glassdoor.com: "Oregon Shakespeare Festival has an overall rating of 1.8 out of 5, based on over 39 reviews left anonymously by employees. 8% of employees would recommend working at Oregon Shakespeare Festival to a friend and 4% have a positive outlook for the business. This rating has decreased by -48% over the last 12 months. Employees also rated Oregon Shakespeare Festival 1.5 out of 5 for work life balance, 1.9 for culture and values and 2.4 for career opportunities.
Some of their comments:
1 Burn out galore, no communication, hollow requests for ideas
The salary ranges are beyond ridiculous. Some people who have worked here for decades make below where they should be, while members of the senior leadership team make near or over $200K.
2 Was valued, until I wasn't.
The administration is more focused on politics than theatre or storytelling. They are systematically tearing down institutional history in favor of creating a new narrative. However, we need to understand history if we are going to build a new future.
3 The Worst Place I Have Ever Worked
From the sexual harassment to bullying to going against the "vision" to fiscal mismanagement to feeding people to the board to funneling money to inflate egos... it's all true. OSF needs to be reborn with competent people at the top. … I hope everyone comes to know the truth about what has been going on at OSF because everything that is being sold to the media is also a lie.
4 Used to love it here, now can't wait to leave.
The organization has had a pretty hard time since the start of the pandemic, as have most arts orgs. But OSF hasn't bounced back the way other orgs have. Leadership has burned their bridges with the community and alienated most of its donors through a series of ridiculously bad calls:
Gutting the industry-leading education program.
Eliminating the membership program and revoking most of the benefits of being a donor while expecting people to continue giving out of the goodness of their hearts.
Kicking an 80+ year old volunteer organization out of its role running the gift shop (so now no gift shop generating revenue and hundreds of angry former volunteers and donors).
Cutting the number of shows in half and expecting ticket sales to not drop catastrophically.
Sinking millions into vanity digital projects with no ROI, some of which look like they were made by highs school students.
Social media and PR contractors who work to burnish the reputation of one person instead of the company.
Hiring contractors from among a small, favored list, with outrageous pay and no controls on costs or firm list of deliverables.
Ignoring or firing long-term professionals because their professional opinion doesn't align with the aspirational goals of management.
Outright lying to the board of directors on financial forecasts to make them think vanity projects can bring in enough revenue to support themselves.
Firing or driving out competent leaders and hiring replacements without the skill and experience to do the job and paying them more to do less.
Ego, ego, and more ego.
It's sad to see a once-great organization broken like this. COVID certainly did its part to ruin the place. Inept executive leadership with a one-size-fits-all big city mentality it tried to force onto a small town didn't help. Artistic leadership that goes around saying things like "these white people think the purpose of theater is to be entertained" and "we used to be Shakespeare summer camp for rich old white ladies" and having programmed the three most depressing seasons of theater in the organization's history in a time when the whole world was just looking for a little joy drove the nail into the coffin.
Advice to Management
Find a strong business-minded Executive Director who will remember that the purpose of the organization is to produce shows people want to see, at a sustainable price.
Stop the disastrous and costly experiments with VR and go back to the roots of producing quality live theater (and film it for broader distribution).
Build a functioning finance department that can pay bills on time.
5 To quote Shakespeare: "Hell is empty and all the devils are here"
Artistic and current leadership can be great artists, but are convinced they can do the administrative and business side of operations and, as evidenced by all of my former colleagues reviews here, obviously cannot. They demand respect but refuse to respect anyone else’s expertise in their fields or professions. The amount of time and energy spent trying to do our jobs while having to carefully tiptoe around wild narcissism and egos was unmatched and exhausting. Leadership has no understanding of people’s jobs outside of their Artistic department, and thus continuously led to poor staffing decisions including nonsensical layoffs, stolen ideas, and interdepartmental strain. Gaslighting and retaliation against speaking up was a huge issue, and one I personally was affected by along with many of my colleagues. Training in systems is nearly non-existent. People let go without warning and their colleagues forced to take up work they are not trained in was very common. Always understaffed and very high turnover. While I was very optimistic of the DEI work, it eventually means nothing when leadership, many of them BIPOC themselves, turn out to be toxic and abusive. So many instances of talk the talk, but not walk the walk. I could go on, but honestly they have already taken so much of my labor in ways I did not consent, that I am simply too tired to remember everything.
Advice to Management
Leave. Accept your implicit role in this organization’s last breath. Yes, there were already systematic issues, yes it was already in a downward trajectory before the COVID shutdown, but the horrific mismanagement of funds and staff over the last few years should be acknowledged and accountability taken – don’t you remember we had a whole series of DEI trainings on accountability? Or was that only to waste staff’s time? Unfortunately, Leadership and Artistic only speak hollow words and never once walked the path of OSF’s stated Mission and Values. Sad, as at least the rest of us tried. As for everyone outside the organization reading this: take any press release or media news relating to OSF with a grain of salt. Look at it with a critical eye. Because as staff and former staff who loved this organization and the work we were trying to do, we are tired of the lies.
Listen to and protect whistleblowers and people who bring credible claims of harassment and discrimination.
Invest in the Education program, which used to be one of OSF's Crown Jewels but has been denigrated by artistic leadership for the last several years even though it was a major source of pride (as well as new audiences and new donors) for decades. Just because you’ve spoken to people who attended once in high school and never came back doesn't mean that thousands of others haven't made a lifelong connection to the arts through that program - expand it instead of killing it.
Run leaner productions with fewer frills and less expensive sets to cut costs.
Stop wasting millions of dollars on expensive contractors and endless strategic planning.
Remember that you are a theater. Your job is to produce shows people want to see, then sell them tickets to see it.
6 A theatrical “omniverse” of toxic “paradigms” and abuse. The most dysfunctional org in American Theatre.
While I was there, there seemed to be a fear around reporting less than ideal working conditions to leadership especially if it was dissonant against the “vision” or anyone that was favored by the AD or ED. The fiscal mismanagement has existed for years now, and due to lack of leadership or backbone from the last ED, we continued to hemorrhage cash on superfluous staffing, digital and VR programming and other personal favors that have yielded little monetary returns which this org needs desperately. Many of these ideas came from the AD who had a strenuous relationship with the ED and ultimately fed him to the board. He didn’t “resign”. He was fired. Full stop. It’s all just legalese for OSF to avoid another lawsuit. And finally, if you’re a person of color, please look for employment elsewhere. Despite the leadership team being primarily people of color, almost all off them are toxic. I was foolish to think this place would be any different. If you don’t fit the mold, you’re going to have a hard time fitting in here.
Advice to Management
It’s hard for me to say this, but the organization is beyond saving in its current iteration. It needs to be gutted. It’s is rotting from the inside and out and it needs leaders that are in it solely for the health of the institution, not industry recognition.
6 Not recommended
Need all new leadership. Start over. Bring back the theater we all knew and loved. It worked! Seats were sold out. The community was proud. People planned their trips around OSF. Families had reunions every year there. It was a summer celebration of live theater.
Berthold Brecht, George Bernard Shaw and countless others found fresh and interesting ways to get their contemporaries discussing what they perceived to be the problems ailing society. Like other pusillanimous spirits, the OSF fiends gleefully obey an ideology that is out to destroy venerable institutions that used to bring joy, knowledge, insights and laughter to the world instead of creating something new and enriching. Thank you for reminding us once more to beware the brethren of the red guards wherever they raise their ugly heads!