Hello and welcome to OSF’s summer Prologue!
Though I joined the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as the new Director of Literary Development and Dramaturgy in August 2016, my interest and curiosity with the Festival began 12 years ago when a visit from the intrepid Dr. Lue Douthit changed my life.
As an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona, I was a burgeoning theatre practitioner passionate about making theatre companies across America more welcoming to marginalized or underrepresented communities. I was fascinated with how the worlds of plays were developed on the page and depicted on the stage. I wanted to celebrate and advocate for playwrights. But I had no idea how to make a career out of these intersecting desires and was starting to lose hope that I’d ever find a role in the theatre that could capture everything I wanted to engage with.
During my junior year undergraduate showcase, Dr. Lue paid a visit to our class as a special alumni guest and reviewed my theatre portfolio. I’ll never forget how cool she was (still is) and how meaningfully she spoke about her love for how stories were told and how that led her to a career in dramaturgy. From that moment onward, Lue became one of my long-distance mentors as I journeyed from the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, Minnesota, to the Shakespeare Theatre Company and Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. I modeled my practice as a dramaturg on her—observing how she fostered relationships with playwrights and directors, supported OSF’s connection to new play development through the Black Swan Lab and brought Shakespeare’s words to life through her masterly work on countless OSF productions and her current directorship of the Play on! translation project.
My relationship with Lue that eventually inspired me to join OSF 12 years after we met epitomizes the lasting power of mentorship and the responsibility of honoring legacy. As I reflect on my first season at OSF, it’s amazing to see how the thematic resonances of mentorship and legacy have manifested in our work on and offstage. Onstage, we experience the journey of a poet and his apprentice through a reflection of life, loss and posterity in UniSon; the passing of a wish through three generations of women in Hannah and the Dread Gazebo; a parental wrestling match with Prince Hal, King Henry IV and Falstaff in Henry IV, Parts One and Two; and preserving the legacy of Native cultural heritage amid the destructive backdrop of the Indian boarding schools in Off the Rails.
Offstage, we witnessed the incredible continuation of OSF’s FAIR program—providing more than 20 diverse artists from across the globe with professional development experience, as seen in our story about Charge Scenic Artist Gabriel Barrera’s work at helping make OSF more diverse. We will soon welcome a new group of high school juniors for our two-week-long Summer Seminar, a program that, as our Prologue story shows, can change lives. And this October, audiences will have a special opportunity to explore their personal relationship to legacy with Take Them into the Dirt, an immersive and participatory theatrical experience developed and produced through OSF’s 2017 Living Ideas programming.
Thank you for being part of our 82-year-old legacy. I'm looking forward to seeing you on the Bricks and in the theatre!