Nataki Garrett doesn’t like to stay in one place.
The interim artistic director of San Francisco’s African-American Shakespeare Company already made a name for herself directing shows like Katori Hall’s Hurt Village and serving as the first Black woman to lead the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Garrett joined the long-running event in Ashland, Ore., in 2019, just in time for Covid and an across-the-board disappearance of arts funding cast its future in doubt. Garrett brought artistic innovation and found some financial stability through streaming, but stepped down in 2023 amid criticism and even death threats for her approach to a festival that has been operating since 1935.
Garrett, a 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award fellow and president and CEO of The Ladder, a leadership consulting and coaching firm, says she’s turned down numerous full-time roles because, as she explained to me, “I don’t know if that’s where the call is.”
Her most recent call came from Sherri Young, founder of Af-Am Shakes, one of the two longest-running Black theatres in California. (The other being SF’s Lorraine Hansberry Theatre.) Garrett and Young are both Oakland natives, but had never collaborated despite the two growing up “knowing some of the same people from high school and college.”
Like most performance arts-based nonprofits, a combination of DOGE cuts, Covid-shrunken audiences, and a changing fundraising landscape put Af-Am Shakes on shaky financial ground.
Af-Am Shakes had also found itself without an artistic director for the first time in almost two decades. To get the house in order, Young reached out to Garrett. “Not only is she our interim artistic director, but she is my coach as well, helping me to navigate and just think about what type of passionate leadership that I want for this organization,” Young said.
Garrett’s presence is less about leaving an artistic mark on the renowned company, and more about tidying things up for the next permanent AD.
“Every single time I’ve led an organization, I had to clean it up to live in it,” says Garrett. She’s stabilizing Af-Am Shakes, she explained, “in preparation for a new artistic leader to come in, to shore up the foundation, and to create an ecology for thriving with Sherri, so that whoever comes in, they can get to work on their vision, as opposed to trying to figure out how to solve the problems of the organization.”
Though explicitly temporary, Garrett’s appointment coincides with that of Margo Hall’s directorship at Lorraine Hansberry, marking the first time both of SF’s institutional Black theatres have been led by Black women.
A lot of the instability, Garrett explained, comes from letting funding concerns overshadow the artistic necessity that inspired Young to found the company in 1994. Garrett’s goal is to have the company’s financial and artistic concerns work in tandem.
Both Garrett and Young acknowledge that such a thing isn’t easy in San Francisco, where the cost of living has drastically reduced the city’s once-thriving Black population. Still, they feel the continued existence of their longtime Black institution can serve as a beacon for Black San Franciscans. As Young sees it, a new artistic director can better deliver that message to the community.
“It’s hard to have visionary leadership when some other core elements need to be looked at and addressed first,” said Young.
“I’m building and thinking upon, with Nataki’s help, about who that next leader should be. And when that vision comes into formation, you’ll see that there will be hundreds of other people coming in because they are seeing it for themselves,” Young said. “Without us having that vision and articulating it, it’s a ghost.”
The duo have begun a nationwide search for the new AD and hope to find them by this summer.
In the meantime, the company has already begun announcing upcoming productions, including their annual Christmas production of Cinderella and this May’s world premiere of “Shakespeare Over My Shoulder”, an authorship-question comedy written and directed by Love Boat star Ted Lange.
In addition to her work with Af-Am Shakes, Garrett is directing American Apollo for West Edge Opera in Berkeley, premiering in August. Her work with the renowned SF institution will be brief, she said, but she hopes it creates a lasting impact.
“It’s about the legacy of this 30-year-old organization [and] how many people are out there in their careers because they came through these doors,” she said.
