This Bay Area leader is taking Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s top job
The venerable but troubled Oregon Shakespeare Festival has a new leader in Tim Bond.
Bond, currently TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s artistic director, is set to take over the Ashland, Ore., company after a tumultuous year that prompted it to launch an emergency fundraising campaign. The news also comes after OSF’s previous leader and Oakland native Nataki Garrett suddenly stepped down mid-season, after receiving death threats while on the job.
Meanwhile, TheatreWorks, which Bond joined in March 2020, named Giovanna Sardelli as its interim leader. She’s currently the company’s artistic associate and director of new works, having worked with TheatreWorks in various capacities for 15 years.
Samantha Laurey/The Chronicle 2022
Both companies announced their new leaders Thursday, July 6. Bond assumes his new post Sept. 1, with OSF associate Artistic Director Evren Odcikin holding the top job on an interim basis until Sept. 15, allowing for an overlap. Sardelli steps into her new role July 14.
“I feel like a general that’s been asked to come back into battle,” Bond, who served as OSF’s associate artistic director from 1996 to 2007, told The Chronicle.
Bond praised OSF, one of the oldest and most influential nonprofit theaters in the country, for its rotating repertory — where audiences can see the same world-class actor in a classical tragedy under the stars one day and in a contemporary comedy in the round the next — as well as for its heightened language and big themes. “As we face AI and misinformation campaigns, that’s something we’re all going to be longing for: getting to the truth of the human condition,” he said.
TheatreWorks 2016
Sardelli said she and Bond had been in talks about giving her more responsibilities at TheatreWorks even before she learned of his departure. She’s been an itinerant freelance director since 2000, dividing her time among New York, TheatreWorks and other on-the-road jobs. Waiting out the pandemic in her native Las Vegas was the first time she had been in one place in decades, and she realized she wanted a true home, one where she could embed herself more deeply in a single theater company.
“Our industry is in crisis and collapse, and I want to be part of trying to figure out what that solution is,” she told The Chronicle.
Choosing Sardelli to step in for Bond “wasn’t even a decision,” said TheatreWorks outgoing board Chair Holly Ward. “It was, ‘Slip her right on in there,’ ” she added, referring to Sardelli’s knowledge of the company and staff.
Kevin Berne/TheatreWorks Silicon Valley
Both TheatreWorks and OSF have struggled financially this year, as have theaters all over the country. In May, TheatreWorks announced it was postponing its summer production of the world premiere of “Alice Bliss,” largely because of a decline in subscriptions. In April, OSF set in motion an emergency fundraising drive with the goal of raising $2.5 million, with $1.5 million needed by June, in order to pull off the rest of its 2023 season. It canceled a holiday production and paused planning for 2024, pending the results of the campaign — which ended up a success, reported OSF board Chair Diane Yu.
“We’ve made our initial goals, but we are all pretty much going to be fundraising all the time,” Yu said, referring to the industry as a whole. “The pandemic has altered our realities, and we must come up with a more sustainable way for us to stay in business.”
Jenny Graham/Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2022
The last year of Garrett’s tenure saw a series of departures, furloughs and restructuring, with Garrett at one point holding two of the company’s top jobs at once. Her 2019 appointment — as a Black woman at a huge institution with Shakespeare in its name, based in a town that’s approximately 90% white — was historic, taken as a symbol of change in an industry that urgently needed to diversify. Her unexplained exit has polarized OSF’s followers at a time when attendance is already down. Asked about the departure of Garrett in the midst of all this financial turmoil, Yu said, “We are now focusing on our future.”
In the last year, the pandemic’s long shadow has resulted in the closure of three local theaters: Bay Area Children’s Theatre in May, PianoFight in March and Exit Theatre’s Eddy Street facility in December. But across the country, larger institutions are making steep cuts in response to similar pressures.
In June, Los Angeles’ Center Theatre Group announced layoffs and the closure of one of its three venues, the Mark Taper Forum, for the foreseeable future, which meant scuttling planned productions of plays by Larissa FastHorse and Lauren Yee. The same month in New York, the Brooklyn Academy of Music said it was laying off 13% of its staff and cutting programming, and the Public Theater announced it wouldn’t produce its Under the Radar festival of experimental work in 2024. Also last month, Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theatre gave notice it would close, and Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company issued massive layoffs and revealed plans to produce much less.
Kevin Berne/TheatreWorks 2019
In the face of such upheaval, Sardelli nonetheless took an optimistic tone as she prepared to take the helm of the Bay Area’s third-largest nonprofit theater, one whose founder, Robert Kelley, was at his post for 50 years before stepping down in 2020.
“The audiences just aren’t back. So you say, ‘OK, what is the disconnect?’ Because the product, I believe, is good,” in many cases better than ever, she said. The company’s work in equity, diversity and inclusion has to be a way forward, she believes. “How do we make the people who have supported us forever also know that while there is change occurring, it is more people at the table? Your seat is here. Let’s extend our party invitation list.”
Samantha Laurey/The Chronicle 2022
Bond had a similar take on his own central mandate.
“OSF has this incredible opportunity to be a national leader in all this challenge we’re all facing right now in the American theater, which is how do we remake ourselves to meet the future theatergoing public?” he said. “I don’t know what that is yet, but I feel like OSF has all the components to figuring that out.”
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
