Opinion | Oregon Shakespeare Festival explores homelessness while homelessness abounds nearby
Juliet’s family lives in a camper beneath a bridge.
The friar — Romeo’s confidant who married the very young couple — is a street minister who drives a truck that serves as a food pantry and provides showers.
Nataki Garrett, former Oregon Shakespeare Festival, or OSF, artistic director, chose to set the staging of “Romeo and Juliet” in conditions depicting West Coast economic hardship.
Just as William Shakespeare had adapted “Romeo and Juliet” from an older Italian play to fit his contemporary context, she wanted to do the same.
“I have always been curious about this story against the backdrop of desperation instead of abundance,” Garrett wrote in the program notes. “Romeo and Juliet was borrowed from an original story and rewritten to reflect current British society back to itself. I am following the Bard in that regard — seeking what modern or ancient lessons can be unlocked if I do the same.”
Garrett grew up in Oakland, California, and the play’s set evokes city bridges near which people survive.
Shakespeare dips into his bag of dramatic tricks to move his plot forward, and that includes how people act when their options are limited.
Homelessness is not only in the major cities of the West Coast. Ashland, an Oregon city of about 22,000 people at the California border, has high housing costs and, thus, homelessness, also.
This past spring, the city of Ashland set up a camp less than a half mile from where “Romeo and Juliet” was staged, so I went to visit it.
I wasn’t prepared, though, to find a barren plot of grass next to the police station. Where were the people? The dwellings? The bags?
It turned out that some people lingered on the edges of the police station by the shrubbery, surrounded by blankets, rolled tents and other belongings.
As I walked around, I met the Cat Man — known by this name because Lokki, his five-year-old cat, was usually perched on his shoulder. He was wandering around, looking in trees because Lokki had gone missing the night before. He was hopeful that someone would find Lokki, who was a local celebrity, he explained.
He explained why the land that I had read was the camp was simply a plot of grass. People had to vacate the land every morning by 7:30 a.m., and the sprinklers came on soon after. Because it was too difficult to travel far, some people waited by the shrubs with their belongings nearby until they could, once again, move onto that grass at 7 p.m.
He then told me I needed to meet Maverick, clearly a community leader.
Maverick sat next to her dog against the shrubs, her belongings in neat mounds, her children playing with friends nearby. Maverick explained to me that Ashland was her hometown. She had moved there when she was eight because her mother attended Southern Oregon University — but in recent years, she had moved many places with her children to flee an abusive person. It was only after that person died that she felt safe to return to Ashland during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At first, she moved between hotels and campgrounds and then secured a temporary living situation in nearby Talent.
It was clear Maverick was resourceful. Too poor for housing and determined to keep her family near, she captured whatever options she could find. She knew federal law well enough, for instance, to know that even when she returned to Ashland, the McKinney-Vento Act required that her children could maintain their schooling in Talent and a bus ride there. That way, they could maintain the stability of teachers and friends.
But in Ashland, Maverick faced new obstacles. Enforcing a no-camping ban, police moved her family constantly, Maverick said. She resisted even calling how she lived “camping.”
“Camping is great for your life,” she said. “This is not camping. This is someone who is trying to survive on the fringes of society that one is not allowed to afford.”
Everywhere she went, police affixed a 72-hour removal notice, Maverick said, and she’d have to move. For a while this past winter, she joined a protest called “Stop Hunting Us” near Lithia Park.
Maverick thumbs through a binder of papers, showing me a chronological stack of bureaucratic papers. She tracks all the systems she navigates. Systems administered by federal, state, county and city governments, as well as area nonprofits. Because so much is managed by the police — the enforcement of the camping ban, the management of this one legal place to camp each night — she advocated successfully for a police liaison. She maintains an advocate at a local nonprofit who keeps a copy of her binder, just in case.
She patches her clothes and is proud that she and her kids know how to skin a deer. She rattles off the various systems she’s navigating — rapid rehousing options through Rogue Retreat, services by Maslow Project and Options for Homeless Residents of Ashland, federal housing vouchers. She’s talking to property owners about accessing corners of their land.
“But if it ends up that we're out here in the winter again, I still have our giant tarp and everything to cover everybody, just in case,” she said.
In other words, Maverick is finding every possibility to survive with few options.
I re-read “Romeo and Juliet” the days before I visited Ashland, thinking about the context of homelessness against its text. This play was written about wealthy feuding families, after all. But as the philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote, art can provide an “aesthetic distance” that accuses reality — or at least, allows insights. The “modern or ancient lessons” that Garrett described.
Shakespeare dips into his bag of dramatic tricks to move his plot forward, and in “Romeo and Juliet,” that includes impulsive decision-making and giant mix-ups. But the element that resonated the most was the way that people navigate barriers. When a person faces few options, their decisions can be bold, startlling, or creative.
Romeo had bad options, after all. What he wanted was to be with Juliet, but in order to do so, he had to overcome immense barriers. Not only were their families feuding but, more significantly, he was limited by a criminal sentence. Caught up in a fight after his friend was slain, he murdered a man — Juliet’s cousin — and he was banished from the land. He legally could not be in the same place as her, and the plot propels forward because he tries to wedge open the impossible. His options were constricted, and none without lawlessness allowed him to be with Juliet.
Shakespeare’s dramatic emphasis is on love against all odds and that people find a way — or die trying.
But mere survival — life — is against the odds for too many people. Poverty provides one enormous barrier, but on top of that is a mess of systems and laws. Outside of the theater, people like Maverick rely on all the resources they can muster to survive, regardless of how impossible that is.
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