Director Rosa Joshi on Julius Caesar Today

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar feels urgently contemporary in Rosa Joshi’s new production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—one of America’s largest and longest-running theater festivals, now in its 90th season. Staged in partnership with Seattle’s upstart crow collective, the production explores the threat of autocracy, drawing on global histories of dictatorship.

Performed entirely by women and nonbinary actors, Joshi’s Julius Caesar offers new perspectives on a historically male-dominated political landscape. The result is a fresh reading of Shakespeare’s classic tale of power, loyalty, and betrayal.

In this episode, Joshi reflects on the production, the politics of performance, and why Shakespeare’s plays continue to illuminate moments of crisis.

>> Discover more about Julius Caesar at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published August 26, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Rosa Joshi (she/her) is a director, producer and educator.  She currently serves as Associate Artistic Director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Rosa’s directing work spans from Shakespeare to modern classics and contemporary plays.  Throughout her career she has created work independently through self-producing, and in 2006 she co-founded upstart crow collective a company that produces classical plays with diverse casts of women and non-binary people.  With upstart crow, she has directed King John, Bring Down the House, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, and Coriolanus. She is committed to creating ambitious productions of classical work featuring women, non-binary, and BIPOC artists.

As Interim Artistic Director of Northwest Asian American Theatre, Rosa produced a range of Asian American performances, including: A-Fest, an international performance festival; Traces, a world premiere multi-disciplinary, multi-media, international collaborative work. She was also a Resident Director and Artistic Director of the Second Company at New City Theater, where she directed and produced various classical and contemporary plays.

Rosa has been a faculty member at Seattle University and has also taught at The Old Globe University of San Diego Shiley Graduate Theatre Program, Hong Kong University, Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, and Cornish College for the Arts.

Rosa holds an MFA in Directing from the Yale School of Drama and a BA in Theatre and Psychology from Bucknell University.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is one of America’s largest and longest-running theater festivals. Each year, OSF puts on contemporary and classic plays, alongside innovative Shakespeare productions, on its three stages. Held in Ashland, Oregon, OSF is now in its 90th season.

A new production of Julius Caesar opened the festival this year. It foregrounds the play’s theme of a republic sliding into autocracy. But it does so with a twist—the entire cast is made up of female or nonbinary actors.

[CLIP from Julius Caesar, directed by Rosa Joshi, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2025. Kate Hurster plays Brutus.]

BRUTUS: (…) But ’tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may.
Then, lest he may, prevent. (…)
—Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 1

The director is Rosa Joshi, whose theater collective upstart crow co-produced the play with OSF. Joshi is also the associate artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a former member of the Folger Board of Governors.

Here’s Rosa Joshi, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

——————-

BARBARA BOGAEV: I do want to start at the beginning by talking about your choreography for the beginning of this production, and, I guess, throughout, but especially the beginning.

You really grip us right from the moment, “Go,” and the cast fills the stage. They’re bathed in red ligh and everyone kind of shakes and shudders in unison. I was watching this, and it just felt it had the impression as if the world is coming apart at the seams. It’s just electrifying.

So, what was your concept for the opening? And what kind of conversations did you have with your choreographer about how to realize this vision?

ROSA JOSHI: I’ve been lucky enough with my work with upstart crow, especially, and other Shakespeares I’ve worked on to be able to workshop ahead of a production.

And so, I work with a choreographer, Alice Gosti. Alice comes from the dance world. Her title with me when we work together is Movement Director because I think that’s really how she thinks about narrative and theme and dramatic structure.

When we workshop, we often start with, “What are some ideas in the play that we’re interested in exploring?” So, one of the things I was interested with in this production was the idea of the world breaking apart.

BOGAEV: Well, you nailed it. I mean…

JOSHI: The ideas often—I say often—always come from the text and there I was struck as I was analyzing the play that the eve of the assassination, you know, the natural world is going haywire, right? There are lions roaming the street. There’s this incredible thunderstorm.

[CLIP from Julius Caesar, directed by Rosa Joshi, Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2025. Amelio García plays Caska.]

CASKA: Are not you moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero,
I have seen tempests when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
Th’ambitious ocean swell, and rage, and foam,
To be exalted with the threat’ning clouds:
But never till tonight, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
—Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 3

And as so often happens in Shakespeare when humans are screwing up, the natural world reacts. You see it in Macbeth, you see it in Midsummer Night’s Dream, and you see it here on the eve of the assassination.

BOGAEV: Nature is a mirror.

JOSHI: Yes, right. It feels very Greek to me in that way also in the way that the natural world and the human world are intertwined.

So, I approached Alice with this idea. I knew that I saw after the assassination when we come back in the second half that the world has broken apart. And I knew I was building a world of concrete, and I was like, “The concrete is going to crack and crumble.” Then it was Alice who said, “I see shaking.” That was just an image that came to her and I have learned in my time working with Alice to be like, “Okay, shaking. Let’s explore that.” So, we just in workshop explored the idea of the human body shaking and then I said, “Oh, maybe this is the way we begin the show?” So, then we just put everybody on in the space and had them shake.

We’d also been exploring different ideas of banners and flags. I was looking at authoritarian imagery. So, we came across banners, like, a lot of our visual research with the scenic design had been banners. So, that motion that you see of waving the banners in the beginning also came out of workshops. So, we put those two ideas together. Along with I also wanted some kind of “Hail Caesar” salute that we came up with.

So, there wasn’t one genesis. It was a whole bunch of different ideas. What I came to realize is that there’s some kind of unrest inside the people. There’s something about this world, the world falling apart, that we are creating, that’s coming from us. It’s not just from one single person. It’s coming from inside the populace.

BOGAEV: Oh, now that’s interesting. Most directors come on the podcast, and they tell me that they start with an overarching concept or just a strong emotional force compelling them towards an idea. So, is that yours? Is that the case for you? And is that where your inspiration came from or did you have some kind of intellectual overarching concept as well?

JOSHI: The reason for doing the play, why this play?

We had this play designed last August because we have to prepare because of working in rotating rep. The design process begins really early here compared to other regional, national theaters. So, I had this approach for this play before the election. But I looked at this play and I knew that I wanted to talk about authoritarianism. So, I knew that that was the approach and I remember thinking, “Well, it’ll still be relevant regardless of who wins the election.”

BOGAEV: Despite what happened here in America, globally it’s so relevant anyway.

JOSHI: Right. So, I was looking at dictatorships globally, right? I wasn’t just thinking about the United States. So, a lot of the research that I was looking at with the creative team was Latin American, was in Asia, was in Africa, and Europe. So, yes, I was looking at global ideas of authoritarianism. That is what I was looking at but also, my way in, I think, was the character of Brutus because I was thinking what we as citizens would do just to save our republic—

BOGAEV: What we’re prepared to do or maybe unprepared to do.

JOSHI: Right.

BOGAEV: Yeah, because Brutus is struggling with that.

JOSHI: Exactly. So, what would we do if we felt that we were faced with an autocracy? And because we all believe that we love our country, we all believe that we are patriotic, we all believe that we are good people, right? And so, what would we do? And what happens when we are convinced that violence is the only answer?

BOGAEV: Well, it’s really provocative. I want to take those two ideas then, in order, and go back to your idea about authoritarianism. And I guess my question is how do you think about modern-day references in a play when you’re tackling that theme but working with Shakespeare? As an example, you do have modern day references in your production. At one point there’s a poster of Caesar in the style of Shepard Fairey’s famous Barack Obama “Hope” Poster for the 2008 campaign. And you were mentioning the banners. You use “SPQR,” of course the famous reference to the Republic, as opposed to an autocracy on your banners. So, how did you think about telegraphing modern politics in this production? Because it can get heavy-handed very quickly.

JOSHI: Yeah, I think I often create worlds that reference different periods without being set in any specific period, although this is, out of the work I’ve done, I think you could look at it and say, “We are referencing 20th-century authoritarian regimes.” So, there’s brutalist architecture that is also referencing Roman architecture in terms of columns and arches. And then, I was looking at 20th-century authoritarian iconography in terms of those banners but also thinking of Rome, right?, and sort of thinking of both those things together. I’m thinking of the time it was written, the time it was written about, the time that we’re in now, and the time roughly that I’m setting it in, and how all of those things are playing together in a way that hopefully isn’t reducing it to one idea but letting all of those ideas live in hopefully a sort of complex way that is both intellectual and hits you emotionally.

BOGAEV: Yea. So very mindful of the layers, always layered.

JOSHI: Yeah, I think I’m always thinking about that so that it can’t be too much of one thing where it starts to become that one thing.

BOGAEV: Well, I can see how you’re making also really interesting choices with your staging. Going on this idea of layering your ideas about authoritarianism in your research, one in particular that I’m thinking of is that you bring Julius Caesar—played by Kate Wisniewski—you bring him back after the assassination. So, Caesar is still in blood-soaked clothes and Caesar haunts the second act as if to say that, “You can kill a tyrant, but you’re not killing the love the tyrant inspired or the ideas the tyrant embodies.”

JOSHI: I think that’s exactly right. I was like, “Okay, we might all fantasize that we can just get rid of this person.”

BOGAEV: Right.

JOSHI: You might feel that but it’s what you said, exactly what I talked about, which is you can kill the tyrant but you don’t kill the ideas necessarily by killing the person. So, in the play, the ghost of Caesar comes back to speak to Brutus. That is actually in the play. I think we just made him more present so that you could see the idea that he rises from the dead. You actually see him rise and then he sets a riot in motion.

BOGAEV: Yeah, he has a bit more agency.

JOSHI: Yeah, and then you see him in this production at key moments affecting the story, so he’s given more agency after his death here. Well, and is it him or is it their guilt? Is it, you know, is it actually him? It’s a ghost. Is it in their minds? I think that’s still at play.

BOGAEV: Right, exactly, like a thorn that—

JOSHI: Yeah, and their own guilt. You know, Brutus was like a son to Caesar. He was his favorite.

BOGAEV: Yes, let’s talk about Brutus because I’ve always thought of Brutus as the surrogate for the audience in this play, that Brutus embodies our apprehensions and our divisions and helps us think through some of these ideas about applying logic and arguing with our conscience and questioning whether the ends justify the means. You know, a restored democratic republic justifies assassination and betrayal and violence and Brutus gets to that and more. But what was your guidepost for your Brutus? What did you most want for your actor Kate Hurster’s performance?

JOSHI: I think it came down to the stoicism of this character, right? Like how much they held within themselves and were trying to live their life through that philosophy. Also, that it was all down—that they knew that they had this position of leadership that people would follow them and so that what they chose to do would have this impact, right? So, they had to be as sure as he could be but he could only be so sure now.

One of the things I did talk to the cast about because of the times we’re in is in the play itself there is a question about whether Caesar will actually be a tyrant, right? If you’re analyzing this play—

BOGAEV: We don’t necessarily know if Caesar’s a tyrant. It’s all in potential.

JOSHI: It’s all in potential, right? But in this production, we’re clearly on our way, right? I have so much authoritarian iconography. I don’t think you can look at and say, “I don’t think he’s going to be like that.” He behaves in ways that it’s very clear. That to me was the question for now. Because you know, Brutus says that in his soliloquy before the conspirators come to visit him. He says words to the effect of “I have not known him to act in this way.” Right?  Like “To tell truth, I’ve never seen him actually do this.”

[CLIP from Julius Caesar, directed by Rosa Joshi, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2025. Kate Hurster plays Brutus]

BRUTUS: It must be by his death. And for my part
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crowned:
How that might change his nature, there’s the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
And that craves wary walking. Crown him that,
And then I grant we put a sting in him
That at his will he may do danger with.
Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins
Remorse from power. And, to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections swayed
More than his reason
—Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 1

“But he might become that, and once he becomes that then it’s too late. So, we have to do it now, right? We have to do it before he becomes that.” So, I think that he’s trying to do what is right, he’s trying to save his country, and he feels the responsibility of that and he feels the burden of that. I think that’s what Kate captures to me.

BOGAEV: I think she does. I think I’ve seen Bruti that are more self-righteous than her. I feel that this performance was more tortured than other Bruti I’ve seen which was interesting because I think the text gives Brutus a lot of room to live in denial of what he’s doing.

JOSHI: Yes.

BOGAEV: I feel that her Brutus is truly emotional, more emotional than that kind of stiff Brutus many, many actors go for. So, I gather that’s a direction that she took that didn’t come from you.

JOSHI: Yeah, I think that the stoicism is because there’s so much brewing underneath Brutus that has to be kept in check as opposed to “I’m in control the whole time.” And, you know, here’s a rawness to Kate’s performance for me that brings me along with her.

BOGAEV: Yeah, and I think she really nailed one of my favorite lines of all time: “The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.”

JOSHI: Yeah.

BOGAEV: Because no one’s left off the hook. I mean, Brutus has greatness. Brutus abuses greatness. Caesar has greatness. All—everyone—it applies to everyone. You have the political becoming personal in such a Shakespearean way because the play gets to the politics but it also gets to these very deep things that happen between people, particularly in the scenes between Brutus and Cassius, who’s played by Caro Zeller in your production, where they bicker, and they wrangle, and they quarrel bitterly in the second half of the play after Caesar’s assassination.

[CLIP from Julius Caesar, directed by Rosa Joshi, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2025. Kate Hurster plays Brutus, and Caro Zeller plays Cassius]

BRUTUS: (…) I had rather be a dog and bay the moon
Than such a Roman.

CASSIUS:  Brutus, bait not me.
I’ll not endure it. You forget yourself
To hedge me in. I am a soldier, I,
Older in practice, abler than yourself
To make conditions.

BRUTUS: Go to! You are not, Cassius.

CASSIUS: I am.

BRUTUS: I say you are not.

CASSIUS: Urge me no more. I shall forget myself.
Have mind upon your health. Tempt me no farther.

BRUTUS: Away, slight man!

CASSIUS: Is ’t possible?

BRUTUS: Hear me, for I will speak.
(…)
—Julius Caesar, Act 4, scene 3

BOGAEV: It’s actually very confusing to anyone who doesn’t know the play that well because they’re arguing. Brutus is mad that Cassius has taken a bribe or maybe taken a bribe, it’s not really clear. But really, you come to realize that it doesn’t matter what they’re arguing about, really. They’re arguing about power and distrust in and disappointment in this relationship, and they’re kind of using this other thing as a proxy argument which is so human.

JOSHI: As soon as this happens, then they—because they haven’t made a plan for afterwards, right? That was also the thing. It was like, did they talk about what they would do afterwards? No, they’re making it up—

BOGAEV: As they go along, yes.

JOSHI: They’re improvising, right? And so that’s also part of it. One thing that revealed itself to me also was that Brutus is coming into that scene with the knowledge of Portia’s death.

BOGAEV: Brutus is a mess.

JOSHI: Brutus is a mess, and so, part of what’s happening also is I thought a lot about displaced anger. Like, he’s the stoic, right? So, he can’t express his anger about or his feelings about Portia. So, he is letting it all out on Cassius.

BOGAEV: That’s right.

JOSHI: Because he has to have somewhere to put that emotion.

BOGAEV: That’s right. To displace it.

JOSHI: Yeah.

BOGAEV: So, we’ve been talking about Caesar as male and your actor is female. And so, I want to get to this; to the female and the nonbinary casting element of this. I wonder what the female and non-binary casting adds.

JOSHI: Yeah, I leave that sort of to an audience.

BOGAEV: I’ll tell you I’m asking this for a specific reason. Because I talked to the actor Harriet Walter about her portrayal of Brutus in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production—

JOSHI: —Which I think is brilliant! I love that.

BOGAEV: Wonderful! It was set in a prison so that added a whole other thing. But she said that she felt that two women arguing raises the stakes even more because women are conditioned not to be so aggressive or confrontational.

JOSHI: Yes.

BOGAEV: So, it hits harder. She thought that was one of her insights into the casting choices. What do you think about that?

JOSHI: I agree that the stakes feel higher but I also think that the friendship feels strong to me. Watching it or thinking about it, the betrayal of the friendship really hits home for me in Cato and Kate’s performance. I think if you talk to them they would also talk about the fact that as women, they experience some of these same things. The sense of bullying, the sense of ostracization, the sense of aggression. You know, women we think tend to think that they’re not aggressive.

BOGAEV: But of course, we are.

JOSHI: Right.

BOGAEV: We’re just conditioned not to be.

JOSHI: When we, you know, often when we do this work, we don’t talk about acting male, we just talk about the character, if that makes sense.

BOGAEV: What does being in a room full of women and nonbinary actors, when you’re in the rehearsal process or the research process, or into the play, how is that different for you? How does an all-female and nonbinary cast affect you as the director, if at all?

JOSHI: This is, I think, my sixth or seventh time doing this work with upstart crow, and so it has become very normalized for me. But one thing I realized when I first started doing this work is that, when I started, I loved doing Shakespeare, so, you’re in a room of mostly men, right?

BOGAEV: Right.

JOSHI: Often, especially if you’re doing the History plays which I loved, I had said, “This is my life. This is my work life. I’m in a room of men. I want to work on Shakespeare. This is what it is.” It took me working on upstart crow to realize that both as a director and as a producer, I can actually change the space. I can change my workspace. Just because I’m working on Shakespeare doesn’t mean it has to be a space filled with men—whom I love working with also—but being in a room of women, I found myself able to not have to think about threats to my authority in the space and how I was going to have to prove that I knew what I was doing. That helped me to problem solve in a collaborative way. And to hear, like, a space where your voice could be heard without fighting for it in the same way that I had experienced before, or that other women had experienced before. I think when I first started doing this work I was just trying to make work for me and for the people that I wanted to work with and I wasn’t actually thinking about how the room would be different or what I was doing politically, if that makes sense.

BOGAEV: Sure, that’s very real. It’s so liberating it sounds like for you, but also for the actors who never had a place in these History plays.

JOSHI: We just were doing the work, and it was through doing the work that I started to say, “Oh, this is what it means when women take on these roles.”

I was working on Henry IV, actually at the Folger, and a great DC actor, Naomi Jacobson—it wasn’t an upstart crow production but I often with Shakespeares try to cast women in roles of power. So, some of the male politicians that have a lot of power and she was playing Worcester, and we were doing table work. We were talking about strategy and war and she said, “I never get to be part of this conversation. I’m always the whore in Eastcheap.” That has always stayed with me.

I get to tell the whole story, right, as the director. But what part of the story do female and nonbinary actors get to tell in Shakespeare? We say Shakespeare is universal, right? We say that these stories are for everyone. What do we really mean when we say that, right? Do we mean that everyone needs to filter their sense of “universal” through a specific point of view and make that universal for themselves? Or can we actually bring different voices, different bodies, different points of view into the story? What does it mean for those bodies on stage to be telling this story—it’s not realism, right? I know that—but with these human beings, who are artists today, who have so much skill and experience?

I was also really influenced by Harriet Walter in her book, Brutus and Other Heroines, which I read after I’d started doing this work and I’m paraphrasing but something she said in that book about the fact that she felt that her Shakespeare days were over because she’d played all the roles. She said she felt like she was a concert pianist who was told that there were no pianos left. She couldn’t play the piano anymore.

BOGAEV: Right, after she played Cleopatra, I think. Yeah, there was nothing left.

JOSHI: There’s nothing left. So, to me, I was like, “Oh, there are these women who are at the top of their game and they can’t play, right? Because there are no roles.” So, what happens when they get to tell these stories?

I also think that you start to look at male behavior differently when women inhabit those roles.

BOGAEV: You can see more of what a performance it is.

JOSHI: Or you can see the behavior differently, right? I mean, I think it’s true if it’s all male Shakespeare also. You might look at gender differently. You experience it more critically also, right, like why do men behave that way? What is it to walk into a room and assume that everybody is going to listen to you? That your opinion matters?

BOGAEV: To inhabit the space, dominate the space. Does your cast think of themselves as playing across gender as women or nonbinary actors playing men? Or are they playing these people as people?

JOSHI: They’re playing character, right? So, we talk about what is the truth of this character? I am interested in the fact that, you know, it’s a woman playing a man. But you’ll forget, and you’ll just start watching that character. Then, all of a sudden, you’ll be reminded that there are women on stage.

I did an adaptation of the Henry VI plays where there was a court scene where Margaret speaks up. She’s the only female character in this room of men and one of the Lords says something along the line: “These are no women’s matters.” You know, puts her down, puts her in her place, and when that was performed, the whole audience laughs because of course they’re aware—

BOGAEV: Right.

JOSHI: That the stage is filled with women and nonbinary people and so, then you’re like, “Well, why are these no women’s matters, right?” And then you think about how many women are in the room when these decisions are being made today.

BOGAEV: More layers upon layers. Since you started upstart crow, you’ve staged History plays. King John, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Coriolanus, and now Julius Caesar. I called them History plays but I read somewhere that you don’t like to call them that, you call them “Shakespeare’s political war plays.”

JOSHI: Yeah, actually Kate Wisniewski taught me to say that. I’m always thinking why are we doing these plays today for us, as a contemporary American audience, right? Why do we care about medieval English history, right? I’s not our history directly, right, so why does it matter?

What has been preoccupying me in these plays is the nature of leadership and moral leadership and the idea of what can we forgive and what must we not forget, right?, in terms of who our leaders are and who we choose for our leaders.

As we were talking about this, Kate said, “You know, when these plays were grouped together in the Folio and they were called the History plays, perhaps that was a disservice because they’re epic plays about politics and war.” If you think about that then you’re talking about something beyond a history lesson—like, you know, if I say History play to you, you go, “Oh, I’m going to fall asleep and be taught something, right?”

BOGAEV: Political war plays are universal.

JOSHI: Political war plays. Suddenly they’re thrillers. They’re action plays, right? They are, to me, what you were saying earlier: the personal and the political run all through them, through every single play. It is, you know, personal relationships between leaders that lead us to war, right? How the people in power are motivated by personal vendettas, by vengeance, by desire for power. They say they’re doing it for the people—I mean, that’s today, isn’t it? That’s why these plays matter and that why they still resonate for us because we can feel that in the world today.

BOGAEV: Absolutely. But do you want to do some comedies or problem plays?

JOSHI: Oh, my goodness., wouldn’t I!

BOGAEV: Oh, really?

JOSHI: I mean, I have, right It’s funny because the first Shakespeares I did early, early on were  Twelfth Night, and Much Ado, and Midsummer Night’s Dream. I have done those, and I did As You Like It here in 2019 also. So, yes. And I’m doing Henry IV, Part I again next year on the Elizabethan Stage—and it might be an oxymoron to say it’s the funniest history play, but it is a comedy—

BOGAEV: —and you’re going to play that up!

Well, we should remind people that you’re also the associate artistic director for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The organization has gone through some turmoil in recent years with Artistic Director Nataki Garrett’s resignation after she received death threats and other harassment allegedly over her attempts to diversify the repertoire. How has this, I guess, turmoil affected the Festival? And where do you find yourselves now?

JOSHI: You know, I think we find ourselves now in a place where we are not going to back down from diversifying the world of Shakespeare, right?, and creating work that speaks to who we are as a contemporary American society now, right?, which means the voices that we celebrate, both in terms of who’s on stage and the words on stage, also, in terms of writers.

My hope is to create a world of Shakespeare that is welcoming to people of all different backgrounds. If we’re speaking about the future of Shakespeare I think a lot about the next generation, and I think that to me, being able to see that the stories can be about you is really important.

A large part of that also is: “Oh, I can actually understand these stories.” These are not stories that are spoken in a kind of language that is rarefied and that is not really meant to be understood. To me, clarity of text is the most important thing in terms of welcoming people into the space.

And then who is, as I said, who is telling the stories on stage in terms of identities. Not to check off a box, but to be like, this is really who we are as a nation, right? So, the people telling the stories reflect the people in our country. We have a play by Karen Zacarias on stage. We have Octavio Solis. We have August Wilson. So, to me, one of the great things about the rotating repertory model that we’re in, also, is that these authors share this space with Shakespeare. The literal physical space. You can see Julius Caesar in the afternoon, and then you can see Karen Zacarías’ work in the evening, and it is literally in the same space.

BOGAEV: Right. Woven within.

JOSHI: With the same resources.

BOGAEV: Yeah, which is a really powerful message. But with this current administration, there’s a really powerful anti-woke movement going on that’s affecting all of the arts, the academy, theaters, workplaces. How do you feel the chill?

JOSHI: I do. I mean, as an artist, I feel the chill for sure, right? But then it makes me realize that the kind of work that we do is really significant and important and I see audiences coming to it, right?

Quixote Nuevo, a retelling of Don Quijote, is reaching people of all backgrounds because it’s saying that this story that is centered around this community actually can speak universally. I don’t say that’s woke. How is that woke? It’s universal.

It’s really important for us to see that there is something in our collective humanity that we share, right?, and that telling stories from different perspectives isn’t meant to exclude anyone. It might speak to certain audiences and certain people that have not been spoken to before. Isn’t that what we’re trying? Like that is actually inclusive. When young women and nonbinary people tell me that they finally see themselves in Shakespeare in a way that they haven’t before, isn’t that what we want? Isn’t that making the work more universal and more inclusive?

I don’t think we do this work to try and make people feel bad about who they are. I think we make this work to invite more voices into the conversation. It’s just this idea that there isn’t space, that we have to protect the space somehow. But there is space, I believe, and when we invite these voices in then the conversation is richer and we all discover more about what it means to be human in the world.

I go to the theater, yes, to experience something that is like me. But also, to experience something that is not like me at all, that opens up my idea of what humanity is and can be, right? To learn about someone else’s particular experience deepens my humanity.

BOGAEV: Thank you so much for this passionate defense of theater, and Rosa Joshi, thank you so much for the conversation.

JOSHI: Thank you. This was really fun. Thank you so much.

——————-

KARIM-COOPER: That was Rosa Joshi, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Julius Caesar runs until October 26th at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, alongside As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Importance of Being Earnest, Into the Woods, Quixote Nuevo, and Shane. Check out their complete schedule at OSFAshland.org.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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