Paul Nicholson, Executive Director

Paul Nicholson

Paul Nicholson is the executive director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a position he has held since 1995.

Interview Excerpts

ON HIS NEW ZEALAND BACKGROUND

PAUL NICHOLSON: I worked for 16 years as General Manager for an Executive Director who embraced every part of what I could bring to this organization, and one of the things that I feel really proud about is the fact that my New Zealand heritage means that I come to the table with a different viewpoint.

Now, we as an organization, Oregon Shakespeare Festival as another organization, embraces diversity. And people tend to put white male as one group, the reality is that I am as a white male very different in many of my perceptions and my values because of my New Zealand heritage. If I had grown up in America, so that’s an element of diversity as well, and I’ve been really, really fortunate that my sort of socialistic upbringing as a New Zealander enabled me to come in here and raise questions about a certain degree of elitism, casteism that was going on.

I’m not sure it’s a really, it’s a right thing to be doing to have just a small group of a dozen people getting retirement benefits. If we are a company, and we want to honor the company then everybody should get those benefits, and that happened over a number of years I was able to make that change. Is it fair to have just a small number of people having health insurance? No it’s not.

So, let’s make sure the company as a whole gets health insurance. When I first came in the management of that time — and we are talking 1980, which is a long time ago. Now, look to pay the least expense of royalties that they possibly could, and basically even though we were sort of verging on being a professional regard as being a pre-professional theatre at that time. We paid amateur royalties, and I said, “Look, if we want to consider ourselves, to think of ourselves as being a professional theatre, we’ve got to pay professional royalties.”

Number one and number two, we’ve got the responsibilities as to support playwrights, and so that’s the sort of thinking that I was able to bring to the company, which I think has really, really being beneficial. As we’ve grown in the way we thought about our relationship with the theatre world.

ON THE QUESTION OF AUTHORSHIP

PAUL NICHOLSON: In my perspective I have great, great doubts that the man from Stratford wrote the plays.

STEVE ROWLAND: Who wrote them?

PAUL NICHOLSON:  I don’t know, does it matter, I don’t think so because it is the way I see it, it’s like these words came to us from the universe, and whoever wrote them was a channel, the way Mozart’s music was channeled through him, from the universe to us; and I feel the same way about Shakespeare’s words. But that is amazing.