Renaissance fairs have long been a place for workers and visitors alike to find community amid the trappings of a fictional medieval town. “Merchants” bring their wares to hawk, while various “guilds” provide the entertainment, from jousting to smithing to demonstrating medieval textile arts.
But some longtime guild workers at the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire have pulled out of the festival due to what they describe as bad management and poor working conditions. They say the organization that puts on the fair — which also operates the Oregon Renaissance Faire and Oregon Celtic Festival — has prioritized profits over maintaining the sense of community that workers and volunteers value.
Nathalie Graham is a former freelance reporter who now writes for The Seattle Stranger. She looked into these complaints in a recent article for InvestigateWest and joins us with more details.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Renaissance fairs have long been a place for workers, volunteers and visitors alike to find community amid the trappings of a fictional medieval town. These fairs often rely on an idiosyncratic mix of people. Merchants bring their wares to hawk while various guilds provide the entertainment and education, from jousting to smithing to arts demonstrations.
But there’s been a lot of tension and turnover in recent years at the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire, which is happening for the next four weekends in Snohomish. Some longtime guild workers have pulled out of the festival due to what they describe as bad management and poor working conditions. They say the organization that puts on the fair has prioritized profits over community. The organization also operates the Oregon Renaissance Faire and the Oregon Celtic Festival.
Nathalie Graham is a former freelance reporter who now writes for The Seattle Stranger. She looked into these complaints in a recent article for InvestigateWest and joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Nathalie Graham: Hey, happy to be here.
Miller: I gave a really short version, but for people who are not in the ren-faire world, how are these festivals organized in the back end?
Graham: It’s such a great question. What I learned reporting this is that Renaissance fairs are very messy in all aspects. But how they’re organized, at least this fair – the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire – it is run by a nonprofit called the Washington Renaissance Arts and Education Society and co-run by a for-profit Wandering in Time Productions, as of 2018. So there’s a board of three or so people, and they are all paid, and then there are some paid employees who manage different aspects of the fair. But the bulk of these fairs comes from volunteer labor or labor that receives stipends for a weekend or the whole fair, things that won’t cover basically enough for gas money. People are not living off of this money.
Miller: What did longtime members of these guilds say about the early years of this fair?
Graham: Yeah, so this fair started, I think, back in 1997. Back then it was still kind of sloppily run. There were some complaints, but the person who created it did so for the love of these fairs. He always had a dream of running a Renaissance fair, and that was palpable. And the people who started it were these artists, these community members. It was hyperlocal. It was a labor of love. And a lot of those people are still involved today, fewer and fewer because management these days is less concerned with loving throwing a renaissance fair and is more concerned with earning money from running a Renaissance fair. And in the last three years, this fair has netted $1.9 million in revenue and $5.9 million in net assets, which is a lot of money for a nonprofit.
Miller: What did people you talked to say changed when David Day and Tracy Nietupski took over?
Graham: It was a slow change is what I heard. Then, in recent years, the changes became palpable. So mainly what changed is just this commercialization of the fair. We can look at something like the turkey leg. The turkey leg price increased exponentially. Tickets to the actual fare increased as well. In the last year, they jumped, tickets jumped from $27 to $40. Then also just the treatment from David and Tracy to the workers was different. So there are allegations that David Day screams at people or that he just has a short fuse. There’s also allegations from people I talked to that Tracy Nietupski is concerned with who is at the fair. She wants to raise prices to weed out what she called “the Walmart people.”
Miller: Were there specific stories you heard from current or now former guild members that really stand out to you?
Graham: Yeah, there were a lot. One of the main ones that I keep coming back to is there was this group, this vendor that put on a D&D, a Dungeons and Dragons game for fairgoers. It costs $10 to register and it would sell out by noon each day of the fair – very popular. And these people started this service because they were themselves fairgoers and they thought, oh, this is something that the fair is missing. They were husband and wife who ran this booth. One year the wife was undergoing chemotherapy, and she was doing injections to her uterus to stimulate menopause. So she was experiencing hot flashes. Fair workers often will camp the weekend or even throughout the week at the fair site. So they were sleeping in a trailer, and the husband had tried to set up an air conditioner to cool his wife, who was undergoing chemotherapy, off at night. But the fair management told them they could not do that, and they got into a big altercation.
Then they had another incident with this group where they had lost the keys to their car while they were setting up the booth. You can’t have a car in the Renaissance Faire. This was before the gates opened and they were looking for the keys. David Day allegedly rolled up on his golf cart and got into a screaming match with the woman who was operating the booth. And they found the key shortly thereafter, but it was just like a very negative, very harsh experience. The next couple of months, when they were trying to register for the next fair, their contract was canceled without any conversation.
That happens a lot, where what I’ve heard from fair workers is if you get on the bad side of these people, they will just slowly ice you out. And also, if you talk ill of the fair, fair workers and volunteers have a nondisclosure agreement in the contracts they sign that says you cannot speak ill of the fair. Several people had their contracts canceled because they had complained. And in Washington state, where at least one of these festivals is based, nondisclosure agreements are illegal as of 2022.
Miller: What did you hear from fair management about these and other complaints that you wrote about in the article?
Graham: Not much. I got a lot of nothing back from them originally and then as we got close to publishing, I received a blanket statement, stating that ticket prices have impacted pretty much the experience and that they’ve responded quickly to concerns about anyone who acted out of line with their community values, as soon as they learned about inappropriate behaviors. But my reporting showed that that might not be completely true. The fair also allegedly employed some bad actors, people who had restraining orders against them for domestic violence or people who were charged in underage child sex trafficking. So there’s a lot bubbling under the surface that seems not very good at this organization.
Miller: Are Renaissance fairs becoming more popular? Anecdotally, I’ve heard that, and I wonder how easy that is to check.
Graham: So I also have heard that anecdotally and I’ve heard that through talking to many of these workers. Then if you look at the fair’s public record finances, you can just see a jump in how much money they earned, especially between 2022 and 2023. In 2022 and 2023, what they raked in is much more than in, say, 2019. Obviously 2020, that’s an outlier. But my theory and what I’ve heard is [that] in the post-pandemic era, the allure of escapism of a Renaissance fair and gathering in public with a big group of people is pulling more people to these fairs. I also think that there is just a rise in popularity or the mainstreaming of science fiction and fantasy. These communities that used to be kind of geeky and unpopular are very popular today.
Miller: You went to this fair last weekend. Just briefly, we have about a minute left, what was it like for you?
Graham: You know, it was the first time I’d been to a fair and it was fine. It mostly felt like an open-air craft market. I believe it’s tough for me to separate my reporting from my experience, so I couldn’t help but scrutinize if this exodus of guilds had led to this feeling that most of what the Renaissance Faire is just being sold to. But I enjoyed the joust. I didn’t get a turkey leg cause the line was too long, but I could still see it being fun. [Laughs]
Miller: Nathalie, thanks very much.
Graham: Yeah, thank you.
Miller: That’s Nathalie Graham. She is now a staff writer at The Seattle Stranger. She wrote an article about tensions and a lot of turnover recently at the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire, which is put on by the same organization that operates the Oregon Renaissance Faire.
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