Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

When I read the list of speakers on the mayor’s panel, it was made of six women, including five artists and one critic. In terms of racial diversity, only one was African-American and another was from Iran. The rest were white speakers. Where was the Latina? Dallas is an astounding 42 percent Latino and the mayor is going to “Re-Imagine Art in Dallas” without including anyone to speak on our behalf?

Lily Janiak discusses the world premiere of Stuart Eugene Bousel's adaptation of Rat Girl, a memior by Kristin Hersh, lead singer of Throwing Muses.

The New York Times posed this question on April 29 when the Tony nominations were announced. It’s a problem that’s getting long in the tooth: for years we’ve known that over 60 percent of the ticket buyers and “butts in seats” are women, and yet less than 20 percent of the stories staged are written, directed or designed by them. Hmm.

And although I’m proud of the production and of the nearly-all Latina/o creative team that gave Mariela en el Desierto an authentic voice, an issue arose as the last weekend of performances approached: No critics from the periodicals in the Atlanta area had attended or reviewed the show.

We cannot be preoccupied before or during a show with differences of race, class, sexuality, etc., and assume because of these differences the lives of those we see before us are foreign territory. When we do that, we rob ourselves of what might be a beautiful and transformative experience if only we give it a chance. Instead we should keep an open mind and find the human connecting points. When we do that, we’ll find that deep down, we are more alike than we are different.

Dani Snyder-Young writes about the intentional diversity she witnessed in five of the 2014 Humana Festival productions.

The Wheelock Family Theatre, Boston was started by four people: Andrea Genser, Susan Kosoff, Jane Staab, and Tony Hancock. The mission of the theatre was to make a professional theater that would be accessible to everyone, with a multicultural cast, with black, yellow, white, green people. When you start defining people by color, just pull in green and blue and orange, like the Muppets. We just want to widen our embrace. The priority was to be affordable, but from the start, we would always have a show that was interpreted. That was in 1981, and we worked with a lot of people to make that happen. Audio description started around 1990 at Imagination Stage, and Wheelock Family Theatre was drawn to it, as we wanted to cast a wider net, and include blind people.

Not only is the portrayal of disability by a non-disabled actor equivalent to blackface—what we in the disability community derisively call “cripping up” (pretending to have a disability)—universally accepted as a technical skill tucked away in an actor’s bag of tricks, it is always applauded and more often than not, rewarded. 16 percent of Academy Award winners have received the coveted statue for playing a character with a disability; just two of those winners were disabled actors. If you think this phenomenon exists only in Hollywood, consider the 2013-14 New York theater season.

 looks at how Magic Theatre's initative for young theatre-goes went beyond a discount, and how the premiere of Taylor Mac's Hir at the Magic complemented their earlier production of Buried Child.

The twenty-first century American theater is a communal experience where artists and audiences are bound in an existence which deems them equal parts subject, spectator and benefactor. Moving beyond traditions of privilege, subscriptions, access and pricing; the contemporary American Theater emerges as a necessary cultural commodity of storytelling. At ArtsEmerson: The World On Stage, we are fully aware of this paradigm shift and we welcome it, seeing it as the bedrock for our audience development goals.

We chose to do "Yellow Face" because of the meaningful questions it raises about the parameters of identity. We chose to do "Yellow Face" because of the revealing and resonant glimpse it gives at immigrant families in the United States; because of its multi-layered examination of the “American Dream”; because of the uproarious and irreverent way it uses humor to expose darker themes. We chose to do "Yellow Face" because clearly, it’s a Jewish play!

Holly L. Derr writes about how various playwrights have gotten hired from non-TV writing, and the diversity initatives drawing in new talent.

Holly L. Derr argues against the traditional idea of a "pipeline" of plays flowing from New York to other places in the country.

Theater artists (and institutions) in the U.S. today constantly grapple with this messy duality: caught between a belief in this idealized vision of infinite potential to explore anything and everything; and the very real world in which everything tells us we cannot cross boundaries, where divisions in class and race are pervasive, where substantive engagement about divisive issues is hard, scary, and infrequent.

By allowing only a European/Western perspective to lead the artistic presentation of stories about class, race, and gender, are we continuing to allow those narratives to be appropriated, assimilated, or turned into the universal, etc. to the point of irrelevance? Perhaps in the attempt to distill a story to its essence there is a dilution that takes place at the hands of the dominant culture?

To say that someone, anyone, is categorically unable to understand something about the human condition because it isn’t part of their own experience or heredity is ludicrous. It would be the end of art as we know it. And it is as unreasonable to say someone from middle America couldn’t possibly understand the experience of someone from India as it is to say that I, as a contemporary Indian American raised in the States, couldn’t possibly understand and therefore have no right to play the role of Lady Macbeth.

When the history of intercultural theatre is written, we will always remember the directors that created these works (i.e., Brecht, Barba, Taymor, Ninagawa, Ong), but few can recall the choreographers, dramaturgs, performers, and designers that collaborated with them to make these productions possible.

As an African American woman playwright from a poor, working class, racist, country town in East Texas, I learned early in life that I am part of a community of people whose voices have been silenced, whose image has been exaggerated and misrepresented, and whose legacy has been erased and exploited. White playwrights, male and female, need to understand that they are writing within a legacy of the people responsible for having done those things to people of color. Neither legacy is fair. They come with unshakable, palpable, and visible burdens.

So I ask, is there a way to make disability a part of the world of a play, without reducing it to stereotype or "triumph-over-adversity" tales? Is there a way to make disability business as usual while sharing it with someone unaware of the daily accommodations involved? Is it possible for disability to serve as a metaphor for the emotional and social deficiencies we all carry around? Can it be the driving examination of a play without seeming wholly negative?

Alice Stanley reflects on Binary Theatre Company's production of Jester's Cap, by Daniel Pennyway and making theatre that contains feminism and same-sex love for a possibly-conservative audience.

In this installation of PROPAGANDA: A Festival Celebrating Russian Voices, Lauren Keating addresses the Russian government passing the Anti-Propaganda Bill and the responses it has garnered.

Amanda Boyle investigates the impacts and learning environments for LGBT students who have performed in gay plays in the past few years focusing specifically on productions of The Laramie Project, 8, and Elegies for Angels, Punks, and Raging Queens at the University of Kansas.