Putting the Colored Back into Theatre

SEVAN K. GREENE, member of the 2011 Emerging Writers Group

Not long after the theatrical firestorm on the Arena Stage blog between Hal Brooks and David Dower comes another theatrical showdown. Tom Loughlin, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Theatre Arts/Acting and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the SUNY-Fredonia, responds to The Broadway League's 2010-11 Demographic Report in a post on his blog that examines what he thinks is the problem with a still-majority white theatre audience. His comments, which partly place the blame on colored audiences, caught the attention of Ron Russell, the executive director of Epic Theater Ensemble who responded via his own post that tears down Loughlin's rhetoric. This topic hits home for many of the EWG playwrights who are artists of color who write for a variety of audiences, including those of their own ethnic and racial background. We've decided to weigh in on the topic from the "other" perspective.

For my own part, I think both men touch on some interesting points. Though Loughlin somewhat mentions the economics of theatre, it IS the more important factor for why theatre audiences are not diversified. Weak general marketing outreach aside (and not knowing how to connect to "those people" or 'those communities" just smacks of absurd racism), the fact is that theatre is nearly unaffordable. I am speaking, of course, of mainstream theatre and some off-Broadway and not-for-profit houses. We’ve started to treat theatre like some kind of elitist activity that can only be enjoyed by the 1%, who are indeed statistically white. Theatre used to be for the people - for all people - regardless of class and race. It was about real life, it was about criticizing establishments, it was about the nitty gritty zeitgeists of the given moment. ANYONE could connect to it because they were living it. It used to be FREE. Does anyone REALLY think the 99% can afford paying more than $100 for an evening of theatre when they have bills to pay and food to put on the table? Believe me, Latinos, African Americans, Middle Easterners, and all "others" WANT to entertained, but not at the cost of their livelihood. I understand it's called show BUSINESS for a reason, and I am not trying to be a Pollyanna about my solutions, but even having ONE free night for "those audiences" would go a long way in reaching out to untapped communities. Or, you know, we could stop with the overproduced spectacle shows thereby reducing production costs and allowing for cheaper or more deeply discounted ticket prices.

On the flip side is the notion of what stories attract which audience. Look, a good story regardless of race and ethnicity will drive ANYONE into a seat (look at Slumdog Millionaire). There is great theatre being produced outside of the Great White Way (which is not the penultimate haven for theatrical experiences) that is viable for and accessible by any kind of audience, but the problem is still that the outreach is lacking. Why assume that "colored audiences" can't appreciate "white stories"? I can assure you that African-Americans do enjoy non-Chitlin' Circuit shows (some don't even like them!). Latinos do watch more than zarzuelas and telenovellas. Chinese people, I am sure, can take a night off from Peking entertainment to cross over to the other side. It becomes a mess of circular rhetoric when you say "those audiences" don't come see our shows but you make no effort to try and get them into your seats. I assure you they don't need a special marketing scheme - they need a modicum of respect and information that doesn't make them feel like they are some kind of piteous community outreach effort to increase funding.
I can understand the argument working for remote regional theatres where the demographics are still heavily balanced towards a white majority, but in New York City, among other metropolitan areas, it is a crime that audiences are still not hugely diverse in 2012.


Sevan K. Greene is still a Brown actor and playwright but is enjoying confounding people with his racial and ethnic ambiguity. NYTW will be producing a reading of his play NARROW DAYLIGHT on March 5 @ 3PM with a stellar cast he has to be hush-hush about for now. www.sevangreene.com

ANNA MOENCH, member of the 2011 Emerging Writers Group

Statistics can be manipulated to "prove" all kinds of things. Yes, trends are apparent in statistical data, but causation is famously difficult to prove with percentages and averages--as my middle school science teacher once said, "correlation does not imply causation." For instance, if you look at the ethnic makeup of immigrants in the 1880s, you'd find no Chinese folks were immigrating. Zero percent. Weird, considering the waves of immigrants who had come over to build the railroads for us throughout the 1800s. You could take that piece of information and conclude that all Chinese people must have gotten into a spaceship to fly off and explore uncharted galaxies. But actually, Congress instituted the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the only law in our great nation's history to prevent immigration and naturalization based on race, which was firmly in place until 1943. Ah. That could have something to do with it.

It's possible that Tom Loughlin's conclusions (that theater is a medium for white people as evidenced by the greater percentages of white producers who mostly produce white playwrights who write most of their plays about white people which are then cast with white actors and are seen by predominently white audiences) are correct. It's entirely possible. But if we are to follow his logic in interpreting another bullet point in the report, if 65% of audiences are female, then theater is for (and likely, about) women more than it is for (and about) men. Why, then, are 74% of scripts written by men, and of those scripts, why do 81% feature mostly male roles, according to Emily Glasstone Sands' now-famous paper about gender bias in the theater? Things are more complex than they may seem.

There are many ways to skew data, and even more ways to interpret it. Immediately concluding that people of color do not see theater because they inherently don't like the medium, rather than because there are fewer wealthy people of color than wealthy white people, or because there are fewer plays written and produced that are about people of color than about white people, or because there is a hard-to-eradicate stink of elitism that lingers in most established theaters, or because most people of color blast off into space on Russian spacecraft at 8:00pm, Tuesday through Sunday (with a matinee orbit at 2pm on Sunday) is just bad middle school science.
One more thing. Although Ron Russell's rebuttal is heartfelt, and his company's work and experiences valuable, unfortunately he relies on anecdotal evidence. In defense of Loughlin, he does state that he is speaking about the trends of the majority, and he acknowledges repeatedly that exceptions do exist. Stating that one company's experience refutes on a broad scale the very real trends that Loughlin cites is just as incomplete an argument.

Anna Moench's short play, PULL!, will be produced in the Red Fern Theater Company's upcoming festival later this month. For details on that and other Moench-related things, visit www.annamoench.com.

DOMINIQUE MORISSEAU, member of the 2011 Emerging Writers Group

Some food for thought from someone on the “outside” perspective:

1) Tyler Perry is not the only kind of theater that Black audiences will pay Broadway money for. Black Broadway and the urban theater circuit are an often overlooked part of the industry. The numbers these tours do could kill some Broadway shows on a good night.

2) Storytelling and its traditions are as old and varied as people ourselves. Nonetheless, good strong narratives resonate with all audiences, including people of color. It just simply isn't true that we don't appreciate linear stories on and off the stage. Our settings may be different, but the impact is the same.

3)Most theaters are puzzled about how to approach “audience development”. They haven’t figured out quite how to crack the code (i.e., reach the audiences of color). The answer isn’t because these audiences aren’t interested in theater. In fact, many people of color come from cultural traditions ROOTED in theater. Theater is in their blood. Start with the Performance traditions of West African, Yoruba culture. Then spread it out across the Latin and Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

4) This is the code cracker. Why aren’t audiences of color overwhelming Broadway houses? It’s simple. No one invests in something that doesn’t invest in them. Lack of audiences of color is a DEVELOPMENT failure. Developed relationships come from respecting a people, and earning their trust. That takes a greater effort than mailing and marketing. That takes community involvement and investment. How can you ask a people to come to you if you aren’t ever willing to go to them? You drop a random flier on my Brooklyn stoop and expect me to come to see your random play? I’ve never seen you in my community, but you want me to all of a sudden LEAVE my community, come all the way out to YOUR community, spend my disposable income and then I’m not even going to see anything from my community reflected on that stage? Who’s idea of marketing is that? If you want the people to come to you, you have to go to the people. (But there’s the rub, isn’t it. Do they even really WANT the people to come to them? Or, much like Loughlin, is there some obscure sense of pride and upholding of race privilege that comes from the idea that theater is only for White people? Does that not satisfy some hibernating feeling of superiority? Is that not some racist, classicist, supremacist thinking?)

5) Loughlin mentions Hip Hop and Jazz, birthed in Black culture and how White audiences enjoy it. Similarly, he says that there are some non-Whites who enjoy theater. But a flaw: Unlike Hip Hop and Jazz that are legitimately traced to the Black community, theater is not exclusively traced to White and European communities. There was a time when the commercial viability of both Hip Hop and Jazz was grossly under-estimated by the music industry. They were given a short life expectancy because they were thought to have no audience. The break in traditional music form was considered inferior art and therefore the practice and its audience were deemed temporary. But alas, both art forms and their audiences are here to stay. These styles have made our music catalogs better, re-shaped the world of music, and been imitated and co-opted by continuing generations. And just like Hip Hop and Jazz, Playwrights and Audiences of Color are grossly under-estimated and here to stay. They may be under-represented, but their life will be long and they will make our theaters better. If they are currently missing-in-action from the party, the failure is not theirs, but rather the party-planner. Nonetheless, the artists and their audiences dance on, with or without an invitation.


Dominique Morisseau is alumni of the 2011 EWG, a current member of the Women's Project Playwright's Lab and a fellow in the 2011-2012 Lark Playwrights Workshop. She is currently developing a three-play cycle on her beloved hometown of Detroit. The first of the three, DETROIT '67, received a reading in the Public's EWG Spotlight Series and the 2011 Lark's Playwrights' Week. She was also a runner-up for the 2011 Princess Grace Award. dominiquemorisseau@yahoo.com / or catch her on Facebook!

PIA WILSON, member of 2008 Emerging Writers Group

Let me say this: the idea expressed in Tom Loughlin's article isn't anything new under the sun. In fact, it's a common stream of "logic" used by oppressors around the world.

The physical form of Black people was used as an excuse to keep them out of ballet, with the Black body as a supposed affront to the European aesthetic. Black people have a long history of discrimination in classical music – another rarified art form that may be considered "for white people." Mr. Loughlin took his turn at the wheel, loosely wrapping an old idea in new statistics. And though he's gotten some flack for it, the simple fact is: he's not alone in his opinion.

That's what I find most troubling about Mr. Loughlin's essay. I don't care that he said something that's not true to anyone with a working frontal lobe. Clearly, theater is not just for white people. What I find disturbing is that he (and those who think like him) just want everyone (read: other Caucasians) to sign off on it, so they don't have to be bothered with the uncomfortable truth.

If theater is only for white people, then theaters don't have to worry about cultivating more than two audiences (old and young white people ... with money). Those pesky artists of color will have to resign themselves to writing stories with which the white audience is comfortable, e.g. writing about slavery or the Civil Rights movement if you're African-American, or penning a hot, passionate, sexy play about immigration if you're Latino, or if you're of Middle Eastern descent, well, then, if your play isn't about terrorism or Muslims, hang it up. Oh, and those artists of color can have their battle royale over the one spot available for a non-white play because ... you know ... that one Black/Asian/Latino play did so poorly 20 years ago.

However, if theater isn't only for white people, then a lot of theaters have done a really bad job of reaching out to other communities. If theater isn't only for white people, then institutional racism and a lack of minority representation in arts administration is a serious problem. If theater is not only for white people, then artistic directors of quite a few theaters are going to have to make new kinds of friends. Oh, the implications!

That's a scary proposition to a lot of theater makers who just want to "concentrate on telling good stories, regardless of race." (I put that last part in quotes because that's often the first response to mentions of racism in theater, as though people of color don't tell good stories.)

American theater will not become more inclusive unless there is a political will to do so. And, here's another truth: white folks who run theaters do have to buy into the idea of being more inclusive. Perhaps white audiences need to be educated about all the other types of theater out there. Maybe, though, they don't. Maybe they only go to see the same types of plays over and over again because that's all they're given.


Pia Wilson is a member of the 2008 Emerging Writers Group. She will be participating in the New Jersey edition of The One-Minute Play Festival on Sunday, Jan. 22 at 7 p.m., at Mile Square Theater Company at the Monroe Arts Center in Hoboken.

DEEN, member of the 2009 Emerging Writers Group

Sometimes, to want something we cannot have is too painful. So instead we say we don't want it, don't need, could care less about it. The price of going to decently produced theater -- especially the price of seeing something on Broadway -- is astronomical. (Translation: So far beyond your budget, don't even bother.) People are not buying tickets to the theater because many cannot possibly afford it.

And because to discuss this properly, we would need to have a much larger discussion about generational oppression, race and economics, who has privilege, and hope (or the lack of it), I will start by saying the following courses are required before we can continue:

Race and Economics in the US - 101
White Privilege - 101

Okay, so let's assume you've now taken those courses. Then I will continue this way: Tom, to say non-white-non-rich people aren't interested in the theater is a bit like saying, "Only rich people are interested in having fabulous health care and winter homes in Tahiti." Certainly, if you look at the evidence, you won't find many poor people purchasing homes in Tahiti, nor will you find many poor people purchasing the gold star health insurance that members of Congress are given -- but one could scarcely say that was because the poor of this country aren't interested in those things. (Then again, maybe they aren't interested in those things -- if you're spending all your time trying to figure out how to make it to your next mortgage payment or how to put food on the table, you may not give a damn about going to the theater. You can't afford to.)

(And because you've taken the required course load, you understand that not having the cash to afford it is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg: We're talking about institutional, systemic disenfranchisement which means everything from a lack of expendable cash, to the lack of educational opportunities, to the lack of exposure to theater and art, all the way to the lack of hope for a better future. It's quite a wide swath. And this is part of White Privilege -- the luxury to be oblivious to this.)

And to take it further, it's a vicious cycle isn't it? There aren't a lot of stories about brown people on the Broadway stage, are there? But if more plays about brown people were produced, who would be able to afford to see them?

But do not mistake me, Tom Loughlin's article is valuable: It brings to light White Privilege in the theater. And though Ron Russell rails against it, I think it's better that White Privilege rises to the surface where we can see it for what it is. Tom is quite right -- the majority of Broadway theater goers are rich white people (you'll forgive me for the gross generalization, won't you?). It's important to see that fact and ask, Why is that appalling? In my opinion, it's appalling because it does not reflect America's actual ethnic diversity. It does, however, reflect the concentration of wealth that exists in our country. And if it is indeed so appalling, how come it hasn't changed? Maybe it's not so appalling to many, many people. (And that, truly, is appalling.)

(Occupy Broadway, anyone...?)

And in Ron's scathing response to Tom's article, I sense some White Guilt. Tom's research is flawed and lacking, but it strikes me as honest and sincere. The problem with White Privilege (the luxury to be oblivious) and White Guilt (the constant burden of feeling responsible) strikes me as similar -- though they are radical ends of the spectrum, both find it difficult to look at what is actually there. And both are a bit self-centered: It's all about you, isn't it? (Trust me when I say, both White Privilege and White Guilt are burdens on those of us who aren't white, though if I had to choose, I'd prefer you feel guilty to oblivious.)

There is one theater that I know of which has been truly inspiring in it's desire to make a change. Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, MN, under the leadership Jack Reuler, has declared theater free for all -- they call it Radical Hospitality.

That is truly revolutionary, and yet I can't help but think that it's a shame that I think so.


Deen would like to acknowledge his privilege as an educated, seemingly cis-gendered man, as well thank his immigrant parents for being in the place to give him both opportunities and hope. His solo play, DRAW THE CIRCLE, will be produced at InterAct Theatre (Philadelphia) in April. For more info, please visit deentheplaywright.weebly.com.