If one looks around the website of The Neil Simon Festival, a yearly theatre event held in Cedar City, Utah, there’s a list of donors to the company. On that list are seven entries at the $100+ level. But the list is perhaps some 30 short, because that’s the approximate number of unlisted individuals who sent $150 to the Festival last year.
While the $150 sent by those people isn’t described by the Festival as a donation, it effectively is one for all but a single person. The $150 figure is derived from the submission fee playwrights are asked to provide as their entry fee to the Festival’s New Play Contest, now in its ninth year. While the Festival notes that every submission receives a written evaluation as part of the company’s response, it is not a fee for service. Playwrights are not offered the opportunity to submit and not receive an evaluation.
Richard Bugg, founder and executive producer of the Festival, said in a call with Arts Integrity that the $150 submission fee was new as of last year, markedly increased from their prior figure. He said it has had the effect of decreasing the submissions, from nearly 100 scripts to somewhere in the 30s. The deadline for the 2019 contest is 11:59 pm on February 1, so there is not yet a final count for this year.
Asked about the fee, which is notably high compared to other play competitions and workshop programs, Bugg explained that the fee is waived for any college or university that chooses and submits a single selection, though he said that none had done so. The Festival’s website states:
The entry fee is used in three areas: a) to help defray the cost of travel and lodging for the playwright, b) payment to our contest readers for their professional expertise, and c) contest administration (photocopying, advertising, etc. but not salary).
Bugg specifically said that the fee helps to underwrite payment to Douglas Hill, who reviews most of the scripts and writes the critiques. Bugg said that Hill is, “magnificent in looking at the structure of scripts and making suggestions.” The payment also helps to pay other reviewers engaged by Hill as needed. Bugg said he also reads all of the finalists’ scripts.
Hill also spoke to the effect of the submission fee, in an e-mail response to questions from Arts Integrity. “We have received as many as 120 submissions in some years, and as few as 20 in other years,” he wrote. “Unfortunately since the contest is less than 10 years old, and with the recent changes to the contest, it’s a little difficult to provide you with a good approximate number.
“We use it to some degree to weed out,” said Bugg. “We get a higher degree of script that way.” However, Bugg allowed that perhaps some worthy scripts might not be submitted due to the expense.
The season at The Neil Simon Festival, an independent not-for-profit organization, is short, only three weeks this coming year, with two shows a day five days a week, and with most actors performing in multiple roles akin to classic repertory format. The winner of the new play contest first receives a six-day staged reading in the year in which it is selected, and is then produced, for three performances, during the subsequent season. In 2019, that play will be I Left My Dignity in My Other Purse by Shelley Chester.
Asked whether the Festival was familiar with Dramatists Guild guidelines regarding play festivals and contests, Bugg said that he was not. Ralph Sevush, Executive Director for Business Affairs of the Guild, when informed of the $150 submission fee, provided the following guidance from the Guild’s best practices guidance:
BEST PRACTICE: The organization does not require a submission fee. Furthermore, the organization imposes no other obligation on the author or encumbrance on the work (e.g., ticket sales, participation fees, technical rentals, hiring fees, marketing, or other selling obligations), except for do-it-yourself (“DIY”) productions.The Guild has long disapproved of excessive submission fees, which not only undermine the benefit of any “award” or “royalty,” but also impose financial hardship on the author. Any other authorial obligations should be clearly noted up front; this is particularly true for DIY and similar festivals that require authors to self-produce their works.
Regarding payments to the authors when their winning works are performed, Bugg said that there were none. The playwright receives transportation and housing during both visits. Bugg explained, “There’s no royalties. Just being in the season is reward in our eyes.” Bugg did make clear that other playwrights in the Festival, including the Simon estate, are paid royalties.
The Neil Simon Festival, now in its 17th year, is admittedly a small company, operating on a budget of roughly $300,000 per Bugg. While Hill wrote, “We’re probably best defined as a professional non-Equity company,” that assertion is undermined by a casting notice from the Festival. The notice stipulates availability from June 3 to July 29 in Cedar City and 4-5 weeks of subsequent performance in Park City and Ivins, also in Utah. Regarding compensation, the website says only that, “Housing is provided along with a modest stipend.” Bugg noted that while he and several of the other leaders of the company are members of Actors Equity and do perform in the Festival, “We don’t do contracts for ourselves.”
That the Neil Simon Festival operates a new play contest in which playwrights are asked to pay a fee far above the typical competition, that the selected playwright receives no royalty for their work being presented to a paying public, and that actors are essentially volunteering for an entire summer’s engagement stand as three red flags about the company. These simply are not prevailing industry standards. Professionals are paid for their work.
That the company leadership – Bugg, Hill, and artistic director Peter Sham – all teach at the university level (Bugg and Sham at Southern Utah University and Hill at University of Nevada Las Vegas) also raises questions about the professional standards they are imparting to their students, separate from their Neil Simon duties. The encouragement to “work” for little or no pay runs contrary to the practices and expectations that should be instilled in aspiring artists. The suggestion that playwrights of new plays should be rewarded simply by virtue of being produced undermines the perceived value of authors’ creations. Actors shouldn’t be grateful for a place to sleep, petty cash, and stage time. High submission fees emphasize economic disparity among artists, making it possible only for those of means to enter competitions that require a significant outlay (very possibly diminishing the range and caliber of submissions and the program in the process).
When the clock strikes midnight on February 2, the Neil Simon Festival’s Play Contest entry period will close. But hopefully with some serious thinking resulting from outside scrutiny, the leadership of the company will rethink the economic model under which they function and the messages they communicate through their operating model. Perhaps they can use it to leverage more funding, locally or nationally. Because however great the experience may be for those involved, exorbitant fees for contest entrants and free labor by actors don’t add up a professional experience. It ends up costing the artists to be involved, even as audiences pay in order to see that work. And that’s no laughing matter.
The headlines were spurred by internal disputes between the board and staff of BCT regarding the nudity in the production. Executive artistic director Burgess Clark informed the press that he is on layoff at the moment, as an alternative to his resigning, in the face of what he sees as board meddling in his artistic prerogatives. He characterized what took place to Don Aucoin of the Globe as attempted censorship by two “overreactionary ninnies” on the company’s board.
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Scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, as seen in The Boston Globe
The fuller situation, as pieced together from e-mail correspondence with Clark and BCT executive director Toby Schine, a phone conversation with BCT board member Henry Lukas, and the press accounts, is as follows.
The not-for-profit BCT, through its program for young people aged 14 to 19, has been producing shows in the past few years geared towards more mature youths, including Rent, Spring Awakening and Reflections of a Rock Lobster. Cuckoo’s Nest was part of that progression of work. Clark says that he has done the full texts of those shows, not student editions.
When Cuckoo’s Nest was announced for production, there was no public notice that nudity would be part of the production, nor was the board apprised of it. Clark, in an e-mail, said that the nudity (one male actor, aged 21, enacted during an exchange that covers less than one page of the acting edition script) was not pre-planned, but, per Clark, originated at the actor’s suggestion at the first rehearsal. “I asked him if he had ever appeared nude onstage before and he said no,” wrote Clark, “but that he was willing. I thought it was a brave risk for a young actor to offer. I told him we would attempt it if it seemed organic. Five weeks later when we were in tech, we tried it and it played beautifully. The cast had become so comfortable with one another by that point that it was pretty casual and had just the right tone.”
Asked when he learned of the nudity, Schine, the executive director, wrote, “Burgess mentioned it to me two weeks in to the rehearsal process. He had considered it for the scene in the pre-production, but thought it better not to take the risk, given that we likely wouldn’t have an actor who was comfortable with the idea. On the first day of rehearsal, the actor playing McMurphy, Sam Mulcahy, asked if the scene would be played with him nude for a few moments – Burgess then reconsidered. He finally said he wanted to move ahead with it two weeks before we opened.”
For student performances, the actor wore boxer shorts, and for the first two general public performances (there were ten general audience shows in total), he wore them as well. The nudity was introduced at the third public performance and was in place for the remainder of the run.
“We had agreed to try it both ways—so we did it without the nude scene the first two performances and did on the next two,” wrote Clark. “The scene as we had rehearsed it (nude) worked much better with our audiences.” In light of that decision, Schine wrote, “We contacted the parents involved in the scene and had discussions with them, [and] had Sam Mulcahy sign a nudity waiver based on AEA’s for his protection and for the theatres.”
During the second week of the three-week run, following the introduction of the nude scene, all parties agree that two board members contacted Schine to discuss the nudity; one audience member also called the company with concerns. What is unclear is the exact nature of the board members’ communications, which has been described variously as “demands from the board members to cut the nude scene” to “a concern about process.” Arts Integrity has asked Schine for clarification, since he was on the calls, and none of the complaints went directly from board members to Clark; as of the morning of May 9, Schine’s e-mail has an auto-respond message saying he is out of the office for two days.
In response to the initial expressions of concern, heated or not, Clark writes, “Toby called Hank [Miller, the board president] back and Hank said, ‘This is an artistic decision and I have to trust you to make the right one. You have my support.’” Lukas, the board member interviewed, confirms that Miller gave his support and makes clear that the board never met or discussed the issue until after the production had closed, and that at no time did the board ask for the production to be altered. Clark acknowledges that the two board members were acting independently.
Clark has said that from the time the concerns were raised, he felt uncertain from day to day as to whether the show would go on. He characterizes the subsequent events as, “After daily harassment from these board members, who were acting completely without authority, I made my plan to resign. My board president and my executive producer collectively offered the alternative of being temporarily laid off rather than have me resign, until they could present a united front from the board. That has yet to take place.”
Subsequent to this, one of the two board members who took issue with the nudity resigned. The board met on Monday May 8, following which Lukas said, of the more advanced work Burgess has done with the older participants, “Burgess has done a great job.” He went on to say, “We’re hoping that we can sit down with Burgess, clarify the issues and have him back. Asked whether there have been any other organizational changes coming out of the meeting, Lukas responded, “Not that we’ve finalized, no.”
News accounts report that the staff has gone on “strike” in support of Clark, and BCT classes were canceled this past weekend. Asked about the strike, Schine responded, “I did not strike – I felt it was most advantageous for our process as an organization to stay on staff and work aggressively to move conversations forward between our Board President, Burgess and the Staff. As of this moment, I’m hopeful that we will be able to move past this challenge towards a very invigorated Boston Children’s Theatre. We’ve had very, very challenging conversations, and we have learned a lot as an organization about how we need to re-align our organizational spine.”
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Scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest at Boston Children’s Theatre (BCT publicity photo)
There are numerous issues bound up in the situation at Boston Children’s Theatre – censorship, public nudity, content for children’s theatre, not-for-profit leadership and governance among them – and they bear consideration, separately and together.
Taking censorship first, it is clear from all accounts that the board of trustees Boston Children’s Theatre did not attempt to censor Burgess Clark’s production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. While two board members independently did express concern – what they sought, how strongly, how often and at what volume is in dispute – they were not acting on behalf of the board. The board never met to discuss the issue while the show was running, and the board president was supportive of the company’s staff leadership in making the decision that they thought best under the circumstances.
In a letter to the BCT board, dated May 8, the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Director of Programs, Svetlana Mintcheva wrote, in part:
“Adults, possibly shamed about their own thoughts and fantasies, may occasionally be embarrassed, but if anyone can look at a nude and not see an issue, it is a child. Nevertheless, there are frequent calls to censor artwork containing nudity so as to “protect children” from what some claim is “indecent,” or simply to avoid controversy.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court has stated multiple times that simple nudity (i.e., representations of the nude body in a non-sexualized manner) is constitutionally protected expression. Schad v. Mount Ephraim (1981), Jenkins v. Georgia (1974), Osborne v. Ohio (1990).”
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was originally seen as a three-act play on Broadway in 1963 for a short run and subsequently revised into a two act for an Off-Broadway revival in 1971. The Off-Broadway script is the one that is available for production through Samuel French. It carries a message from playwright Dale Wasserman saying:
“There is profanity and strong language in the play. Particularly as concerns educational institutions and community theatre, you may feel free to modify or delete language which may give offense in your community without, however, altering the basic text.”
What it does not have is any stage direction indicating nudity. Indeed, in the scene in question, the script notes that the character of McMurphy, when told to remove a towel around his waist, reveals silk boxers covered in white whales, saying:
“Ain’t they some shit? They was a present from a co-ed at Oregon State. She said I was some kind of symbol.”
Commenting on the addition of nudity in his production, Clark wrote, “When it was written, I doubt that would have even been an option.” At a separate point in the correspondence, he wrote, responding to a question about the dialogue about the boxers, “The dialogue was the same with and without the boxer shorts. The particular line ‘Ain’t they some shit?’ (which now referenced his manhood on display) got quite a laugh as I recall.”
In a phone call with Samuel French, the company’s executive director Bruce Lazarus said that BCT had not sought any permission to alter any of the show’s text. Stage directions and costuming, however, are not the same as text in some cases, and not always followed in staging shows unless the action is essential to the plot or the author’s clear intent.
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The issue of nudity on stage is a complicated one when working with professional actors, let alone young ones. Professional practice generally requires that any role requiring nudity be stated as such in a casting notice, and that the actor agree to it in writing at the time of contracting. In university theatres, many schools have guidelines that require nudity to be discussed prior to the start of production with a department chair, and state that no student should be required to perform nude or appear in a production with nudity if they do not wish to do so, among other protections (including prohibitions on photography and video recording of any nude scenes). The advance notices and stipulations are designed to insure that, in the power dynamic between a director (who also may be an employer or teacher) and their cast, no one is expected or pressured to participate in a process that makes them uncomfortable, or seen to be opposing the wishes of the majority opinion on such matters. Such guidelines have been increasingly implemented over the past few decades as protection for all concerned.
While the actor who appeared nude reportedly suggested the idea himself, and the other actors who appeared on stage in the scene who were under 18 received parental approval to participate, the process for nudity in a children’s theatre production could have been more thorough, consistent with professional or educational practice. Burgess professed to being surprised that the nudity had become “such an electric issue.” Separately, he wrote, “The nude scene is organic to the story, and I was proud to again be the first children’s’ theatre in the country to be staging full male nudity by a 21-year old actor.”
This also begs the question of whether it was appropriate to make the audience aware of the nudity, especially in the context of production by a youth theatre program that’s part of a children’s theatre company. “We gave ample warning of the nudity, language and adult themes,” Clark wrote. Schine wrote, “The audience was warned on signs upon entering the theatre, the website, during a curtain speech and in the playbill. During the tech process, we invited parents, theatre staff (those not working on the show already) and solicited opinions.”
However, while notice may have been given at the theatre, BCT’s website speaks only of “strong language and adult themes,” and notes that, “No one under 14 will be admitted without a guardian’s permission.” Unless there was a pop-up box in the ordering process, now disabled, there is not specificity about nudity in the online advisories. With the nudity only added to the show following the first two performances, the question of whether ticket buyers should have been or were advised about the nudity in advance of arriving at the performance, and how and when, remains unclear.
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Regardless of one’s moral, ethical or even legal perspective on the issues surrounding Cuckoo’s Nest at BCT, the problems that emerged would seem to stem in particular from a failure of communications within the totality of the organization. While board members certainly have the right to share their thoughts with the company’s leadership, if individual board members did in fact demand that the show be altered, they were placing the executive director in an untenable situation, since artistic and managerial leaders typically report jointly to the board, not to individual board members or factions within the board. If that was their demand, as characterized by Clark, then they should have asked for an emergency board meeting to address such an action, since artistic leaders are indeed empowered to make creative decisions for the organization, but are ultimately accountable to a board. If they were asking only for conversation, as characterized by Lukas, then Schine’s account of the conversations may have precipitated the kind of brinksmanship that arose, as Clark was relying upon what he was told by Schine, having never spoken directly to the complainants. The circumstances remain unclear.
While at professional organizations, or for that matter any not-for -profit, the danger of a board trying to micromanage, let alone dictate appropriate artistic content, is always a concern. Strong artsboards have grappled with the issues of governance and put in place procedures for communication and oversight of staff. However, when an artistic director has no direct communications with any of the board in a time of crisis, that is only bound to exacerbate issues. Additionally, when an organization is anticipating potentially controversial issues, not apprising the board in advance, or as soon as possible when such circumstances arise, is foolhardy, since the board’s support and guidance can help to protect against any blowback.
It’s impossible to say how this will all resolve, since the situation seems fluid. There appears to be a great deal more communication needed, ideally with all pertinent parties in the same room at the same time. As for the efforts of BCT to serve older youths beyond the nomenclature of “children’s theatre”? That seems a worthy goal, provided the company follows best practices, hewing to, as the vision statement on their website includes, “maintaining and understanding artistic discipline,” with “professionalism and professional standards play[ing] a key role.” That process calls for – and in light of the specific controversy you should pardon the expression – getting everything out into the open. Everyone in leadership, staff and board, at BCT, needs to be on the same page, on the same team, and acting in the very best interests of the young people they are there to train and serve.
Addendum: As this post was to be published, Don Aucoin at The Boston Globe published a commentary piece which also sought opinions from other youth theatre companies in the Boston area. You can read it here. It concludes with a paragraph that seems counterproductive to a positive theatergoing experience. It reads:
“Reassuring words, but it’s still probably wise for parents to be ready to clap their hands over the eyes or ears of their little ones when they take them to any theater, anywhere. Just in case.”
That seems an awful state of mind for parents to be in when taking their children to the theatre. If they have any concerns, they should call the theatre company and inquire as to specifics of content. Sitting poised for alarm seems no way for anyone to attend the theatre, and to do so seems a certain way of spoiling the show for both parents and children.
Update, May 11, 7 am: The Boston Globe reports that Burgess Clark and the Boston Children’s Theatre staff have returned to work at the company. A total of three board members, specifically board president Hank Miller as well as the two trustees who registered complaints about the nudity in Cuckoo’s Nest, have resigned. The company’s annual benefit, which generates roughly 10% of its income, has been postponed from next week until the autumn. A series of steps are being put into place to address longstanding financial instabilities which have come to light, as well as the company’s failure to compete mandatory tax filings since 2014.
Update, May 12, 8 am: Contrary to their account from one day earlier, The Boston Globe now reports that there is again a rift a Boston Children’s Theatre. Next steps seem to be uncertain following the seeming detente of the prior 24 hours.
This post will be updated as circumstances warrant.
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Note: in the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledge that I attended high school and was friends with BCT board member Lori Correale. While I was aware of her son’s participation in the company, I did not know she was a board member until I began researching this article, at which point I determined that I couldn’t interview her, in order to avoid any real or perceived conflict of interest. I did ask her for help with contact information for board members who might be willing to speak with me.
Scene from the musical Marathon of Hope (screen grab from Drayton Entertainment YouTube video)
If you look at photos or video from Marathon of Hope, a new musical that just premiered in Waterloo, Canada, about an hour outside Toronto, something seems off.
The musical is based on the life story of Terry Fox, a young Canadian man who in 1980, after losing a leg to cancer, undertook a country-wide run to raise money for and bring attention to cancer research. He did not complete his effort, because his cancer metastasized to his lungs and he died in 1981. His life is the stuff of legend in Canada, with schools, athletic centers and sculptures standing as memorials to him, and ongoing fundraising to fight cancer in his name. His story has been told in two separate TV movies, in 1983 and 2005.
So what’s wrong with the images?
It looks like the on-stage Terry Fox, especially when seen in running shorts, has three legs. One limb appears to be flesh and bone, the second is shrouded in a black legging and the third is a prosthesis. The images reveal that in telling the story of a man who is certainly one of the best known Canadian athletes and advocates with a disability, Drayton Entertainment, the producer of the musical, has cast a non-disabled actor. The prosthesis is a stand-in for the real one that Fox used to make his run; the black-clad one is an effort to disguise the presence of one of the actor’s own limbs.
The list of actors with disabilities portraying characters with disabilities on stage, TV and film is stunningly brief, despite Harold Russell’s dual Oscar win in 1947 for The Best Years of Our Lives. Deaf West’s Big River and Spring Awakening, with Deaf and disabled actors, were significant milestones on Broadway, but they remain the exception to the rule. Yet the decision to have a non-disabled actor play Terry Fox seems creatively and historically derelict (though it should be noted that Fox’s family approves of and supports the musical).
Drayton doesn’t seem unaware of the casting imperative for the show, making note of their efforts to seek talent in the amputee community. Their announcement of the show’s cast includes this statement.
Given the scope of this particular project, in addition to its regular audition process, the not-for-profit theatre company initiated a nationwide search for the role of Terry Fox through open call video auditions.
The organization also reached out to the National Amputee Centre and 35 prosthetic and orthotic centres throughout Ontario, along with the Amputee Coalition of Canada and Amputees Amplified. Additional leads were generated through Casting Workbook, an industry group providing full service casting software.
There’s no question that these are good efforts to have made. But speaking for the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts, where I am interim director, the countless artists with disabilities for whom we advocate, and the hundreds we have in our files for just such casting needs, Drayton didn’t go far enough, based on the final casting of the show.
While national pride could have been an issue in a story so dear to Canadians’ hearts, Drayton may not have reached beyond Canadian borders. Within minutes of learning about Marathon of Hope and its casting yesterday, my colleagues at Inclusion were able to list several male actors in their 20s who are amputees – including Anthony Michael Lopez and Evan Ruggiero (Ruggiero’s musical skills landed him a spot on Ellen). There are other actors who fit the requirements of the role in the Inclusion files, but without public websites or Facebook pages, we’re not able to name them so publicly (Drayton never contacted Inclusion, though we often consult with Canadian as well as UK companies).
Is it possible that Drayton reached out to these performers? Certainly. As it happens, both are working on stage this fall: Ruggiero as the title role in The Toxic Avenger for the Pittsburgh CLO and Lopez in New York Theatre Workshop’s Othello. But the fact is, when telling a story about disability, about a person whose disability was so central to his fame, to not cast the role with an actor with a disability denies one message of the show and insults professional actors who are indeed capable of playing the role. Talent searches among non-professionals may sometimes prove fruitful, but there’s no guarantee. For a show such as Marathon of Hope, if an appropriate actor isn’t immediately available, the show should be delayed until they are.
Pretending to disability under the mask of “theatricality” is no solution – even if it is part of the long, frustrating history of ignoring actors with disabilities. This point was not lost on J. Kelly Nestruck, critic for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, who wrote in his review of the production:
Carroll’s casting has angered some activists who feel that this is an example of “cripping up.” For me, the larger problem is that Mustakas’s production (which also features a pair of able-bodied child actors playing disabled characters) has not found room for disability anywhere in his aesthetic.
This is a musical whose main goal is to inspire – as unabashedly as Fox did. And instead, it sends a message that while a young man with one leg may be able to run 5,373 kilometres, there is no room for anyone with atypical abilities in musical theatre.
It’s worth noting that when the 1983 TV movie The Terry Fox Story was made, an actor who was a real-life amputee played the role. When the story was told again in 2005, the filmmakers cast a non-amputee, and used digital airbrushing to replace one of his legs. Regrettably, technological advancements in filmmaking trumped lived experience. Of course, that’s not possible on stage.
Whatever the future may hold for Marathon of Hope, it has the potential to make a strong statement not only about Terry Fox’s achievements, but also about the avenues open to performers with disabilities. In its present form, it has opted only to advance the former story, while disguising the latter – not once, but three times, per Nestruck – because the producers and creative team did not fully commit to every facet of the story they sought to tell.
The bombshell article in the Chicago Reader by Aimee Levitt and Christopher Piatt, about serially abusive practices at Chicago’s Profiles Theatre, rightly zoomed around the theatre world from the moment it went online on Wednesday at approximately 5:30 pm eastern time. Profoundly troubling to virtually anyone who read it, this account of abuse masquerading as theatre will surely be one of the seminal articles to be read, shared and taught for years to come. It is a cautionary tale about how, under the guise of art and daring, unethical and perhaps even illegal acts can be sustained by those who choose to exploit both the ostensibly safe spaces of creative practice and the unending appeal of theatre for those just looking for a break, any break, seemingly no matter what the cost.
It is impossible to say much more than Levitt and Piatt have already done with their essential yearlong investigation. But there are a few items that have come to Arts Integrity’s attention.
“The Village Bike” withdrawn from Profiles
If one visits the website of Profiles Theatre right now, the company promises a production of Penelope Skinner’s The Village Bike beginning in late August. That production will not be happening, because the playwright has withdrawn the rights. Skinner provided a statement to Arts Integrity via her New York representative, Scott Chaloff at WME. It reads, in its entirety:
When the article in the Chicago Reader appeared, it was sent to me by a number of artists in the American theatre community and beyond it. Having read the article, alongside their emails, I feel it essential to withdraw the rights of my play ‘The Village Bike’ from that theatre. In light of the serious allegations made against the management, it would seem unwise for a production of this play – or indeed any play – to go on at that theatre until a full investigation has been made into their practices. I regret that it is not always possible from outside a community to hear the rumours of what goes on inside. Thank you to the brave actresses who came forward and to the writers of the article for raising awareness, and for giving the wider community an opportunity to take action.
Arts Integrity was advised that this would be Skinner’s only comment on Profiles Theatre.
It should be noted that in the wake of the revelations, the ad design for The Village Bike, shown above, which under other circumstances might be seen as merely provocative, seems to be further evidence of the pathology at work at Profiles.
Silence from the theatre
At approximately 5:50 pm eastern on Wednesday, Arts Integrity wrote to Larry Larsen, the senior vice prudent of Greentarget, the communications firm representing Profiles. The company had previously been represented by Cathy Taylor PR, a veteran Chicago press office, and it was Taylor who advised Arts Integrity to contact Greentarget. Taylor’s name was still on the Profiles site as the press contact for the theatre.
Asked for comment on the article and the situation at Profiles, Arts Integrity quickly received the following response from Larsen, about 20 minutes later:
I am representing the Profiles Theatre. As you noted, the article has just appeared. We are in the process of reading it. I will respond further once we have reviewed it.
There has been no further response from Greentarget, which is primarily a corporate communications firm. One of the specialties, according to their website is “Special Situation Communication: protecting reputation during the most critical times.” This seems to be doublespeak for what most people would call crisis management. In any event, Greentarget’s strategy to date has been silence.
Should people have realized sooner
In a follow up piece for the Reader, “A critic’s mea culpa, or How Chicago theater critics failed the women of Profiles Theatre,” critic Christopher Piatt publicly examined his own failure to recognize the pathology of Profiles through the kind of work they presented over 20 years, a brave statement on his part, and one that is equally important reading to the main story if the theatre community as a whole is to truly learn from these alleged practices. It should be noted that, in hindsight, beyond The Village Bike image shared earlier, Profiles was either insufficiently self-aware of the image they were telegraphing, or didn’t care, when one looks at some images still cycling on their website from past productions. (Arts Integrity is not reproducing the images, given the unethical circumstances under which they were created.)
The trolls come out to play
Remarkably, in an account that communicates emotional damage and the kind of practices that must be eliminated, there are always naysayers. LA Bitter Lemons, an outspoken Los Angeles theatre site which Arts Integrity’s director challenged over its pay for review strategy about a year ago, has posted a short piece by editor Colin Mitchell which seems, in essence, to “blame the victims” of Profiles for not speaking up sooner. Read it if you must, but given this manner of engaging with a serious problem at one theatre that, unfortunately, is likely happening at other theatres and in the arts at large, Arts Integrity believes Bitter Lemons has gone from bitter to vile, and will no longer give further consideration to writing that appears on the site again. If you do read the piece, be sure to share your comments with the author and, perhaps, the site’s advertisers.
Aftermath
Even before the Profiles situation was revealed, the Chicago theatre community had already begun to come together over abuses in non-Equity theatre through the Not In Our House campaign, which includes a code of conduct. This effort needs to be replicated in communities throughout the country, and Arts Integrity stands ready to support and participate in these initiatives – and to be a vehicle through which artists who feel they have no voice can find support and guidance when it’s needed.
As for Profiles, there is distinct irony that the company has employed the tagline “Whatever the truth requires” in its marketing. The truth requires that Profiles be held to account now that they have been exposed for twisting the theatrical concept of truth to their own ends.
Update, June 10, 10:15 pm: Sometime in the past hour a statement from Darrell W. Cox, artistic director of Profiles Theatre, appeared on the company’s Facebook page. It begins:
On June 8, 2016, the Chicago Reader published an article entitled “At Profiles Theatre the drama—and abuse—is real.” For those who have not read it, I recommend you do so. The article’s overarching message of zero tolerance for workplace abuse is powerful and right.
Unfortunately, I am the villain in the Reader’s approximately 12,700-word article. The article chronicles much of my life since joining Profiles as recalled mainly through selective accounts of three women in my life. Most of the article dealt with people’s views of my work as an actor, director and artistic director of Profiles. But a portion of the article made allegations about my private conduct. Many people who read the article did not recognize the distinction and seemed to believe everything in the article without question.
Cox’s post goes on to express dismay over retribution that has been directed at him and the theatre since the article appeared, and states, “Joe Jahraus and I (Profiles artistic directors) have never and will never condone workplace abuse at Profiles Theatre….All of our actors are here of their own free will.”
It continues:
Unfortunately, the article has made it impossible for me to respond further to the women’s statements in a way that would convince anyone who believes their statements are accurate. I must rely, instead, on those who were and are a part of my life and Profiles Theatre to know the facts.
The statement concludes by asking for a meeting with the leadership of Not In Our House.
It should be noted that the original Chicago Reader article sought Cox and Jahraus’s participation, which was declined. In addition, as noted above, Arts Integrity sought comment or an interview with the Profiles leadership which, after being told a response would be forthcoming, never came; it has now been more than 52 hours. It was not, and is not, impossible for Cox to respond. He has elected not to.
A prophetic image on the Profiles Theatre website?
Update, June 10, 10:55 pm: In addition to the accounts in the article, and Darryl Cox’s Facebook reply, another actress who worked at Profiles, and who had previously declined to speak with the Chicago Reader, has come forward, writing, “I should have shared my story when called for comment.” Her full post can be read here.
Update, June 11, 6:00 pm: In the wake of his essay about the Profiles Theatre, referred to above, Colin Mitchell has been removed as editor of the website LA Bitter Lemons. The site’s publisher wrote that, “Colin Mitchell’s recent article within the Chicago theatrical community crossed from controversial into unacceptable.” Paul Birchall gives a fuller report of the situation wth Bitter Lemons at Stage Raw.
Update, June 12, 6:00 am: Last evening, Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune wrote on his Facebook page about the Profiles Theatre revelations. He began:
People have been calling for me to comment further on the allegations reported in The Reader. I felt it was important that I speak to the Reader’s reporter, Aimee Levitt, on the record, and I did. Not all of what I had to say ended up in the piece, which is neither unusual nor unreasonable. But I have been asked to say more and am now doing so, speaking only for myself. It took me a little time to re-read everything I had written about Profiles. It does not need liking; there has not been much to like these last 72 hours.
I found the allegations contained in the piece to be exceptionally distressing and painful.
The theater is a place of trust – actors need to trust each other to be able to make great art; audiences, critics included, must be able to trust that what they are seeing on stage is the work of professionals operating in a professional workplace. Those allegations would suggest I took too much on trust, to assume all the actors felt and/or were safe despite the lack of union representation, or some other workplace protections, in the room.
In addition to reflecting on his own writing in response to specific Profiles productions, Jones wrote:
Some of this, I think, has flowed from my longstanding obsession with viewing only the work as it is, in the moment. I’ve always seen that as a fundamental matter of fairness, as a self-corrective against bias. But these allegations serve as a reminder that context must always be considered, perhaps more than I have been willing to admit. Many of the numerous theaters that I have chosen to attend, and those choices have been mine, regularly operate with little or no protections, in a gray area between legitimate employment and an informal interest group with powerful leaders and an artistic product. The piece. for me, raises some questions about whether I should have been in those theaters at all, inviting the public to follow.
If Chicago theaters are to be viewed as professional, they need structures in place to protect their courageous artists who are asked, as part of this art, to give deeply of themselves. Not in Our House is, as most of you know, is working hard on this.
Update, June 15, 7:00 am: In a statement on their website and Facebook page posted late last evening, Profiles Theatre announced its immediate closure.
Since 2005, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, the British playwright and director, has been bringing plays – often two or even three at a time – to 59E59 Theaters in New York from his home base at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England, where he was artistic director for more than 30 years. On each of his six visits to the U.S. – save for one where he fell ill at the last moment – I’ve moderated a public conversation with him, prompted by our friendship dating back to 1996 and the U.S. premiere of By Jeeves at Goodspeed Musicals, where I was general manager at the time.
For the first time, this year I remembered to record our conversation on May 29. Because I always learn so much from discussing theatre with Alan – we’ve also done two lengthy audio interviews, the most recent (2011) of which can be found here – I thought I’d set down a bit of this year’s conversation, focusing entirely on what Alan had to say. These pieces of the conversation have been slightly edited and condensed for clarity.
* * *
Richard Stacey and Elizabeth Boag in Confusions
On Confusions, his 14th play, from 1974, which is only now having its U.S. premiere at 59E59 Theaters.
I hardly recognize the boy who wrote Confusions. He was very, very young. I never rewrite them, I just them be. I just don’t know the guy who wrote it and I don’t want to meddle with his work, in case he comes forward in time and beats me up….
It’s a great art form, one-act play writing. Just because you can write full-length plays doesn’t necessarily mean you can write one-acts. One of our great one-act writers was a guy called John Mortimer who wrote some wonderful one-act plays. But I think his full-length ones were slightly less certain or sure-footed than his one act plays, plays like The Dock Brief and What Should We Tell Caroline and all those were marvelous little examples.
It’s like the way Saki wrote a short story. It’s akin to short story writing because you just need a different set of muscles. Like an athlete, just because you’re a 100-metre sprinter doesn’t mean you can run a marathon, in fact you probably can’t. It just depends on the discipline.
The one-act is a fascinating discipline because everything has to be very concise, very quick By the time one of the Confusions plays is over, Hero’s Welcome [this year’s other Ayckbourn production in New York, his 79th play], in time span, is just getting underway and you think that’s leisurely, you can establish the characters, you can establish the situation, you can plant questions in people’s minds.
On working in theatre.
One of my crusades is live theatre and keeping it alive. I’ve never worked extensively in movies, or television or radio. I’ve always concentrated in theatre.
About every five years, we need to stop and just ask ourselves, why are we staying in theatre? The depressing Sunday morning when nothing’s happening or the Wednesday afternoon when nobody’s coming in, you think “What the hell are we doing this for?” and I just have to list the things which I consider important with live theatre.
One of those things, and it sounds like a total cliché, is it’s live. It’s when you do something here in this space, we’re all in the same room and in this tiny space a group of people will perform something and hopefully you will interact with them and they will interact with you. It’s a live, living experience.
It’s the one facet of theatre that’s totally unique. You can forget all the other things: big flying pieces of scenery and spectacular lighting effects and the huge orchestras that swell up. In the end it’s just a group of human beings with a certain talent for acting getting together and doing something, trying to tell a story which somebody else who has a certain talent for writing has constructed, and allowing it to happen.
On his eight-hour narrative for voices, The Divide, performed only once to date.
I think one of the things that drives me, apart from live theatre, is the need to surprise myself, or indeed in the case of The Karaoke Theatre Company [his newest play, debuting this summer at the Stephen Joseph], to terrify myself.
I’m aware that when you get to my length of career, 80 plays and counting, the danger is to rely on the tried and tested. There’s nothing in new in theatre. Always when you do something you consider totally new someone will come up and say, ‘I saw in 1921 an identical play to this’ or it was just slightly different, so you don’t try to do that but do something different.
Because I’m a director and a writer and the two roles are simultaneous – as I’m writing a new play I’m directing it in my head, I’m solving the problems, at least to a certain extent. I’ve got no unsolved problems by the time I’ve got them onstage, because I know what I’m doing. That’s not conceited, it’s just practice really. So when I sat down for The Divide, I wrote something I knew I couldn’t stage.
On science fiction.
Sci-fi gives you common ground with the generations you are no longer part of. You can invent a world which hopefully they will accept which doesn’t depend on me knowing their jargon or their way of texting or anything like that. I invent the ground rules. You ask them please accept the ground rules of this….
When you try and do an Isaac Asimov, when you start prophesying the future, you try and think of the trends. I got quite a lot in Henceforward [his 1987 play being revived this summer at the Stephen Joseph] right. What I haven’t got right is the technology, which has leapt through. Who could anticipate that since 1987 digital technology would advance as far as it has?
On relationships between men and women in his plays.
Russell Dixon and Stephen Billington in Hero’s Welcome
I always felt that I’m probably very calm and I hope pleasant person, but whenever I’ve hurt people, they’re always people I love, because it’s a sort of defensive thing. Over the years, when I was very young, I got quite aggressive to some people with whom I should have known better.
Nevertheless, you must have perceived in some of my plays that when men and women cohabit, when they choose to live together, they proceed to destroy each other and do terrible things they never would dream of doing to a complete stranger – even if it’s non-physical, saying terrible things.
On whether he sees much theatre beyond his own work.
When I go into a theatre I go to work. I sit in the auditorium, and I sit and worry, quite often. I think about how can we make this better, how can we make this right? So I go to the movies. I don’t have to worry there.
If you’ve ever been to the movies with a film editor they are appalling people. They go “No, no, no. Cut, cut, cut. For god’s sake they’ve let that shot go far too long.” And I just sit there going, “Oh, that’s good.”
Responding to an audience member who asked how, since he works so much, he’s learned such a great deal about human nature.
I’ve worked with human beings. They are actors, admittedly, and they’re rather extraordinary human beings. Actors have a tendency to live very close to the surface and they tend to be very fluent about themselves because they use themselves so much. I learn a lot about human nature from actors, and the rest I observe, staring out of the window and walking around.
The deep and interesting things, the psychological things I learn by working as a director. The director is an interesting mix of facilitator and dictator really and a little bit of something else, a sort of counselor, who hopefully is helpful.
Once I asked Stephen Joseph, “What’s the secret of directing?” and he said, “The secret to directing is to create an atmosphere in which other people feel free to create.” That is the most extraordinarily easy answer and the most difficult thing to achieve. Because you get a group of actors who are different, they’re fairly centered a lot of them, and you can persuade them, cajole them, to work together and sometimes they do very willingly and sometimes with great reluctance. It’s most interesting and informative thing for a dramatist and also I think it brings me a lot closer to the psychology of what makes people tick.
On casting and creating an ensemble.
Like many directors I try not to always rely on the same team because there’s eventually something stupefying about that. You sit there thinking, ‘Aren’t we wonderful, aren’t we wonderful?’ No, we’re not wonderful. You have to bring new blood in. I have a sort of rolling system. Hopefully I have enough actors at any one time in the company who understand the ethic of the way I like to work and then you bring the new people in who provide the new spark. It is a growing thing.
I’ve always worked on the assumption, it’s an old show biz cliché really: Take the work seriously, but never yourself. A lot of the time we work from having fun, just enjoying each others’ company and I think that is very helpful in the process of creation, because it relaxes people, they feel confident, perhaps. If you’re going to act, you’ve got to try a role out, try to do something with it, chances are you’re going to make a bit of a fool of yourself in the early stages, because you’re going to go too far or just do something that’s totally wrong, but if you give the actor the feeling they can do that without you going “Ga-ah, stupid,” you just say “Well that hardly worked, but well done. Moving on. Shall we try another one?” So it’s that sort of trust. I hope the actors who work with me trust me to say the right thing.
This morning, I was both annoyed and bemused to learn that Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi, two esteemed British actors, had just been given airtime by National Public Radio, to advance the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare’s true identity. This minority opinion about the authorship of the canon of works credited to Shakespeare holds that a commoner like Shakespeare couldn’t have possibly written the plays, and typically credits a British nobleman with having written them secretly. There’s a strong whiff of classism in the position, positing that genius can’t come from humble beginnings. But Rylance and Jacobi’s conspiracy theories on this subject are nothing new, and while I have to wonder at NPR’s decision to advance the theory without presenting any countervailing positions, at least they had the courtesy to wait until this weekend’s Shakespeare 400 anniversary and celebrations had passed.
As it turns out, this morning in England, The Telegraph gave another major British actor the opportunity to hold forth on another subject steeped in history. Simon Callow, who I have interviewed (and chatted with casually once, unexpectedly, on the tube), has announced that he doesn’t see what’s wrong with “blacking up,” an old theatre tradition. You say you don’t know the term? Well in America, it’s called blackface, and is widely held to be offensive, insensitive and wholly out of step with modern practice.
Starting with his opposition to the idea that transgender actors should have precedence in the casting of transgender roles, Callow moves on takes the standard argument against culturally specific casting, pursuing it to ridiculous ends. Quoting him, from The Telegraph:
“This is madness. The whole idea of acting has gone out of the window, if you follow the logic of that,” he says.
“To say it is offensive to transgendered people for non-trans people to play them is nonsense. Because you have to have been a murderer to play Macbeth, you have to be Jewish to play Shylock. It’s nonsense.
“The great point of acting is that it is an act of empathy about someone you don’t know or understand. I continue to defend Laurence Olivier’s performance as Othello.”
Later in the article, the following appears:
I ask if he’d ever consider playing Othello, even though blacking up is widely considered offensive. “Is it so offensive? I don’t know. People say it’s offensive because it reminds you of the Black & White Minstrel show. But, it’s a different thing altogether.”
He adds: “It would depend on the circumstances, absolutely. But, there is actually ban on it in my union. You can not do it. You can not black up,” he says this in a way that suggests he does not wholly approve.
Equity, the actors’ union, in fact has no veto. A spokesman says, “we don’t have the power to ban”, but does make clear that “we are absolutely opposed to blacking up” except in “very exceptional circumstances”.
Callow does contradict himself on the subject:
“I totally accept it was the right thing to do to put a moratorium on white actors playing Othello, to allow black actors to fill those giant boots.” However, he then adds: “I can not say that the principle is a correct one.”
It is impossible to know whether Callow’s opinion lurks in the psyches of other British actors of his generation, or whether he’s an outlier (the author of the article does conclude by slyly cautioning Callow away from playing Othello). His comparison of blackface to Robert de Niro gaining weight for Raging Bull borders on the absurd. But the fact remains that he is respected not only as an actor but as a historian (his multi-volume biography of Orson Welles, with three completed and one to go is an impressive work of scholarship).
Consequently, when Callow speaks, he generates headlines, and his position, while acknowledging the prevailing sentiment, advocates for and gives credence to sustaining a practice that is decried by artists of color and their allies, be it blacking up or being “yellowed-up,” as The Telegraph refers to Jonathan Pryce’s performance in Miss Saigon. That Callow, one of the first British actors to come out as gay, finds prioritizing transgender actors for transgender roles to be so much “nonsense” works against the efforts of the transgender creative community, though surely it offers Eddie Redmayne some comfort.
Is this “an English thing,” a difference between American and British racial, gender and cultural sensibilities? Certainly the outcry over the yellowface The Orphan of Zhao at the Royal Shakespeare Company several years ago would suggest that the two nations are fairly close on their evolution towards cultural sensitivity, with both missteps and voices ready to speak against them. I write that as someone who still sees reports of yellowface and brownface with some regularity in the U.S., as well as redface (looking at you, Wooster Group). How the performing arts welcome transgender actors in transgender roles is still evolving, but rapidly, and in the direction of authenticity in casting.
What I don’t see in the U.S. is a famous actor in a major media outlet yearning for a return to the time when Caucasians played black, Latino, Asian, Native American and other characters of color with impunity; I don’t see actors denying the legitimacy of the positions of their trans* colleagues. The voices supporting such positions in the U.S. tend to turn up in social media feeds and comments sections, often with fictitious names. I trust the UK advocacy organization Act For Change will be responding to Callow very soon.
“Is blacking up offensive survey,” as of April 25, 7 pm
In the meantime, Callow’s statements are a reminder that the idea and ideal of cultural diversity in the arts is still fighting an uphill battle, as evidenced by The Telegraph’s own online survey, embedded in the Callow story, which determined that 77% of their readers do not find blacking up to be offensive. Remarks like these must be challenged by diversity advocates, strongly, wherever they appear. If I happen to run into Callow again, I’ll be tempted to quote myself on this subject, though I need to expand my full statement, which spoke first and foremost to race, to embrace transgender actors as well:
The whole point of diversifying our theatre is not to give white artists yet more opportunities, but to try to address the systemic imbalance, and indeed exclusion, that artists of color, artists with disabilities and even non-male artists have experienced. Of course, when it comes to roles specifically written for POC, those roles should be played by actors of that race or ethnicity – and again, not reducing it to the level of only Italians should play Italians and only Jews should plays Jews, but that no one should be painting their faces to pretend to an ethnicity which is obviously not theirs, while denying that opportunity to people of that race.
In the meantime, perhaps Callow will get off the casting soapbox and throw in his lot with the Oxfordians, if he desires to publicly take on unpopular positions. I’m sure the late 17th Earl of Oxford will be delighted with the effort.
Howard Sherman is interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.
“We really pride ourselves on putting so much out for actors,” said the artistic director, who founded and has run the small non-Equity theatre company for more than a decade. “I’ve had my own experiences, both good and bad, that informed this company. We put everything out there so the actors can make an informed decision.”
It all sounds very positive, very transparent, however the artistic director was responding to a series of specific questions posed about hiring and employment policies, which were spelled out in detail in their company’s online materials, in a questionnaire provided to actors in advance of auditions, and in a contract offered to an actor. The inquiry was not prompted by any outreach from a past member of the company with an axe to grind.
The company’s practices in some cases are seemingly overcontrolling and unenforceable, in other cases contrary to employment law. Regardless of how open the company is, they’re not fostering a safe and creatively productive environment for everyone involved. First and foremost they are protecting their own interests.
The materials obtained contained so much questionable language, and suggests fear on the part of the company’s leadership, that it does raise the question of how actors may be treated when a collective bargaining agreement is not in place. That’s not to say that all companies should immediately strike up agreements with Actors Equity; non-Equity theatre is an essential part of the theatrical environment where young actors, perhaps actors still in school, can get practical experience on stage and where small communities can benefit from live performance. But they need to be making theatre in an environment that is safe and fulfilling.
* * *
The company in question is quite small, claiming roughly a $30,000 annual operating budget. They charge nothing for performances, although they may pass the hat. They perform in a significantly rural part of their state and travel to different towns for their shows. They claim an honor from their state’s governor, and in the brochure used to attract performers, namechecks numerous Shakespeare festivals around the US as having hired their alumni.
While calling themselves professional, half their season is performed by actors who pay a non-refundable $800 (and a $100 security deposit) for the right to perform. The other half of the season, actors are hired for $800 for a total of four weeks. Housing is provided; meals or per diems are not.
Here are some examples of their employment provisions, first from their agreement with the actors paying to participate, with observations notated:
“Artist understands that they participate in all activities associated with company at their own risk, indemnifying and holding harmless theatre group.” This is not an acceptable practice in any employment situation, or frankly even for volunteers. If the actors are paying to work with the company, or if they’re paid by the company, the company should maintain full liability insurance as well as workers compensation insurance, and should produce proof of such insurance on request.
The term of the agreement is “Immediately to Final Check Out Day, July 10, 2016.” The term should be from first day of work to last day of work. The company has no jurisdiction over any actor from the moment the contract is signed.
While housing is provided, there should be “no excess housing electrical/water usage fees ($200+ dollars for the month.” As housing is shared, it is not possible to determine who might be responsible for such overages, especially with some staff living in that housing. No actor should be held liable. This is simply part of housing expense.
“There are no understudies. If Artist should fail to honor the terms of this agreement, they may be held fiscally liable if, in doing so, additional costs are borne by the organization as a result.” This suggests that if an actor is ill and cannot perform for one or more performances, they bear replacement costs. The same would be true if an actor quit. These costs would be levied on actors who have already paid for the right to be there.
“Artist gives a release/permission in perpetuity for their likeness and name to be used to promote the Organization, for social media, and agrees to participate in public relations/community outreach events.” The terms for use of likeness and name are unnecessarily broad and vague; it suggests that if an actor becomes well-known, the company can ostentatiously use them in all marketing. Additionally, since there are no stated work hours to begin with, how can actors be compelled to take part in activities beyond their acting work?
“Artist understands company is a ‘no smoking/no alcohol at any time’ company (even for those over 21).” While an employer can proscribe such behavior during work hours and on company property, they have no right to police people’s personal habits 24/7 for the term of an agreement.
While there is no reference to workday or workweek in any of the material obtained, the company should make clear that while working with them may be rigorous, and exceed the provisions of most Equity agreements, they should expect a certain amount of guaranteed time for sleep and some partial or full days off in a one-month period.
The company also has a ‘Code of Ethics,’ which is part of their agreement. Among its points, again with annotation:
“I will: accept the director’s direction in the spirit in which it is given….I will respect that I am part of their vision for the show….I will forego the gratification of ego.” While not illegal, this has nothing to do with ethics. This is actors being told to do exactly what the director tells them without questioning. It seems detrimental to the development of young talent.
“I will not: Disclose to anyone outside of the Company any Company business including (but not limited to) matters of a fiscal, emotional and/or private nature, as well as what is said or goes on in Company meetings, gatherings and rehearsals.” Questionable in almost any situation, when people are paying a fee to be part of the company, this manner of non-disclosure is inappropriate. What are “matters of an emotional nature” and is the actor supposed to not ever discuss their feelings about their work while working with the company?
“I will not: Foment an element of ill will by displays of temper, complaining, negativity, foul language, yelling, verbal or physical abuse, gossip or other behavior that may be construed as detrimental to Company morale and to never be anything but positive, polite and friendly to audience members, VIP’s, press, volunteers, and sponsors. I shall inspire the public to respect me and my craft through graciousness in accepting both praise and constructive criticism.” The first portion approaches the controlling nature of social engineering and is probably unenforceable. It raises the question of why the company must proscribe such behaviors as “negativity” and “gossip.” Physical abuse is already illegal.
“I will not: Publish company business of any kind via electronic or other means, in perpetuity. (i.e: youtube, blogging, social network sites, email, printed materials, etc.).” Again, non-disclosure language that is unnecessarily and unenforceably broad. It’s unlikely an actor would be privy to business information that rises to the level of warranting such confidentiality. This could be construed as an attempt to prohibit all social media activity in connection with an actor’s time with the company.
“I will not: Discuss or reveal the existence of this agreement with anyone outside the Company.” If you’re afraid people might see your contract terms, then you know there’s something wrong with them. Fix the terms rather than trying to hide your contract from scrutiny.
Finally, from the audition questionnaire:
“List Daily Medications. Do you have any medical/physical conditions? If yes, describe. Are you currently under psychiatric care/counseling.” Regardless of whether people are paying to participate or being paid, regardless of whether this company is defined as professional or amateur, this kind of question is illegal. Aside from asking for the disclosure of confidential information to which the company has no right, it can be the foundation of discrimination. Only after engaging an actor may the company inquire as to whether an actor has any special requirements of which the company may be called upon to assist, or at least be aware. But disclosure is at the discretion of the actor, except in such cases where a condition would prohibit an actor from fulfilling bona fide occupational requirements, which should be spelled out in advance casting materials.
* * *
The company under discussion holds its auditions at the annual Straw Hat Auditions, held in New York in March. Many non-Equity companies use the Straw Hat Auditions as a means of finding actors for their seasons (as well as staff), but the website of the Straw Hats is fairly enigmatic. E-mails were sent to the two addresses provided on the site, as no phone number appeared. The following questions were posed:
How many theatres were at this year’s auditions?
Presumably the theatres pay a fee to participate in the auditions. is that so? If yes, is the rate they pay something that is publicly published, or would you be willing to share it?
Do you have any criteria for the theatres that participate (beyond being Non-Equity companies)?
Are the auditions conducted as a commercial or not-for-profit enterprise?
No response was received. There is a clear need for more transparency about who operates the Straw Hat Auditions, the manner in which they accept participating companies, and whether they undertake to verify the employment practices of the companies they are essentially serving as agents.
* * *
It is hard not to be sympathetic to a company that brings theatre to an underserved area, to a theatre that says it ceased charging admission as a tribute to an alumnus of their summer camp who died in service in Afghanistan. It is hard not to appreciate the efforts of any producer scraping by on a shoestring, that says their goal is to do good in their community.
But it’s also hard not to feel concern for young actors, eager for any opportunity to get on stage, who may not have the knowledge or even sense to understand when they’re agreeing to substandard terms and conditions and even putting themselves at risk in order to build a resume. All producers, commercial or not for profit, professional or amateur, should first and foremost treat artists with care and professionalism, and insure that their workplace rules and practices place safety above all else. That holds no matter the size of the budget, or even the lack of one.
So this annotated list is offered not simply to call out the behavior of a single company (indeed it is not even a complete accounting of the issues in the material obtained), but to raise awareness of the kind of language that companies may employ, and which artists and indeed staffs should look out for. Many people in the theatre have funny stories about exhaustive hours and risky practices they experienced early in their careers, but with every generation the field should be trying to do better. Just as the medical field has done away with days upon days of on-call work for young residents, theatre cannot sustain itself, even at its most rudimentary and well-meaning level, by saying that if it was OK then, it’s OK now.
Fixing the contractual language above, and the intent behind it, is not particularly expensive; it can surely be put in place for this coming summer season. The artistic director has already made assurances that the medical questions will be withdrawn. The company in question, and its artistic director have not been named throughout because this is not a hit piece, not a “gotcha” piece, but counsel to a company and to anyone who is going to be acting in non-Equity summer stock in the coming months, or employing people as staff or interns.
So as not to be coy, so as not to be accused of creating a straw man and inventing possible scenarios just to raise issues, the company here is incorporated as a 501(c)(3) as PLAYAH in New Hampshire, and does business as Shakespeare in the Valley. This piece should not be an excuse to declare open season on them online and in social media (as was the case with Words Players Theatre almost a year ago), but only to hold them to reasonable professional and legal standards, and to make other companies with comparable provisions aware that non-Equity and summer stock must never be synonyms for non-professional, unfair, or unsafe.
* * *
The Arts Integrity Initiative will monitor this particular situation over the coming 15 months, and invites confidential communications and inquiries from artists, staff and interns not covered by collective bargaining agreements who have concerns about the legality and safety of their employment in the arts.
In what will most assuredly give comfort to aspiring performers everywhere, you’ll be highly amused to know that Cate Blanchett began her career singing silly songs in the Melbourne University Law Revue show in her native Australia. “Weird Love Song” certainly lives up to its name in the “Red Faces” segment of the long-running Australian variety show Hey Hey It’s Saturday (1971-1999). The segment itself seems to owe a great deal to The Gong Show or, for all we know about Australian television here in the United States, it could be the other way around. Here’s the celebrated Ms. Blanchett as part of the duo “Kate and Simon.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHREdO9-l5w
You may not care much for the song (“I wish I was your cigarette, smoked on through your lips/killing you softly with my tar and seeping out your nostrils”), but what’s undeniable is the vocal prowess of Ms. Blanchett. Perhaps when she makes her Broadway debut this fall in The Present, an adaptation of an early Chekhov play by her husband Andrew Upton, she’ll turn up at a few theatre benefits, or maybe at 54 Below, and reconnect with her singing roots. I think the kid has got potential. She could be big.
P.S. Ms. Blanchett’s off beat comic sensibility from her university days has not, apparently, been dulled by fame. Perhaps you missed her cameo in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Hot Fuzz. There’s a tiny bit more than this clip. But not much.
Bottom line: keep your sense of humor at all times. But don’t listen to me. Take it from two-time Oscar winner and still undiscovered novelty song chanteuse Cate Blanchett.
“I come at this more like a lawyer, who would say that everybody has a right to a fair trial. Or a journalist, or a priest, who would hear the confession.”
– Anna Deavere Smith
On November 7, I had the opportunity to interview Anna Deavere Smith as part of the third annual “Stage The Change: Theatre As A Social Voice” conference, a day-long event of panels and workshops for high school and college students, a collaboration between the Happauge Public Schools and The Tilles Center at LIU Post. Smith is the creator and performer of such acclaimed “documentary theatre” works as Fires in the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, and Let Me Down Easy. What follows is an edited and somewhat condensed portion of that conversation, aimed at the students in attendance.
HOWARD SHERMAN: No one typically has their own theater: you have to find a place to perform, to convince people to let you do this work. How did you create opportunities for yourself originally?
Anna Deavere Smith at LIU Post
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: I was really trying to learn some things, which is what started me interviewing people in New York in 1980. Just people I saw on the street, or people I saw like the lifeguard where I swam. Then I paired actors with people. So the first one of these that I made had an actor for each person. I just rented a loft in downtown in Tribeca before Tribeca was hip. It was just broken down, sort of old factories, and abandoned places. There were these lofts that were put together with empty spaces with wooden floors. That was the first one that I made. I made it by charging actors to take a workshop and they would perform as a result of the workshop, but really it was just enough to cover the cost. I don’t know if actors are still like that, but people are always looking for someway to perform.
HES: Was the initial work about exploring characters or subjects?
ADS: It was just characters.
HES: How long do you take to interview people when you’re working on a piece?
ADS: It depends on the piece. The piece that I’m working on now is about young people, younger than you all, that don’t make it through school. And they end up in the criminal justice system. I started working on that in 2013, but I’ve spent maybe a total of three months, spread out, and I’ve done about 150 interviews to start working on that play. It’s called Notes From The Field: Doing Time in Education. For Let Me Down Easy, I interviewed over 300 people, on three continents, so it took some time, but in the middle of that time, I was occasionally doing more performances and gathering more information as I refined the play.
HES: When you moved from characters to subjects, what galvanized you to shifting the work towards something topical?
ADS: What happened was, I really didn’t have a place to do this in the theater. No theater hired me well into the process. Who did hire me was universities, who in the 1980’s were revising many things about their curriculum, mostly to make more space for literature, ideas, works of art by people of different colors than white – of women, as well as people of different expressions of sexuality than heterosexuality. So I would say that in the 1980’s, across the board in this country what we call the canon, what is the traditional thing we learn, changed dramatically. The conservatory, the playwrights were looking at scripts by either dead or living white males and even someone like a white male like Sam Shepard, and even his work was considered extremely avant-garde. The only woman you would find is Lillian Hellman. You know, maybe Lorraine Hansberry.
The ‘80’s were the time where that really shook up, but what that meant was, that at these universities and at these colleges people were very refined, Smith College, a place like that, or Princeton, there were very, very difficult things about people getting along on campus. I was hired by Princeton to write a piece about the fact that they had only had women for 20 years. Think of the history of Princeton. Princeton exists long enough that men from the South brought their slaves to school with them for a very, very long time. These traditions are very hard to change. So 20 years of women, they asked me to come and make a piece. There were some very difficult things happening on campus, some women had had some sexual assaults and yet the alumni, didn’t want to make the lamps any brighter because they felt it would kill the romance of the campus. Two of the eating clubs – they didn’t have fraternities – still would not accept women. After that, they were forced to do so. Places hired me and it was really to mirror them in transition, to mirror back to them the difficulty they were having in transition. There were a group of women professors in the theater across the country having to deal with new things going on among women or even the fight women were having getting into university. That’s what really made my work become socially oriented.
HES: Why the choice to move from bringing in actors to portray each of these people? Why the choice to have these people, instead of having different people play these different roles, to take them all into yourself?
ADS: Again, it was a very practical reason. I couldn’t imagine how to pay everyone. The first time I got away with it because people were so eager to have a reason to perform. They were like me, they were hardly ever getting cast, they were happy to have a reason to have agents and other people come and see them, and to be working. So they paid me to do a workshop and put that together. So I figured that’s not going to work very long. The notion of getting a grant was way out of my – I couldn’t do that.
But then I remembered that as a kid, I was a mimic. So I thought, well I’ll just do all the parts myself, until I can figure out how to raise money. Then when I could figure out how to raise money, and invited actors to do it, they didn’t really like my process. I think it would be different now. This whole idea of documentary theater, it’s taken off in a big way. When I first started presenting the work to actors, they didn’t like it because they felt so much of the idea of acting training, and maybe these young people today have this idea and maybe not, was the idea of inner truth.
I don’t believe my inner truth is necessarily relevant to the cowboy you saw there [in a video screened at the event]. I’m trying to figure out his inner truth! Things that I’ve learned about language have lead me to understand and believe, and try to exemplify, is that his inner truth, whether he’s telling the truth or not, does live in how he sees. So I’m not into this inner truth stuff. I don’t like the word truth. That’s a moral judgment and it’s a very heavy idea. In those days, I’ve always taught acting since 1973, you know we have these students who would go to conservatory to hear notes from all these teachers. My colleagues would do stuff like yell at people for acting. “You’re lying!” Of course they’re lying, they’re acting.
HES: When actors play roles that aren’t necessarily likable or honest, you often hear the talk about finding some part of them to like. Do you need to like the people and do you even like the people you end up interviewing?
ADS: Well, I love everybody I interview. In my Ted talk, I performed a woman who sat on her bedside while her boyfriend killed her daughter. Murder, that’s murder, she’s an accomplice to murder. And I met her in a penitentiary in Maryland. I come at this more like a lawyer who would say that everybody has a right to a fair trial. Or a journalist, or a priest, who would hear the confession, most likely of the person who did the most despicable thing. And I think of people in terms of their fate in life.
Anna Deavere Smith at LIU Post
I think a person who does a very despicable thing like the women who let her child be killed is trapped not only in prison but in her own crisis of what she did when she recognizes what she did, when she sees that reality. And so I think I have a bit of humility about these things. I do believe that in the grace of God, I do believe in old fashion acting techniques, Stanislavski, the father of modern acting, way back in the 19th century. People behave according to their circumstances and how they adjust to those circumstances.
So I don’t know what it would be like for me to live in an environment where I was acquiring drugs, selling drugs, addicted to drugs, was in a relationship with a man who beat me, beat my children, and for whatever reason I learned to understand that as normal. And that would lead me to be so high that I would allow that to happen to my child. My job is to imagine those circumstances and then to find a way to illuminate that for whatever reason.
Maybe the thing I would be trying to illuminate is drug addiction. Maybe I would be trying to illuminate what it does mean for women to live in abusive relationships, right? So I see that person as living a life that is at first unimaginable to me, and then my job is to imagine it. I think as actors, we have chance to do big projects like that. If I were a doctor, I could choose, am I going to be an internist? Am I going to want to do big operations? Am I going to be a surgeon of cancer? You know, I could choose how big I want my project to be. I do think the project of portraying someone who seems to be unlikable, or you know if you meet somebody in your school whose perfectly likable, a cheerleader, but you don’t like her, then the project is how do I get myself to be able to imagine her circumstances and to imagine living in her shoes? Then my project is really living in their words. For me, again, the bigger the project, the better, the bigger leap I have to make, the more I get to exercise my muscles as an artist.
HES: When you set out to do a project, do you always know exactly what you want to explore? Or do you start having conversations and find the subject or the focus that you’re going to take on it?
ADS: I don’t have a take, and my take evolves. For example, my new project is about what some people call the school to prison pipeline. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this at all or you’re starting to hear about it, I started to hear about in 2011, and I’d never heard about it. So the idea is poor kids of color are unfairly disciplined, some of you might have seen this video that has kind of gone viral of a girl in South Carolina who won’t turn her cell phone off and then they bring the cop in and he throws her around in the chair. We see these things.
Say, for example, I started out, with the idea of images in my mind like hearing about a five year old in Florida who was handcuffed, this kind of thing. But the more I looked at it, the more I see that the thing that causes young people to end up in juvenile hall or in these kinds of circumstances are even more complicated than school discipline. So now I would never call it the school to prison pipeline. I don’t know quite what I would call it, but I’d call it something else that allows the project to be seen as about a series of things that make it hard for young people to be in our education system.
HES: You are now, of course, widely known in the theater community and many communities for the work that you do. Has it become easier to gain access to people to interview them or are people now more aware of how you might portray them? And does that, in some ways, make people more guarded?
ADS: Well I think most of the people I interview have never heard of me. At all. And if they have, it’s because they saw me on a television show called Nurse Jackie. Maybe.
Anna Deavere Smith in Let Me Down Easy
I am very aware that my theater is in a very small portion of America. That is the kind that these young people are here to think about, work on, theater about social change. It’s not a big Broadway show. Only one of my works went to Broadway. A lot of people don’t know about my theater work. But what has happened, as you know, these young people would certainly, I mean there doing selfies all the time and filming each other all the time, people are much less inhibited, they don’t care anymore. I used to travel with a tape recorder about that size, now you know I can use my phone, now I bring a camera in, nobody cares!
I think as a society – I’ve been doing this for a long time – as a society we’ve changed in terms of our sense of being public. And we sign a release, some of them don’t even look at it. I encourage them to, take your time, cross out anything you don’t like. But I think it’s also because of all of this stuff, reality television. When I started there wasn’t even Oprah, you know what I mean? All these things that make people feel like, ‘Well I’m a star! I’m telling my tale!’
HES: Can theater create social change or does it begin to go back to your word, mirror social change?
ADS: Well I certainly believe it can be a part of sparing the time and I think it rides that wave, it pushes us farther.
I would say that there are many things on television that had to do with change, even the show I was on Nurse Jackie has to do with something in the human condition which is not a movement. But many people on the street came up to me and told me how much the character Jackie meant to them in their recovery from addiction. Tony Kushner did a lot to help us in a time where we were thinking about the AIDS crisis to well before gay marriage and all that. So I think we that are interested in change are not making the change alone at all. But if we are on the moment of trying to expose something that’s going on, and people come to the theater, it gives them an opportunity to look through in a different way than they see in a newspaper. It causes some people’s hearts to be changed and it can be a conversion. It can cause a conversion in terms of behavior for some folks.
HES: You speak to people in all walks of life. And you sometimes speak to really, really important leaders. What is it like to be an artist who has the ability to speak beyond just the work that you create?
ADS: The irony is that all of you are learning how to perform but the kind of performance that you’re doing, if you’re performing on behalf of social change, at some point is indicating to the viewer this is not a show. I’ve called you here because this is real. I’ve called you. I need to catch you attention. You might not have noticed it on the paper. You might not have noticed it on the news. You may not know. You’ve heard people talk about bullying but you may not really, if you don’t have a child, who’s being bullied, you may not really know. So I would like you to, you heard about it for a little bit of time on CNN 360 or something but I would like you to come in here with your whole heart and mind and visit it with me. Right? So there is this way that when you take on social change, it gets real. Right?
So I think that’s the way one ends up in the company of academics, the President of the United States, governors, chief justices, or justices of the supreme court, are many of the kinds of people that I’ve had the chance to speak with. It’s because of that reality and because we are all in those realms trying to address those realities. And luckily there are many government leaders who do see the value of art as one way of causing people to tend to these issues.
HES: You talk about truth, you talk about reality. You talked about journalism. Is what you do a form of documentary?
ADS: Well, people say that. I suppose it has aspects of that. However the part that is not documentary is that it is my persona, not the persona of the persons. So there’s already that other thing going on. So it’s not really a photograph, right? It has been adjusted and altered, so the fact of the aesthetic part of it is relative. I mean I’m not the cowboy, so maybe there’s something interesting about an African American woman older than this cowboy with assumed different political views, maybe there’s another suggestion about the fact that I’m not him. I think that suggestion is about asking the audience to reach outside their own known world to consider the point of view of someone else or the life of someone else.
HES: Is there a way you would suggest to people how they might approach getting to this work for the first time?
ADS: Interview your little sister. You know, interview the lady next door. The main thing is to talk to somebody you’re really curious about and to see what you have to do to get them to talk. Do they become interesting and more interesting than you thought while you were talking to them? I would say that’s a way to start.
HES: And when you interview people, are you just doing audio or are you doing video?
Anna Deavere Smith in The Pipeline Project
ADS: I’m doing video now. I would like to [put it online] largely because, by the time we’re finished with what I call the “Pipeline Project,” I’ll have at least 200 interviews. I’m only going to perform for an hour and a half on stage. Think of all that material that is never seen. Right? Characters. I think the work could be of use to folks who would like to either now or years from now like to look back on this moment in American history and look at this crisis. So that’s why to put the work out there to be of use.
HES: In an age of what you say selfies and social media, where people are so much more exposed and there are people who desire to be exposed, do you want people when they see your work to think that they are seeing you or do you want to be completely behind your character, the people that you play?
ADS: I’d be more concerned that I don’t want them to think that I’m Mrs. Akalitus from Nurse Jackie. I had a student of mine – I teach at NYU – and one of the graduate students told me that his mother had said, “I just saw your professor on television and I thought you said she was intelligent.”
I see my identity as for rent, and I want them to hear what the people have to say. I want them to hear what I heard. But I hope I don’t get in the way of that. I hope that my presence doesn’t get in the way of that but I know that my presence is there.
HES: The Pipeline Project has played out in Berkeley, California. You said to me that it’s going to have a few performances in Baltimore. Do you want it to have more or do you reach a point where you feel like I’ve done this piece?
ADS: I would like this piece to have more because I feel that the people are ever so compelling and that I want to keep refining them. I know more now about how to do these portrayals than I ever had, and that’s what happens to all of us, we gather information. I have that thing like a baby who knows it’s time to crawl. Your mother’s wondering when is he or she going to crawl? When is he going to walk? And they’re walking and that inner urge that we all have as humans, trying to ride a bike, trying to do something. I do have this great feeling to keep doing this project. To keep refining these portrayals. To keep trying to make the lens that I’m using to look at this large enough that it could be of use to the public.
HES: Obviously you go to a lot of different places to conduct your interviews, but you also perform in a number of different places. What is the experience if you know that one or more of the people that you’re portraying is in the house when you’re doing the show?
ADS: I’m nervous about it, I do invite them all. I want them to see it. And you know, I hope that they are not too self conscious or upset. I don’t think people tell me the truth about what they see. But it is important to me that they are invited and that their families are there.
HES: Very often, writers who are writing a conventional script, a writer who is sitting at the computer, creating the story, are sort of going towards wanting you to think something, wanting you to come out with a thing, or a group of things. Do you want people to come away with a particular thing?
ADS: This generation here is probably the first generation in a very long time, certainly in my lifetime, who actually comes to school to look at artistic practice for social change. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of this happening in high school. It’s usually Guys and Dolls or West Side Story or whatever the latest thing is, right? A Chorus Line. You get to be in the show! Right?
There’s always this concern that if you apply yourself like this, that you’re being didactic, or being political, right? So the people running for President want you to think something. ‘I’m the baddest of the bad and I’m the one that you should elect,’ right?
I want people to be driven to action. I want them to write a check to make something better for a kid somewhere. I want them to become involved in early childhood if they can. I want them to think about these kids, [about] who they want to elect as President of the United States. I want them to think about these kids when they decide who the mayor is in their town.
I want them to think differently about a kid who is walking by in the “iconic” hoodie with his pants down quite low in the back, because that’s what I want to consider. These kids who we lock up might not all be as dangerous as we think, in fact they’re very, very vulnerable to some profound inequities in society that make living pretty dangerous where they live. I want people who can do stuff to do stuff even if it’s, ‘I’ll walk a kid to school who has to cross a gang line’ or drive them or whatever. I want people to move up and do things the way that people did things when I grew up in the Civil Rights Movement. It’s that kind of moment in American history where people went outside of their normal doing to do a little bit more. I feel that we are really in a moment in our history where we need that to happen.
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Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School for Performing Arts School of Drama. Thanks to Briana Rice for editorial assistance with this post.
Rehearsal for Jesus in India at Clarion University
“The students are victims,” writes playwright Lloyd Suh, regarding the events that led to his play Jesus in India being canceled a little more than a week before it was to be produced at Clarion University in Pennsylvania. Presumably, anyone learning of students who have been preparing a production for weeks, only to not be able to present it to audiences, would agree with that statement, no matter what they may think of the circumstance surrounding the cancelation, first reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It is truly unfortunate. But there are larger issues and perhaps greater lessons at stake.
As many others have reported, Suh wrote earlier this week to Marilouise Michel, professor of theatre in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Clarion, asking that either three roles written as Indian characters but cast at Clarion with two Caucasian students and one mixed race student, either be cast with students of color or the production canceled. The university theatre department opted for the latter.
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Regarding the casting of Caucasian students in specifically ethnic roles, Michel said, “I realized that the Jewish characters were from Palestine. In my mind, to truly cast them correctly they would have had to be Palestinian, I guess, and the Indian characters would have to be Indian. But I read Mr. Suh’s program notes from the production at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, where he specifically states that the play is for anybody, the play is universal. Perhaps I misunderstood what he meant, but I thought I was taking him at his word, so I cast it without thinking what color people were at all. I would have cast a black Jesus if I had the right person for the role. I wasn’t thinking that this was a play about race. When I do plays about race, I try to be extraordinarily sensitive to those issues.”
In a statement, included below in its entirety, Suh speaks specifically to his comment, writing, “Much has been made of an interview I gave years ago in which I used the word ‘universal’ to describe the play. But universal does not and should not mean white, or the privilege of ignoring race. I wish it were not so difficult to accept that an actor of color, playing a character of color, could convey something universal. To understand that white actors should not be the default option for any role. To recognize that people of color are not simply replaceable.”
Regarding casting beyond the specifics of a script, Michel said, “It’s not unusual in college productions to change the gender of a character to offer opportunities to the students that are available.” Asked whether approval for such changes are sought from playwrights or their representatives, she said, “I don’t deal with the contracts. The department chair and the student association deal with the contracts. But should it seem like we’re doing something that’s against the contract, we would definitely address it. I always check with my superiors if I think that’s going to be an issue.” The superior she was referring to was department chair Bob Levy, who declined via e-mail to be interviewed for this piece.
She continued, “We’ve never done it in a play where we thought race was an important issue of the script, or the gender was an important issue of the script. Sometimes the director might address the issue in the program of why it was done. While I hesitate to connect myself to Michael Oatman [director of The Mountaintop at Kent State where a white actor was cast as Martin Luther King], it would be similar in that it’s an academic exercise of, ‘what if?’ which is what we do in acting.”
As for the issue of race in Jesus in India, Michel said, “I don’t feel like it was the focus of the play. I feel like the focus teenagers coming of age and maturing, and that’s what spoke to me about the script and led me to think this would be a wonderful opportunity for the students in my program.”
To Suh, authentic representation of race is essential. He wrote, “I could not allow the play to be performed with white actors in non-white roles before a public audience. This is not a unique position. It is not strange or radical. It is common industry practice that productions of copyrighted plays adhere to the requirements of the text. In addition, as a writer of color in a field where representation and visibility are ongoing struggles, I feel a responsibility to provide opportunities for artists of color to be seen, and to protect that work from distortion in the public eye. The practice of using white actors to portray non-white characters has deep roots in ugly racist traditions. It sends a message, intended or not, that is exclusionary at best, dehumanizing at worst.”
Michel noted that, in planning the production, “I was expecting controversy, but I wasn’t expecting this.” She explained, “In my little small, conservative community I had Jesus saying ‘fuck ‘ over and over. He’s smoking weed, he’s got a girl, he gets a girl pregnant, he screams ‘I pulled out’ at one point. He says ‘My god damn father.” All of which I’m cringing at, thinking, I have to be brave and represent this playwright’s work. We’re going to be pickets by the conservative Christians. I’m getting e-mails from conservative Christians saying their prayers have been answered, implying we got what we deserved. They’re so glad that this play is not going to be produced in our community, because it portrays Jesus as different from the Bible.”
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Clarion University’s Home Page
Clarion University is a small state university in Western Pennsylvania, with a student body of approximately 5,700 students in total, 4,900 being undergraduates, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. The school body is 83% white, 7% black, 2% Latino or Hispanic, 2% multiracial and 1% Asian. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported the Asian student body as being below 1%, but in real numbers on a campus of 5,700, 1% translates to a total of 57 Asian students. How must they feel in the midst of all this? These numbers do contrast with the representation of diversity implied by the university home page (shown at right) in which the racial representation seems much more broadly spread.
In light of the protests at the University of Missouri and Yale University in recent weeks, the subject of racial representation on campuses is top of mind for many people, and it certainly should extend into performing arts programs. On the one hand, the decision of the theatre program to produce a show set in India with Indian characters is an admirable step towards addressing diversity, but the likely inability to cast roles without racial authenticity calls into question whether the choice would ultimately make students of color feel included.
After what has transpired this week, will Michel think differently when producing works in which there are characters of color? “Well of course,” she replied, “particularly with living playwrights.”
It’s important to know that the planned production of Jesus in India at Clarion transformed the play, which had a few songs, into a full-blown musical. With permission from the playwright, Michel commissioned an original score which ran to 21 songs and underscoring. The playwright and his agent approved the composer, but for this one production, did not seek approval over the material itself. However, that did not extend to other approvals, for which the contract noted that the playwright’s approval was required.
Beth Blickers, Suh’s agent, commented that while she had inquired about the racial casting early on, and was told it was too early to know, but there was considerable communication about the new score.
“I think the music change is the key factor,” said Blickers. “That’s the thing they understood. The issue about ethnicity, they were reasonably oblivious to. They acknowledged that I asked and they belatedly said it wasn’t cast yet and then they forgot.”
Michel said that she had asked several times to confer with Suh, but was told he was unavailable. She said, “I believe that a dialogue early on, it would have come clear what his priorities were, that I wasn’t seeing things the way he was. I don’t disagree with his right to feel the way he does about his work. I just wish I had known, so that either we could have had a meeting of the minds or I wouldn’t have invested my time and my students in this venture.” Blickers said that Suh was wrapped up in other productions and family issues and didn’t have the time to visit Clarion or consult with them.
There has also been considerable discussion online over the timing of Suh’s letter, which he addresses in his statement. Michel says that it is her understanding that the contract was in force as soon as the university signed it and sent a $500 payment, and that since the check was cashed, all was in place. Blickers says that the contract was never received and that while the $500 check was cashed (and is now being returned), the contract was never signed by the playwright, and therefore the contract was not in force. Suh asserts that the first time he realized the play was going into production was via a posting of rehearsal photos on Facebook.
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I have advocated previously about the rights of artists, most often playwrights, to control their work, and on the heels of the controversy over Jesus in India and The Mountaintop, I feel it’s incumbent upon me to restate that university productions are not exempt from copyright law or licensing contracts. While academic exploration in a classroom of a scene from a play which allows an actor to explore a role written for someone of another race may prove valuable, once the work is presented in front of an audience, or in its entirety, whether only to a university-based audience or the general public, the playwright’s wishes must take precedence. I say that from both an ethical and legal standpoint.
As for the idea that race doesn’t always matter or isn’t central to a particular work, if the playwright has indicated characters of a certain ethnicity, that should be adhered to, permission should be sought to make a change, or another work should be chosen. While Jesus in India may be still in manuscript form, and therefore lacking in some of the details an officially published script may contain, the combination of the title and character names of “Gopal,” “Mahari/Mary,” and “Sushil” seem quite specific. To assume that this information isn’t central to the playwright’s vision and the actors chosen to portray them needn’t be specific seems a willful overlooking of the context of the work, even if the race is not explicitly stated in the script or licensing agreement. As I wrote about The Mountaintop, and Katori Hall has done and Suh will now do, this seems to require even more specificity from playwrights, to insure their wishes are followed. This is not an effort to be racially divisive, but rather to insure that roles for artists of color remain in their grasp, in part to address the ongoing inequities in racial roles and racial casting.
“The conversation is how far are we going to take this,” Michel said to me, “with truly understanding all points of view, to not be a part of diminishing anyone’s pain or experience. I don’t want to diminish that, I just want to know how to make it right and tell stories that aren’t just about white girls.”
Given the makeup of the student body at Clarion, I understand the challenge. But the discussion is not so granular as wondering whether only actors of Irish descent should play Irish roles, as Michel asked me rhetorically in reference to an upcoming Clarion production. Instead, it is about insuring that roles written for people of color are never diminished, or to use Katori Hall’s word, “erased.”
And despite the pictures on the school’s website, if the theatre department is to be able to do shows about more than just “white girls,” it seems the university must address broadly diversifying the student body, not just so more plays can be done authentically, but so people of color are indeed not minorities on the campus, but truly well-represented in the school community, thereby enhancing and informing every aspect of campus life.
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Earlier this morning, the official Clarion University Twitter feed contained the following message: “With the cancellation of ‘Jesus in India’ we hope to reflect upon how race and culture should relate to creative works such as these.”
As painful as this experience has been for all concerned, this seems a positive step. If indeed Clarion follows through, I hope they will avail themselves of resources in the theatrical community, who I have little doubt would be willing to travel to western Pennsylvania to participate in that process in a positive and supportive manner. And I’m willing to drive the van.
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FULL STATEMENT FROM LLOYD SUH
Regarding the cancellation of my play JESUS IN INDIA at Clarion University, I hope the following statement clarifies my entire position.
My first contact with Clarion was in January, when Marilouise Michel requested a copy of the play and invited me to work on it with her students. Due to other commitments, I was unable to participate, but I did express willingness to let them use the play for classroom purposes without me.
I didn’t hear anything again until late May, when I was informed they were experimenting with the piece as a musical. It is highly atypical to do such work without direct collaboration from the author, so I asked for more information. In particular, if their exploration was simply for private, in-class use, I was happy to let them do whatever they desired. Although I could not participate directly, I was certainly curious what they might discover. However, if their intention was a full production with a public audience, I asked specifically whether they would be able to honor the general ethnicity of the characters.
I did not hear anything else from anyone at Clarion again until October 30, well into the rehearsal process.
I was not informed that a production was taking place.
I was not informed about any casting activities.
I was not informed about any license agreement granting rights to perform the play. It has since been confirmed to me that while negotiations towards an agreement did occur through my agent, no agreement was ever executed, meaning Clarion’s right to perform the play was, in fact, never granted.
Instead, on October 30, I was asked whether I would be able to Skype with the actors. Usually my response would be of course. However, because I had no idea a production was even taking place, my reaction was What?
So I searched online to find out what was happening, and saw photos that seemed to show two of the Indian characters portrayed by Caucasian actors, in total disregard for my earlier query. My agent immediately wrote to Ms. Michel for clarification. Her response on November 2 acknowledged receipt of our previous question on casting, but in her words:
“When you asked, I hadn’t cast the show, and then I forgot.”
On November 9, after confirming that a fully executed license agreement did not exist, I sent an email to Ms. Michel insisting that she either recast, or cancel the production. I absolutely understand that this has caused anger, confusion and disappointment among the actors and crew that had been hard at work on the piece. I do not take that lightly. The students are victims, and the timing of this mess has raised many questions. But the timing was never in my control.
I could not allow the play to be performed with white actors in non-white roles before a public audience. This is not a unique position. It is not strange or radical. It is common industry practice that productions of copyrighted plays adhere to the requirements of the text. In addition, as a writer of color in a field where representation and visibility are ongoing struggles, I feel a responsibility to provide opportunities for artists of color to be seen, and to protect that work from distortion in the public eye. The practice of using white actors to portray non-white characters has deep roots in ugly racist traditions. It sends a message, intended or not, that is exclusionary at best, dehumanizing at worst.
This includes university theater programs, which are a crucial part of the way professional theater is born. We are witnessing a moment on multiple college campuses where racial tensions are undeniable and extremely dangerous. I cannot grant university programs an allowance on these matters that I would never grant a professional theater.
Much has been made of an interview I gave years ago in which I used the word “universal” to describe the play. But universal does not and should not mean white, or the privilege of ignoring race. I wish it were not so difficult to accept that an actor of color, playing a character of color, could convey something universal. To understand that white actors should not be the default option for any role. To recognize that people of color are not simply replaceable.
It was not my intention to debate this matter in public. I attempted to settle the issue privately, but Clarion’s insistence on involving the press and releasing my personal communication has made this statement imperative. I am now grateful for that opportunity, as I hope this clears the air on my intentions, and the circumstances under which this cancellation has taken place.
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Update, November 16 at 12 pm: I wrote more about the cancelation of Jesus in India at Clarion University, and the school’s public relations campaign against such. Read that post by clicking here.
Update, November 19 at 8 am: While it is only one issue in the discussion of Jesus in India at Clarion, and in my opinion notably subordinate to the central issues of artists’ rights and racial representation, I have continued to explore the topic of whether the play had been properly licensed. After conversations with both parties, as well as licensing companies that regularly contract for non-professional productions regarding common practices, I can say that there were some factors which could have led the theatre faculty at Clarion to believe they had licensed the play.
While the totality of the agreement prepared by Suh’s agency required signatures by both parties, a phrase early in the agreement (“when signed by you” as opposed to, say, “when signed by us both”) could suggest that only an official Clarion signature and a payment was required. Clarion maintains that they nonetheless returned a signed contract and made the required payment, which was accepted; the agency acknowledges receipt of the payment but not the signed contract, which is why a countersigned agreement was never returned to Clarion. Short of legal discovery to reveal all communications between the parties, the discrepancy over the sending and receipt of the agreement cannot be sorted definitively.
It is not uncommon for licensing companies – not authors’ agents – to send agreements to non-professional producers, a term which which encompasses academic productions, that do not require a signature and returned agreement at all. An e-mailed contract is considered the legal “offer” and receipt of payment is considered “acceptance” of all terms. However, that was not the case with this specific agreement, which was never fully executed and therefore not in force.
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Howard Sherman is interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts and director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts School of Drama.
