» race and representation Howard Sherman

The casting of the upcoming production of In The Heights at Porchlight Music Theatre in Chicago, in particular the hiring of a non-Latinx actor for the leading role of Usnavi, has provoked a great deal of comment and controversy in that community and beyond. In response, on August 9, Victory Gardens Theatre hosted a public forum, organized by ALTA, the Association of Latinx Theatre Artists of Chicago, “The Color Game: whitewashing Latinx stories.” It drew a full house and an even larger online audience to explore the issues of race, ethnicity, authenticity and representation, provoked by the Porchlight casting and an earlier production of Evita in Chicago; reports from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Reader on the forum expanded its reach yet further. The event had been preceded by multiple online essays on the subject, including posts by Trevor Boffone, Tommy Rivera-Vega and Jose T. Nateras, as well as two reports from Arts Integrity (here and here) as the situation unfolded, and a commentary by Arts Integrity director Howard Sherman, writing in his capacity as interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

On Sunday evening, August 14, Victory Gardens artistic director Chay Yew shared, via Facebook, a post that was headed, “Just got this from Lin-Manuel and Quiara.” Readers have noted that it seems to be coming from a single voice, but Hudes’s preface addresses that:

I will be swamped returning from vacation and may not get a statement out, I wanted to forward you my email interview thread with Diep Tran for American Theater at the end of July when this happened. Lin stood behind my comments in this thread then, and I assume that still stands. Here are some of my most relevant comments, cut and pasted for continuity which I am comfortable with them being posted publicly, in the context of “excerpts from her interview with Diep Tran for American Theatre Magazine.”

For those seeking to clarify Miranda’s position, Arts Integrity was in touch with him following the publication of the American Theatre article; he had been on vacation when the controversy over Porchlight’s casting emerged. Responding to an offer to add his own thoughts, Miranda wrote, referencing Hudes’s comments in the the article, “I honestly can’t improve on her words. She speaks for us both.” Additionally, Yew reports that he had received an e-mail from Miranda backing the statement.

Hudes’s full statement, the excerpts from her American Theatre interview, as she provided it to Yew, is as follows:

I am not familiar with Porchlight but based on them being Equity, then I can only assume this is a professional theater company. Within the context of professional productions, casting the roles appropriately is of fundamental importance.

The fact is that creating true artistic diversity often takes hard work. Concerted, extra effort. It takes time and money. You cannot just put out a casting call and hope people come and then shrug if they don’t show up. You may need to add extra casting calls (I do this all the time), to go do outreach in communities you haven’t worked with before. You may need to reach out to the Latino theaters and artists and build partnerships to share resources and information. You may need to fly in actors from out of town if you’ve exhausted local avenues, and house them during the run. When faced with these expensive obstacles, an organization’s status quo sometimes wins because it’s cheaper and less trouble. The Latino community has the right to be disappointed and depressed that an opportunity like this was lost. It can be very disheartening, as an artist and as an audience member.

The sad fact is that even in New York, where we Latinos abound, the theater world often reflects a much more closed system. I’m talking onstage and off.

For decades, the vast majority of Latino roles were maids, gang bangers, etc etc. It’s demoralizing, obnoxious, and reductive of an entire people. It’s a lie about who we are, how complicated our dreams and individuality are.

Chicago has a historic Puerto Rican and Latino community. Its history as a hub of Latino migration is beautiful and robust. I’ve had the honor of working in Chicago numerous times and getting to know a deep pool of diverse talent there. Artists like Eddie Torres founded Latino theater companies to create opportunities where there were none. The Goodman houses a Latino theater festival frequently, and they did a beautiful job casting my play The Happiest Song Plays Last. DePaul recently hosted the Latino/a Theater Commons festival. Chicago is poised to be at the forefront of these issues!

I am proud to have written complex roles for actors of many ethnicities: Latino, African-American, White, Asian-American, Arab-American. I have stumbled at times. But I continue to commit to nuance and specificity as the core of the dramatic impulse, and the gateway to the human experience.

I have been in a lot of rooms where people give lip service to being committed to diversity. But that’s different than doing the hard work that it often involves.

I do not hold these views as strongly with educational and non-professional productions. I’m happy for schools and communities who do not have these actors on hand to use In the Heights as an educational experience for participants of all stripes.

I have had the pleasure of working with directors of many backgrounds on my work. Women and men, Latin@, Asian American, African American, bicultural, and white. I have purposely tried to work with the widest range of directors possible, aesthetically and culturally speaking, and this broad group of collaborators has enriched my vision as an artist.

I have chosen directors based on many considerations: aesthetics, artistic mission, their connection with a given script, their history of excellent casting and designer collaborations.

Rather than demand a particular background for a director of my work, I try to encourage Artistic Directors and producers to consider hiring woman directors and culturally diverse directors THROUGHOUT their season–not just for the “Latino” play or “women’s” play. Directors of color should be hired to do EVERYTHING. They should be directing Shakespeare and Moliere and Ibsen and Cruz. Not just Cruz.

Margaret Hughes

It is quite possible that, when the English stage was officially opened up to allow women to perform alongside men, most likely in 1660 when Margaret Hughes played Desdemona, some argued against it, on the grounds that young boys had been successfully been playing women for years, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. After all, only 30 years earlier, a French touring troupe met with disdain for daring to employ women, and even once English women were permitted to act, men did not immediately cease playing women’s roles.

Ira Aldridge

When Ira Aldridge became the first black actor to find fame on the stages of Europe, having left America, which offered him no opportunity, there were at first people who took exception to the breaking of the color line, feeling that blackface had been more than sufficient for the portrayal of non-white characters and that a black man speaking the words of Shakespeare was “blasphemous.” One critic wrote that “with lips so shaped that it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English,” while another objected to his leading lady being “pawed about on the stage by a black man.”

Phyllis Frelich

After Phyllis Frelich won a Tony Award in 1979 for Children of a Lesser God, might some have dismissed her honor as resulting from a sympathy vote because she was a deaf woman playing a deaf woman, or that her achievement was somehow less simply because she used sign language, which was how she communicated every day? After all, one critic, praising Frelich, took note of her “affiliction.”

Invented scenarios? Only in part. And certainly none are implausible, at distances of hundreds of years or just a few decades. They are, after all, representations of the breaking of a status quo, the altering of a dominant narrative, and the much too easy ways of diminishing significant achievements at the time that they happened.

The stage remains a place where certain practices, steeped in tradition, persist. Despite being seen by many as a bastion of liberals and progressives, the arts are dominated by white Eurocentric men, whether it comes to the stories being told or the people placed in the positions of authority who are charged with making work happen. While the not-for-profit arts community has begun in recent years to explore equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives designed to give voice to a broader range of gender, race, ethnicity and disability, the field is still dominated by white structures and white professionals “opening doors” to other stories.

That’s not to be dismissive of those efforts, but only a means of contextualizing them and reflecting how nascent they still are in so many places. Let’s not forget, it was only in 2015 that the Metropolitan Opera dropped using blackface on the actor playing the title role in Otello, an original Broadway musical featured an all-Asian cast, an actor with a mobility disability in life originated a role in a Broadway production using a wheelchair. How was it possible that this hadn’t happened sooner?

The changes on our stages, the efforts to assert of a broad range of identity where it was previously denied, is reflective of society as a whole. While it has been 51 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and 26 years since the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, there are still legal battles being fought to insure and protect their full and proper implementation. However, in the past decade, with the rise of social media, advocates for change have had the opportunity to make their cases ever more swiftly and directly, without adjudication by the media as to what concerns will be permitted to reach a critical mass of awareness, with people driving the story, not the story driving the people.

As efforts towards fairer and truer representations of racial and ethnic identity in theatre have resulted in particular shows becoming flashpoints – with The Mikado in Seattle and New York, with The Mountaintop at Kent State, with Evita and In The Heights in Chicago, The Prince of Egypt in the Hamptons and so many more – one of the more frequent and derisive responses has been, “It’s called acting.” That is to say, ‘Oh, it’s all make believe,’ all little more than ‘let’s pretend,’ and as such shouldn’t be held to the same scrutiny or standard as say, the make-up of juries or the population of schools. It says that since the discipline is about taking on a persona, the reality of the person doing so shouldn’t be considered, shouldn’t matter. The phrase condescends to anyone who dares think otherwise.

Those who would reduce efforts toward equity in the arts might wish to isolate them as being the result of identity politics or political correctness. The “it’s called acting” claim is, make no mistake about it, an argument for the status quo, for tradition, for the denial of opportunity, for erasing race. It expresses the thinking that gives awards to people who pretend to be disabled on stage and screen, while making it difficult for people with disabilities to attend cultural events, let alone be a participant in creating them. It is the mentality that loves West Side Story, but cries foul when songs sung by characters who speak Spanish are translated into and performed in Spanish.

“It’s called acting” is the response of those who perceive their long-held dominance, their tradition, as threatened, their own position as being at risk. “It’s called acting” sustains systemic exclusion. After all, as the saying goes, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality looks like oppression.” Privilege abounds in the arts, on stage, backstage and in the seats.

If we lived in a society, a country, where everyone was indeed equal in opportunity, then the arguments for paying heed to the realities of race, ethnicity, gender and disability might be concerns that could be set aside. But that’s far from the case, and if the arts are to be anything more than a palliative, they must think not just of artifice, but also about the authenticity and context of what they offer to audiences.

For the arts to survive, they must move forward, lest they become antiquated. In a society where the balance of ethnicity and race is shifting, it is incumbent upon the arts to at last fully welcome and support all voices and allow them to portray and tell their stories as well as the stories of others, instead of being forced to assimilate into some arbitrarily evolved template. There should to be an acknowledgment of how the lived experience can contribute to the arts, rather than denying its presence or validity, along the lines of the canard, “I don’t see color.”

There is no absolute in the arts, no definitive good or bad, right or wrong. The act of creation and the response to that act exist simultaneously in the eye of the creator and beholder (the audience). Consequently, the arts give rise to phalanxes of arbiters at almost every level – teachers, directors and artistic directors, and critics – who seek to guide and even control training, practice and opinion, each in their own way. When those arbiters have disproportionate influence, or in fact become gatekeepers, they assume a greater responsibility, one that goes beyond themselves into the field as a whole. How they are empowered, what they believe, becomes essential to sustaining – or diminishing – the arts.

When it comes to respect and recognition, diversity and inclusion, there is a new arts narrative being written right now. Within that process there are progressives making change, late adopters who are coming to understand, and reactionaries who want to hold on to the past. If we believe that art has value, so do the ethics and process of making it. Being unaware, or worse still, dismissive of how the arts are changing and how the arts reflect society, would keep the field trapped at a moment in time, one already mired in the past, as the world advances. That’s the road to irrelevance, which the arts cannot afford.

Howard Sherman is interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

Late last month, a headline writer for McClatchy DC was not alone in getting caught in a linguistic, oxymoronic knot when they announced, “Minority babies outnumber whites among US infants.” While the word minority has been a catchall to describe people of any race or ethnicity other than white, it also means, per Dictionary.com, “1. the smaller part or number; a number, part, or amount forming less than half of the whole, 2.a smaller party or group opposed to a majority, as in voting or other action, 3. a group in society distinguished from, and less dominant than, the more numerous majority.”

What the McClatchy headline, and others like it, seemed unable to address was that, despite the very facts they were reporting upon, the so-called minority is rapidly becoming the majority overall; babies are just the bellwether. Using minority to denote people of color is rapidly becoming, and in many cases already is, both incorrect and passé. Bloomberg News had similar trouble in their headline on the same subject – “The Majority of American Babies Are Now Minorities” – but they salvaged the situation, to a degree, with a graphic headed “Minorities No More.” Other outlets managed just fine, ranging from Pew Research, which actually addressed the inversion of terminology in their headline, to NPR.

Does minority remain the prevailing term for people of color inadvertently, or is it deployed to sustain a narrative in which people of color are not only numerically but conceptually less than white society? One can only hope that editing stylebooks are grappling with this very issue, and will come out on the side of retiring the reductive use of minority as a synonym for any and all people whose race or ethnicity is not Eurocentric white.

Perhaps if stylebooks were all more advanced on language surrounding race and ethnicity, the Chicago Sun-Times wouldn’t have run a headline this week that read, “Porchlight’s ‘In the Heights’ names its authentic cast.” Those who see anything beyond the title of the show, the theatre and the word cast, might wonder about the presence of the word authentic. Aren’t all casts authentic, in that the actors are who they say they are and will be playing the roles they’re announced to play?

The source of this construction can be found in the body of what should be a straightforward casting announcement (as it was in the Chicago Tribune), where Sun-Times writer Hedy Weiss writes, “Porchlight Music Theatre will open its production of that first Miranda hit with an unusually ‘authentic’ cast.” This begs the question: what’s with the quotes around authentic? What’s so unusual?

Weiss doesn’t explain, and the rest of the piece goes on to quote the artistic director of Porchlight and to list the cast. Presumably, Weiss is using the word authentic to address the fact that the cast is, based solely on their names, largely Latinx. Of course, that is entirely appropriate, considering that the characters in Heights are almost entirely Latinx. But by utilizing authentic (a word which does not appear in Porchlight’s release) set off in quotes and by citing the casting as unusual, Weiss seems to imply that this is an exception to some norm and questions the very term and concept of authentic when it comes to casting.

This subtle undermining of what has rapidly become the prevailing, but by no means universal, casting practice in the U.S. reveals at best a disagreement with the practice. That no editor questioned it, that an editor compounded it in the headline, effectively making it the central theme of the brief, predominantly cut and paste, story, suggests the retrograde idea that through casting, race can still be acceptably erased on stage, even when it is absolutely essential to the story being told.

While Weiss introduced both authentic and the possibly sarcastic equivalent of air quotes around it, Porchlight’s press release unfortunately led her in that direction. A statement from Porchlight’s artistic director Michael Weber mentions “an exhaustive audition process seeing hundreds of the Chicago-area’s diverse established and new music theatre talent, and even reaching out to our city’s vast hip-hop dance community,” “[making] every effort to present a company that reflects the true spirit of this story of community,” and “all but one of our actors is making their Porchlight Mainstage debut.”

Without ever using the word Latino (let alone Latino/a, Latinao or Latinx), this statement comes off as Weber patting his own theatre on the back for working so very hard to meet the basic requirements of the musical he chose. That’s the implicit message that Weiss intuited and made somewhat more explicit, if still enigmatic to those unaware of the concept of authenticity in casting.

No doubt Weber’s statement was designed to ward off any possibility of the kind of criticism leveled at the casting of Evita at the Marriott Theatre in Chicago earlier this year. Actor Bear Bellinger was the first to call out the casting of that production, and the resulting press attention made very clear that when it came to authenticity in casting when it comes to racial representation (a term that needs no quotes surrounding it), Chicago needed to step up its practices. But now that color conscious casting has become the predominant practice nationally, there’s no need to point it out or expect kudos for employing it (inadvertently, Weber has demonstrated how little his company knew of Latinx talent in the city). The subject of race in casting should only be news when it is being ignored or exclusionary.

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes (Photo: New Dramatists)

On a corollary note regarding gender, Porchlight’s release is a bit too caught up in Hamilton fever, as it came with a large photo of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Heights’s composer and lyricist. To be sure, Heights was Miranda’s baby from its earliest days at Wesleyan University, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that in addition to the photo, Miranda’s name appears in the headline, is mentioned in Weber’s statement and he gets a bio alongside the production’s director, while bookwriter Quiara Alegría Hudes’s sole mention amounts to “book by.” Miranda is rightly acclaimed and surely Porchlight is attempting to link itself to the impending Chicago run of Hamilton. That doesn’t excuse virtually ignoring Hudes, who – like Miranda – has received the Pulitzer Prize; in fact, she beat him to it by four years. Also, Porchlight’s In The Heights is not the “Latest Creation by Multi Award-Winning Director/Choreographer Brenda Didier.” Heights was created by Miranda and Hudes, two acclaimed Latinx artists.

Whether it’s the dissemination of messaging by theatres or reports on that messaging by the arts press, there’s an essential need for everyone to step up their game. While theatres are being encouraged, and in some cases required, to participate in equity, diversity and inclusion training that may help to smooth this transition, it’s not immediately apparent whether the same effort to raise awareness is taking place in newsrooms, especially among veteran writers whose concept of language around race may have been formed in an earlier era. But both the act of making art and the act of writing about it share the common goal of communication, and at a time when the conversation around race in this country is both heightened and often divisive, certainly the arts are one place where care and consideration can prevail.

Update, July 20, 2:45 pm: Additional information that reflects upon the topics in this post is currently being gathered, and further updates will include that material as it is confirmed. However, it has been noted by several readers on social media that while Porchlight may have done an extensive casting search for diverse talent in the cast, the primary creatives on the production are all apparently non-Latinx artists, which certainly bears on the discussion of authenticity in one of the few popular musicals that centers on the Latinx community.

Update, July 27, 11:30 am: an update to this post has been posted separately, as “Intricacies and Intent Surrounding Race and Ethnicity in Casting.”

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts and interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

Several sentences in the letter posted to the Facebook page of the Atlanta Lyric Theatre could easily serve as a model for statements by theatres nationally. They read:

Moving forward, it is the policy of Atlanta Lyric Theatre that ethnically specific casting, or the casting of any other actors of color, will occur in those shows in which ethnicity is a central component to the telling of the story. Additionally, The Lyric will continue its policy of considering people of all backgrounds for roles that are not ethnically specified. We are proud to be part of a diverse theatre community; and our stage will represent that inclusivity.

It is the hope of Atlanta Lyric Theatre and the members of the Latino community with whom we spoke that there will be a deeper understanding of the need for an ongoing discussion about race in theatre and in all aspects of our lives, and to encourage others to have positive and constructive face-to-face conversations.

The letter, dated June 30, was prompted by the casting of The Lyric’s production of West Side Story, which had closed the preceding weekend. The letter further states that while “the intention of The Lyric was to cast appropriate roles in the show with Latino singers, dancers, and actors, some roles in the show did not accurately reflect that ethnicity,” that “Atlanta Lyric Theatre regrets not casting all ethnically specific roles in ‘West Side Story’ with Latino performers,” and that the company “acknowledges that we could have done more to reach out to the community in an effort to insure Latinos were well represented.” As a professional company that casts not only locally but in New York, sometimes using Actors Equity guest artist contracts (there were four AEA actors in WSS), The Lyric certainly shouldn’t have wanted for options.

While The Lyric doesn’t specifically say that they “apologize,” the effect of the letter is to make clear that they realize they were in error and that they publicly pledge not to disregard race in casting again – though it should be noted that the cast was, in part, Latina/o, that there was not a complete racial erasure by any means.

Not to diminish the importance of The Lyric’s statement, there are a few comments that hint at what preceded it, but elide thornier topics. The Lyric begins by writing that they “initiated a meeting…with members of the Latino community to have an open dialogue about race and its impact on actors and audiences.” It is surprising that, having cast their production as they did, The Lyric spontaneously decided to address ethnic authenticity in casting.

Responding to questions via e-mail, The Lyric’s artistic director Brandt Blocker described the origins of the dialogue and the group the theatre met with:

The two Latino actors who originally voiced concerns around the casting of WSS were invited. One is a local freelance actor (who has performed in a Lyric cabaret in our studio space, but never on our main stage) and the other is originally from the Atlanta area but currently lives/works in NYC (and had no prior affiliation of any kind with The Lyric). Prior to the meeting, we requested them to please invite others in the local Latino theatre community who they felt would want to participate in our discussion. Our understanding is they invited the artistic directors of another local theatre company, but unfortunately they did not/were not able to attend. The Lyric also invited and in attendance were our Latina WSS choreographer, our Latino WSS production assistant (who is also a local freelance actor), as well as an active local Latino freelance director/choreographer (who was not involved in the WSS production, but has directed/choreographed shows for The Lyric in the past).

Elsewhere in his response, Blocker said, “The Lyric has been in contact with the Latino community here in Atlanta throughout the entire production process.” As to the final statement as issued, Blocker wrote, “The statement was written by The Lyric along with input, feedback, and ultimately, blessing, from the members of the Latino community with whom we met. It was intended by both parties to be a joint statement in the hopes of demonstrating the power of productive conversation when it comes to conversations regarding diversity and inclusivity in our industry.”

It might have made the statement even stronger had it been made clear that The Lyric was responding to concerned expressed from outside the theatre, rather than seeming to emerge unilaterally from within. Also, this is not solely a creative issue but one for the entire Latina/o community in this case, and ultimately for all communities of color in the Atlanta area. Going beyond the artists affiliated with the production and other Latina/o artists known to The Lyric’s artists, perhaps reaching out to more broad-based Latina/o organizations, would have insured the message went even father and that The Lyric benefited from even greater community knowledge.

In a review of comments on The Lyric’s Facebook page, one commenter asks what happened to a conversation about race and casting that had begun on one of their posts (that same commenter later praised the letter regarding future policy). Given that the only Facebook comments that remain in connection with West Side Story posts are positive or neutral, it’s impossible not to wonder whether members of the Latina/o community expressed their concerns there initially, vocally and emphatically, only to have that dialogue expunged.

Blocker responded to this, saying, “Several individuals on the Lyric’s FB page removed their comments that were attached to this post of their own accord, and as a result, any sub-comments attached to their posts were also deleted. After our meeting last week with members of the Atlanta Latino theatre community, we mutually agreed to remove the original posting because the remaining comments, with so many pieces deleted, were fragmented and confusing to a reader who had not had the opportunity to read the entire thread as it originally unfolded.” However, the fact that any question remains on their page asking what happened to the dialogue suggests that while a defined group may have agreed to remove the conversation in the wake of the new statement, there were others who were not directly party to that meeting who were left feeling perhaps too much had been removed.

As a corollary to Blocker’s statement above about the origin of the new statement, other groups that opt to issue statements that speak to artistic policy regarding race should consider making very clear that the company leadership fully stands behind it it. The Lyric letter was posted without any signature and without any personal e-mail through which people might respond, only an “info@” address. The letter would carry even more weight if it were signed by Blocker and perhaps by the present board chair Paula Grothe. Then it would make absolutely clear that the policy has been discussed and agreed upon throughout the organization, and not only in response to a particular circumstance, even though the intention is clearly and laudably stated. Blocker writes that, “the staff, creative team, and board of directors have enthusiastically embraced this policy, which is set to be ratified by the Board at their next meeting on July 24th.”

Finally, while the run of the play was short (June 10 through 27) and it’s not clear when The Lyric first began to hear from the Latina/o community, acknowledging the new policy while the show was still running would have been a major step. Also, not releasing the statement at a time when many people had begun a long holiday weekend would have helped to bring attention to their new commitment.

These are meant as constructive criticisms, specifically because there’s so very much that is positive in The Lyric’s letter. Certainly The Lyric has put itself on the line and the creative community in the Atlanta area will surely hold them to to the standards now set. As for other companies evolving their thinking on this topic in response to artists, or proactively making clear their intentions without any inciting incident, they would do well to take full responsibility in every sentence of what they say. There’s no shame in admitting you’re wrong, and that you are committing to not repeating the same mistakes again, be it with the Latina/o, black, Asian, Native, LGBT, disability communities and artists – or any other.

P.S. One last tip for The Lyric: it may be wise to remove those photos of the “Indians” of Peter Pan from the company website. While you cannot deny your company’s history regarding ethnic and racial representation, making these particular images so readily available is at cross-purposes with your new policy.

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School of Performing Arts and interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

The headline in London Sunday Times was certain to make anyone who advocates for diversity in the arts sit up, take notice and get quite upset. It read, “Lack of diversity not a problem, says RSC boss.”

Since headlines are written by editors and not reporters, it was possible that the statement was deliberately hyperbolic. But the article by David Sanderson began with three paragraphs that seemed to support it entirely.

“The head of the Royal Shakespeare Company has said he is not worried about the lack of diversity in theatre audiences, adding that he did not want the white middle classes sidelined.

“Gregory Doran said that while it was important that theatres reflected society, he wanted to ensure that the traditional audience had equal rights.

“Doran, artistic director at the RSC where he has worked for nearly 30 years, said that black people would feel that they did not belong when they saw that the entire audience was white.”

That’s as far as people who haven’t subscribed to The Times online, or who couldn’t pick up a print edition could read, thanks to the paper’s paywall. But even those first few paragraphs, deeply troubling though they might be, perhaps should have given all readers pause, since they weren’t quotes, but rather paraphrases constructed by Sanderson, sans context. Even reading the entire piece, as photographs of the rest of the article circulated quickly to defeat the paywall, seemed to support the headline and the first paragraphs.

RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran speaking at The Hay Festival

It turns out that Sanderson hadn’t conducted an interview, but rather had been cherrypicking a handful of statements from a talk Doran had given at The Hay Festival, and indeed all came in response to a single question from an audience member. That isn’t acknowledged at all in Sanderson’s piece.

Through the RSC, Doran has issued a statement in response:

The Times headline not only willfully misrepresents my view, but entirely reverses it.

Lack of diversity is a huge challenge and one which we at the RSC have taken to the very heart of our programming. There is much more we need to do to address it, but we are at the forefront of efforts to do so.

I made the point that just as Hamlet holds the mirror up to nature, if we hold that mirror up and large parts of our audience do not see their community reflected on our stages, then we are not doing our job.

I want to see the whole of society represented on our stages and in our audiences and I don’t want anyone to feel excluded, whatever their age, class or ethnicity.

The RSC has championed inclusion for many years and I want our theatres to be as welcoming as possible for everyone.

For those who view at this as after the fact spin, it’s worth looking to the same material from which The Sunday Times drew selectively. The actual exchange with an audience member begins by Doran being asked “the recent black production of Hamlet” and the fact that “most of the audience was white. Does this worry you?”

“Does it worry me?” replies Doran. “No, I don’t think it worries me, but it is a really important thing. Hamlet, in the speech we were just talking about, talks about holding the mirror up to nature. Now if we, a national Shakespeare company, are holding the mirror up, and the audience see their reflection and that audience is entirely white, then a black kid watching that might go, ‘Well obviously I’m not meant to be there.” He then relates a story about a friend who had recently taken the train to Stratford, sharing a carriage with a group of black students who were “buzzing with excitement” to see the Hamlet, “Because somehow their faces were being reflected on that stage.”

“I think it’s really important that we have the whole community, that we reflect that community. That’s not just black actors. Actors of British East Asian origin have very much less visibility than the black actors do. But it’s growing and it’s really important that it does continue to grow.”

Ayesha Darker and Chris Clarke in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The RSC (Photo by Zuleika Henry)

After noting the casting of Ayesha Dharker as Titania in Erica Whyman’s recent RSC production of A Midsummer NIght’s Dream, Doran continued:

“I think it’s important that we reflect the communities that we want to enjoy our productions as well. That is not to say those of us who are white and middle class, or whatever our education backgrounds are, don’t have the equal right or shouldn’t feel that we’re somehow being sidelined, because it’s very important to make sure that the whole balance of the community is addressed.”

The moderator, unidentified in the video or on the BBC iPlayer site, wraps up Doran’s comments by saying that, “Cultural ownership belongs to everyone.”

Was Doran’s statement in support of diversity on stage and in his audience as definitive as some might like? No. He might have said that he was in fact worried about diversity, rather than parsing words. Should he have invoked the term “equal right” when speaking about sustaining his traditional core audience as he advances diversity? Those important words do not speak clearly to a wholly inclusive audience, but suggest that the existing audience has some ownership that they might be losing in the push towards diversity, playing to those who want to advance a racial divide. Could he have cited more examples of diversity on stage than the Hamlet production or the casting of Dharker? That would have been helpful, especially in light of his own 2012 production of The Orphan of Zhao, which saw an almost entirely white company performing an Asian story.

But the entire exchange on diversity took less than three minutes, because the event was only an hour long; the question came 56 minutes in, and on balance, it was supportive of diversity at The RSC. There’s no question that if Doran is committed to diversity, he needs to be better at expressing that commitment unequivocally every time it comes up, planned or by chance, in addition to demonstrating it at every turn with the choices he makes for the company, both in developing the audience and through the artists he chooses to create the company’s work.

In this case, it seems clear that David Sanderson and The Sunday Times were out to make trouble for Doran and The RSC. While they might have raised a stir, they spun it out from the thinnest of material and their insinuations and misrepresentations shouldn’t be allowed to stand as the final word on the subject.

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College for Performing Arts and interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

Avenue Q at Warsaw Federal Incline Theater (Photo by Jennifer Perrino)

“In America, where we have diverse populations, even if you’re in a community theatre, I think it’s better to not do the show rather than do it in yellowface or blackface.”

“The show” in question is Avenue Q, the 2004 Tony Award winning send-up of Sesame Street. The speaker is Robert Lopez, the co-conceiver, co-composer and co-lyricist (with Jeff Marx) of the musical; Lopez is also an award recipient for his work on Broadway’s The Book of Mormon and Disney’s film Frozen. Lopez was responding to questions provoked by a recent article in the Cincinnati Enquirer by David Lyman, a freelance writer covering arts and culture for the paper, entitled “Yellowface: The New Blackface?” Lyman’s article was instigated by the casting of the role of Japanese immigrant Christmas Eve in the Warsaw Federal Incline Theater production of Avenue Q, which closed this past weekend.

In the piece, Lyman wrote, “It probably shouldn’t have surprised me when I saw the Warsaw Federal Incline Theater’s production of Avenue Q and found the character of Christmas Eve – “I am Japanese,” she declares at one point – played by an actress who looked white. (More on this later.) Showbiz Players did the same thing when it produced the show in 2012.” Lyman went on to write, “While casting an ethnically appropriate Asian actor may be more difficult in Greater Cincinnati than in Seattle, it is not impossible.”

Lyman was prompted to examine Avenue Q due to a Facebook colloquy begun by Cincinnati actress Elizabeth Molloy on February 7, ten days before the production began its run. It began:

How is it 2016, and I still have to explain to people that yellowface is wrong?

I mean, everyone knows that blackface is a no-no, right? (RIGHT?!). So why is it so difficult to extend that same logic to other races? Do I really have to point out that yellowface is just as terrible, just as insulting, just as disrespectful, and just as mean as blackface?

In an interview, Lyman said he did not know Molloy well, but saw her remarks because mutual friends shared them on Facebook. Lyman said that as a freelancer, he does not review every show in the area. “This [Avenue Q] was one I probably was not going to see,” he notes, but as a result of Molloy’s post, “I thought, ‘Well OK, I need to change my plans and I did.” Lyman notes that he paid for his seat.

In his article, Lyman wrote:

So is it essential that an actor look Asian? Or is it enough that a person’s heritage somehow reflect an Asian heritage? [The actress] doesn’t look particularly Asian. But according to Rodger Pille, director of communications and development for Cincinnati Landmark Productions, the Incline’s parent organization, [the actress] said that her great-great-great-grandmother was Ma’ohi, from the island of Tahiti.

“Once we knew that she did have some of that descent, we felt we could move forward with the casting,” says Pille. “That was enough for us. We didn’t want to be the arbiter of what percentage Asian she was.”

He has a point. Theaters shouldn’t have to check genetic code before they allow a person to audition for a particular role. But they should be sensitive and use common sense.

Please note that the name of the actor has been omitted above, and will not figure in this article. The responsibility for the casting lies with the theatre and production’s director. The goal here is to explore the ramifications of the casting in Cincinnati, not to in any way shame a performer who had a chance for paid work in what is surely a limited range of opportunities in the city. Warsaw Federal Incline Theater is a professional non-Equity company, described by several people as the top non-Equity theatre in the area, with sufficient influence that several individuals contacted for this article declined to be interviewed out of concern for alienating the leadership of the company.

As Lyman’s article spread nationally, it reached Erin Quill, a staunch advocate for authenticity in racial casting and, as it happens, the original understudy for the role of Christmas Eve in the Broadway company of Avenue Q. She has written her own commentary about the situation on her blog, “The Fairy Princess Diaries,” but also responded to questions resulting from Lyman’s article via e-mail. She wrote:

CE [Christmas Eve] is an immigrant from Japan. First generation. There is an obligation to showcase the character in such a way that honors the writers’ intentions. CE is Japanese. It is in the script.

I think it is fair to say that in this particular case, with a reviewer being so distracted by concerns of ‘whitewashing’ while he viewed the show in Cincinnati that he felt he had to write extensively about it – I think the Creative/Production Team did not do their job. They may be good people, but good people make bad decisions all the time.

Actors don’t cast themselves. As Ann Harada tweeted me the other day ‘Sometimes people need time for learning’ – and this is really what it is –learning where the line is drawn for an audience to buy into the show. According to that review –this casting is problematic. I for one, am glad that diversity is being discussed in Cincinnati theater, I hope it continues.

Quill went on to write,:

I believe that as we are now 15 years (gulp) down the road- you can always find a person to play the role that would be appropriate. You cannot sell me on the idea that ‘no one came in’ – and if that IS the rare instance – make a phone call and see who is out there that is available.

Saying ‘we could not find any’ is laziness.

Ann Harada, referred to by Quill, originated the role of Christmas Eve, in workshop, Off-Broadway at The Vineyard Theatre and on Broadway. Regarding the Warsaw Federal Incline production she wrote via e-mail:

I do understand the limitations of casting certain roles, but then, why do the play? I have a hard time believing they’d use a White Othello instead of just not doing Othello. That being said, I always wish I’d seen the international productions of Q like in Denmark, God knows who played Christmas Eve and Gary [Coleman] in that one.

I’ve met a few white Christmas Eves in my time, mostly adorable young girls who played her in high school. Whatever. Which is why we can’t get upset at the actress who was cast, it’s not her fault. It’s interesting and a little hurtful that her heritage was deemed “exotic” enough to pass for Japanese but ultimately it is a decision we have to lay at the feet of the producers and creative team.

In response to whether the character of Christmas Eve, with her heavily accented English, could be perceived as a stereotype, Harada wrote:

I was concerned that the role would be viewed as a stereotype but I felt it was integral to the points made in the show that the character have an accent. I know several people who expressed their dismay to me about the accent and my response was ” you don’t get it”. If I felt Christmas Eve was a stereotypical character (submissive, shy lotus blossom, good at math, that sort of thing) it might be one thing but she was so obviously tough, smart, educated and aggressive that I felt she was a fully rounded person. People do have accents. It doesn’t make them less smart or interesting or valid than people who don’t have accents.

Except for a few specific lines, the script of Avenue Q does not write in an accent or dialect for Christmas Eve. While it does drop articles and reverse pluralization of words, lines like “Ev’lyone’s a ritter bit lacist” are the exception in the text, rather than the rule. That was very intentional, said Lopez, though he warned of overdoing it. Lopez, incidentally, describes himself as “half Filipino, half a medley of Irish, English, Canadian, Latvian and other stuff.”

“I think that’s the way the performer would prefer to read the script, so that’s how we presented it,” Lopez explained. “I think there’s a description that says she speaks with a heavy accent and that’s not something that we’re trying to micromanage exactly. It’s on a performer by performer basis. I’ve seen it done even by professionals and it’s made me uncomfortable and I always give a note about it. Because there’s a line – and it’s not just a racial sensitivity thing, it’s a comedy sensitivity thing. If you play something cheap, if you play it for cheap laughs, instead of playing the truth behind it, it will always be offensive. Bad comedy always offends me in all forms. Avenue Q has that pitfall because it’s puppets. In many ways it’s cartoony, but on the other hand it’s also real, it’s also about real life. Unless the actors play the truth of the characters, the show is just a shadow of itself.”

It’s worth noting that among its various transgressive elements, which includes a gender switch in casting which calls for a actress to play the role of Gary Coleman, early workshop iterations, including its five performances at the O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, saw a white actress in that role. Lopez said that the original intent was meant to be merely another example of the show’s irreverence. He credits the show’s commercial producers with prompting Lopez, Whitty, Marx and director Jason Moore to cast a black actress when the show moved to full production. Lopez said he would not support a return to the casting of a white actress in that role. [In full disclosure, at the time of the 2002 workshop, I was executive director of The O’Neill Center, and while I found the casting choice very strange when I learned of it, I did not make any objection to it. In the same situation today, I would let my voice be heard speaking against the choice.]

This past Sunday, during a Democratic presidential debate, CNN moderator Don Lemon cited the Avenue Q song “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist,” which indicated that 13 years after its Broadway debut, the show’s messages remain current.

“Sometimes I wondered about that song and sometimes I think that people don’t get the spirit in which it’s meant,” said Lopez. “It’s certainly not intended for us to relax our standards as far as the way we treat other people. The only way we can move forward is if we acknowledge where we are. So the song in that sense is relevant.”

In the wake of his article about the Warsaw Federal Incline production, David Lyman said that while he was surprised to see few responses in the article’s comments section, he had gotten “dozens of communications” in its wake via e-mail and on social media.

Describing the response as “uniformly supportive,” Lyman characterized the messages as saying, “I’m glad you brought this up. It’s about time somebody wrote something like this. I’m impressed. I’m proud of the paper for doing that.” He contrasted this with the responses he received several years ago when he called out a University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music production for using the original script of the musical Peter Pan, complete with archaic representations of Native Americans and still featuring the song “Ugg-a-Wugg.” He said that in his review, he expressed the opinion, “’Well shame on them. They shouldn’t be doing that. This is the wrong century for that.’ That did not go down well. I got a fair amount of negative feedback on that one.”

Lyman also noted that he had not heard anything from the Warsaw Federal Incline Theatre itself since his article came out. For this article, multiple attempts were made, via phone and e-mail, to contact executive and artistic director Tim Perrino as well as communications/development director Rodger Pille, of Cincinnati Landmark Productions, the parent organization behind Warsaw Federal Incline. Neither responded to any of the inquiries. That gives Lopez, Harada, Quill, Lyman and even Elizabeth Molloy, who began the conversation, the final words on the subject, namely that when casting roles where race is specified, the roles should be filled by actors of that race.

But Lopez, in considering the subject of the show’s continued relevance, struck a conciliatory note while making clear what the lessons should be from and for Cincinnati, as well as any future productions of Avenue Q.

“I think that the dialogue has widened,” observed Lopez. “I think people are more comfortable sharing their opinions. I think as the conversation widens to include to everybody’s point of view, we all benefit from learning what offends people and learning what in fact their point of view is. I think we all learn from that, but unless we all talk about it, you don’t learn. In some ways, unless you cast a white Christmas Eve, you don’t learn that that’s wrong, you don’t learn that that’s not OK with people.”

Even though Avenue Q is closed, David Lyman notes that the issue of authenticity in racial casting retains great currency, not only in Cincinnati, but at this particular theatre. “Warsaw Federal incline Theatre is doing Anything Goes in June,” notes Lyman. “What are we going to see there? We’ve got these two Chinese guys. Are they going to make any effort to find Asians? I don’t know. We’re going to find out.”

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.

“In America, where we have diverse populations, even if you’re in a community theatre, I think it’s better to not do the show rather than do it in yellowface or blackface.”