Photo by Howard Sherman

They are, to many, the scourge of Times Square and the theatre district. I refer not to the prostitutes and three-card monte hustlers of 25 years ago. They’ve long since been exiled to the outer reaches of our tourism mecca.

Now, thanks to the pedestrian plazas created along Broadway between 47th and 42nd Streets under our former mayor Michael Bloomberg, visitors and theatregoers often must run a gauntlet of unauthorized Marvel superheroes, Sesame Street characters, and cartoons come to life in order to reach their destination. Oh, and I can’t forget the desnudas, the topless women whose bodies are painted in patriotic red, white and blue.

“Elmo Eats His Hand” (Photo by Howard Sherman)

It wasn’t so long ago that the only regular character in Times Square was the blonde-tressed, muscularly defined Naked Cowboy, posing on traffic medians with tourists for tips while clad in nothing but a cowboy hat, a guitar, boots and a double layer (per news reports) of tighty-whitie undershorts. But the greater pedestrian spaces in the new plazas allowed the situation to mushroom, into roving hordes of often ratty knock-off characters aggressively soliciting passers-by to pose for photos and then compensate them with tips.

Over the summer, the situation reached a fever pitch of outrage, particularly towards the desnudas, with a series of affronted front pages in the New York Daily News. This led politicians to posture about how they proposed to limit this activity, ranging from impinging on free speech rights to tearing up the still-unfinished plazas themselves. As someone who works in the heart of Times Square, I tend to look at the characters – both those in costume and those in public office – with a sense of bemusement. The only people I truly feel for are parents trying to keep their children away from these low-rent facsimiles, who tend to remove their character heads (or don robes) whenever someone doesn’t seem ready to shell out for a photo, destroying many a toddler’s dreams.

“Iron Man and Bunnies” (Photo by Howard Sherman)

It is a little hard to call the situation a quality of life issue in an area largely devoid of residential property, but it can be annoyance when you’re late to a meeting and have to dodge Hello Kitty beckoning with open arms in order to make it to the next crosswalk. I confess that it has always surprised me that Disney (which controls not only their classic characters, but also those of Marvel and Pixar) hasn’t chosen to exert its copyright in order to drive away these scofflaws. I’m sure it has its reasons, and there are certainly non-Disney characters in the mix.

But I’d like to suggest, on a major tourism weekend in New York (our Thanksgiving holiday) that the theatre community has it in its power to seriously disrupt this cycle, peaceably, while reclaiming Times Square as a theatrical centre at the same time. My proposal is based on something already taking place, albeit at a simpler level.

It’s not uncommon for shows to field street teams of people to pass out flyers to promote their nearby productions in the plazas as well. Some may only sport T-shirts emblazoned with logos, but some go the extra mile creatively – Chicago, for example, sends out black-clad women wearing red stockings who strike Fosse-eque poses while proffering a leaflet.

I would suggest that even shows that don’t engage in this type of marketing could contribute to upgrading the character situation in Times Square by hiring people to walk the zone fully and professionally costumed as Jean Valjean, Elphaba and the Phantom, to name but three. Sans flyers and paid not by the tourists but by the shows – and perhaps also out of pooled funds from the Broadway League, the Times Square Alliance and the NYC visitors bureau – they could be compensated at an hourly rate and wear prominent badges saying “no tips accepted”.

“Elvis and Chewie” (Photo by Howard Sherman)

Posing for photos, never breaking character, directly competing with the more mercenary band currently at large, they would undermine the freelance players by offering a cleaner, safer, more professional alternative. This would allow Broadway to reclaim Broadway, while overwhelming Instagram and Facebook with theatrically-based tourist photos. They wouldn’t even have to show up every day; just enough and irregularly enough to make the current situation unprofitable for the pushy opportunists.

Of course, this won’t drive away the desnudas, unless a revival of Hair or Oh, Calcutta! decides to get in on the action. But for all of those who miss the tawdry Times Square of old, maybe a few desnudas provide a nostalgic link to the bad old days. And if people leave New York with a selfie that includes someone nearly naked along with, say, one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s cats, maybe that will only help sell the city, and the theatre as well.

This column originally appeared in The Stage newspaper.

The Bad Seed at Portage High School (Photo by Sarah Farthing-Hudson)

I am delighted to report that all of the smoking, drinking, drugging and sexual references will be intact – tonight, tomorrow and Sunday – in the production of Maxwell Anderson’s 1950s psychodrama The Bad Seed at Portage High School in northwestern Indiana. This may seem entirely unremarkable, except that just 11 days ago, students were still being instructed to strike out lines in their scripts and change stage directions to purge the production of all such content. Even the presence of an ashtray wasn’t going to be permitted.

Mind you, I’m not specifically celebrating cigarette smoking, drug use, alcohol consumption or sexual activities among teens, but rather their ability to portray these activities in a script some six decades old. More importantly, I want to congratulate the students for responding in the best possible– and effective – way when they were instructed to censor the script, knowing full well that no approval had been sought from the licensing house or the author’s estate.

I caught wind of this situation last Wednesday morning, when NWI Times published a story about Portage Thespians appearing at a school board meeting the night before, to express their dismay over the editing they had been instructed to undertake. Per the newtimes.com account, the school board chair professed to know nothing about any censorship, and she asked the superintendent to investigate.

I received the article via Facebook within an hour of it appearing online in Indiana, and I quickly undertook to track down the students who had so responsibly brought the issue to the school board. By noontime, after some social media searching, I was in communication with several students who had been part of the appeal at the board meeting. I quickly learned that the school superintendent had asked to meet with the students after school that very day. I offered some general counsel about broaching the subject at that meeting, and then simply waited for a report as to how things were proceeding.

The Bad Seed at Portage High School (Photo by Sarah Farthing-Hudson)

Imagine my surprise when, just a few hours later, I learned from the students online that The Bad Seed would be performed intact. Students tweeted happily about erasing crossed out lines from their scripts. All was well. The next day, the nwitimes confirmed the news in a followup story.

When situations like this arise at other schools in the future, those committed to the ethically and legally correct path of producing plays as written would do well to remember the words of Portage superintendent. “The director is encouraged to do the show and given the support to use his best judgment to do what is right for the students,” wrote superintendent Richard Weigel once the situation was resolved. He’d already said, in a statement, “From my perspective, the purpose of theater is to provide insights into characters that reflect different ways of thinking. Theater provides an opportunity for our students to reflect on those characters, not become those characters.”

More importantly, people should emulate students like Lydia Gerike, Sara Dailey and Valerie Plinovich (all named by the NWI Times), who spoke out with clarity and integrity in support of the play and their exploration of it. They didn’t need any coaching from anyone, it seems. They knew just what to do to put the situation right.

Mind you, it’s never come entirely clear who demanded the changes to the script, but it seems reasonably safe to assume that it happened somewhere above the drama program’s director and below the level of the superintendent. Infer what you will about who in the school hierarchy might have been behind the effort.

Calm, rational, righteous heads set thing right in Portage, so that homicidal Rhoda Penmark can wreak havoc tonight, tomorrow night and at Sunday’s matinee. I applaud the Portage Thespians from afar. I may not have occasion to be in touch with any of them again. But they deserve credit, along with their superintendent and school board, for making sure things happened as they should, with the play performed as written and students freed to explore characters and habits not necessarily their own. Now all of those involved just need to keep their eyes open for any subsequent homogenization of Portage High School productions, to make sure that the censorship doesn’t happen before future plays are chosen, and the unknown bad seed in this censorship story doesn’t succeed in the long run by foisting bland material on the next wave of shows and students.

So the only thing left to say to the Portage Thespians, as is only appropriate for a show like The Bad Seed, is: knock ‘em dead, kids.

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts School of Drama.

The White House

There’s been a song running through my head for the past week, prompted by a series of press releases I’ve received. Anyone on a press list will tell you, notices from publicists flooding your inbox don’t normally move one to song.

The tune in question is “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” from Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. If you don’t know the song, it’s a cabaret number devised by the lead characters, spoofing the cultural array offered up by the Kennedy White House in the early 1960s. I’ve always been taken with the line, “We’ll have Bernstein play next on the Bechstein piano/And Auden read poems and stuff.” There’s lots of material like that.

The Sondheim wordplay is on my mind because there has been a steady drumbeat of cultural interest by the Obama White House in recent weeks, though not remotely for the first time. Without being political or trumpeting national pride, I have to say this makes me rather happy.

A number of Broadway shows were in Washington DC on Monday to tape Broadway at the White House for broadcast next week by TLC, one of our countless cable channels, on our Thanksgiving holiday. It features Michelle Obama as a special guest, with performances from several Broadway shows including On Your Feet, An American in Paris (in poignant timing), School of Rock and Fun Home. On Wednesday, the White House hosted a livestream salute to the Americans With Disabilities Act in its 25th year, which included a performance by the cast of Spring Awakening, which reached Broadway after being developed by the company Deaf West in a tiny theatre in Los Angeles.

This is all on top of New York City’s traffic-stopping special performance of the musical Hamilton two weeks ago, with the Obamas in attendance, in a high-price-ticket fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee. The event was widely known about and seen thanks to news reports about the president’s onstage remarks. And it’s worth noting that this was the second time the Obamas, who have visited Broadway regularly throughout his terms, have seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s look at early US history (although Miranda’s alternate was on the first time they went).

Sondheim’s ribbing of the Kennedys notwithstanding, it’s incredibly affirming for every theatre geek in the country to know that the form of culture we participate in and love finds favour in the highest corridors of power. To be sure, some might make the charge that theatre is an elitist art if they’re trying to tear down the politicians who attend, but TLC wisely made the taping of their show part of a daylong event for students from arts programs in public schools around the country. Who can argue with that? As for Spring Awakening, the stream was free for all to see.

Diehards like me cling to moments when theatre is recognised by the wider culture. I’m happy to tell you that in the 1950s, the sitcom I Love Lucy sent Lucy and Ricky to Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, while more recently South Park featured Stephen Schwartz and Andrew Lloyd Webber in a brilliantly absurdist episode. There is symbolic power in politicians sitting in the dark watching the performing arts live, because it’s going to reach some portions of the population who might just decide to check this stuff out for themselves.

As Broadway is showcased before our political leaders and donors, it’s worth noting that even though some of the aforementioned shows originated with subsidised companies, there’s a vast array of theatre that isn’t defined by commercial success. Maybe before leaving office the Obamas might stop in at one or more of those companies. Or invite them to their home for the holidays.

This column originally appeared in The Stage newspaper in London.

“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.

*  *  *

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.

Robert Branch and Camila Christian in The Mountaintop at Kent State University

In the many press accounts of director Michael Oatman casting a white man to play Dr. Martin Luther King in Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, stories have all acknowledged Oatman’s original concept of splitting the role between black and white actors. His intent was, in his words:

“I truly wanted to explore the issue of racial ownership and authenticity.  I didn’t want this to be a stunt, but a true exploration of King’s wish that we all be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin,” said Oatman about his non-traditional cast.  “I wanted the contrast . . . I wanted to see how the words rang differently or indeed the same, coming from two different actors, with two different racial backgrounds.”

That narrative has prevailed, even when Katori Hall let it be known that she did not and would not ever approve of a white actor playing King in her play. Just as I had in my original post on this incident, she wondered why the black actor sharing the role was so little in evidence. Even after speaking with Oatman, Hall wrote:

“It’s true that Oatman only fell halfway off the ‘turn-up’ truck; the white actor was indeed sharing the role with another black actor. But the fact that this mystery actor has remained nameless further demonstrates the erasure of the black body in this experiment. Even on the school newspaper’s website, only the white actor’s name is listed.”

As it turns out, the reason this black actor is so scarce is because no black actor performed in the role of Martin Luther King at Kent State. As part of an interview with Oatman, the Akron Beacon Journal reports:

“At Kent State, Oatman originally double cast the King role, with white actor Robert Branch for three performances and a black actor for five shows. When more than one black actor dropped out due to family and other personal issues, Branch, whom Oatman described as one of the best actors he’s ever seen, assumed all eight performances.”

Even if one gives credence to Oatman’s intellectual basis for attempting to split the role, it evaporated along with the unnamed black actor, regardless of Branch’s talent. At that point, the already unjustifiable production should have been irrevocably abandoned, since the entire conceptual underpinning had come undone. What Oatman did was not a half-measure, as Hall was apparently led to believe, as we were all led to believe, but indeed the complete erasure of a black body as she had feared. There was no rationalization left, yet despite the intense press interest since Hall published her essay on TheRoot.com, Oatman at best quietly allowed a myth to be sustained, or at worst actively sought to keep the truth of the production secret to anyone interested, until this interview.

That this fact is virtually an aside in the Beacon Journal’s follow-up, which largely affords an unfettered opportunity for Oatman to advance his reasoning yet again, with nothing but quotes from Hall’s essay as pushback, seems a conscious effort to minimize the facts of the narrative. In citing supportive messages from friends on Oatman’s Facebook page, and noting that there were only a few walkouts as if that made the casting acceptable, the Beacon Journal is complicit in failing to address the willful lack of fidelity to the playwright’s intent. Where are the quotes from Hall’s friends, who were outraged. In addition, by saying at one point of Hall that “she railed,” rather than “she wrote,” there is also an implication that Hall’s thoughts on this issue were somehow not presented in an “acceptable” manner, another unfortunate choice.

So the summary of the Kent State Mountaintop story is: the creative decision was faulty to begin with, ultimately abandoned (no matter what the reason) and possibly kept secret even as scrutiny was focused on the production. Whether by omission or misdirection, Oatman has compounded his troubling creative decision immeasurably.

Though Oatman has said he wouldn’t make this particular choice again, he seems unbowed by the response from Hall and the playwriting community. He told the Journal:

“I think artists get too touchy about this kind of stuff,” he said. “I think whenever you make a controversial decision like this you have to allow the audience their space to react as they’re going to react. That’s what theater is about.”

If a director’s ethical and legal responsibility to other artists is dismissed as being “touchy,” indeed by someone who is primarily a playwright, any questions about Oatman’s judgment in this case should no longer be in question. He finds widely accepted professional practices to be a nuisance, when they are fundamental to the field he works in.

If his goal was to court controversy, Oatman has probably succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and there may be more yet to come. But if his goal was to illuminate Katori Hall’s play for audiences, it’s quite clear that he failed, even if people applauded. He may have thought originally that what he was doing wasn’t a stunt, but in the end, that’s just what it turned out to be.

Update, November 16, 4:45 pm: In sharing my post on Facebook, Katori Hall prefaced it, in part, with the following statement:

“…When I spoke to Michael Oatman via phone October 27th, he never disclosed the fact that the black actor never went on, even when I questioned the validity of his social experiment of seeing if the ‘words rang differently or indeed the same, coming from two different actors, with two different racial backgrounds.’

I learned that the black actor never went on when Oatman was interviewed Friday night by Don Lemon on CNN. Surprise, surprise.

Howard Sherman is the 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.

Poster for Jesus in India at Clarion University

“What will you learn?” asks the home page of the website of Clarion University in Pennsylvania. In the wake of the school’s handling of the casting of white students in Asian roles in Lloyd Suh’s Jesus in India, and the playwright’s withdrawal of production rights upon learning this fact, it’s unclear at best, disturbing at worst, to consider what Clarion wants students to learn about race and about the arts.

Based on what is appearing in the press, they are learning to blame artists for wanting to see their work represented accurately. They are learning to attack artists when the artists defend their work. They are learning that a desire to see race portrayed with authenticity is irrelevant in an academic setting. They are learning that Clarion seems unaware of the issues that have fueled racial unrest on campuses around the country, most recently with flashpoints at the University of Missouri and Yale University. They are learning that when a community is overwhelmingly white, concerns about race aren’t perceived as valid.

In an essay published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Friday, Marilouise Michel, professor of theatre and director of the canceled production, wrote, “I have intentionally left out the name of the playwright and the piece that we were working on as I do not wish to provide him with publicity at the expense of the fine and viable work of our students.” What’s peculiar about that statement is that until 1:30 pm that day, when he released a statement, the playwright hadn’t sought for this issue to be public in any way. It was Clarion that had contacted the press, Clarion which had released his correspondence with Michel, and Clarion which used a professional public relations firm to issue a statement about the situation from the university and its president. It reads, in part:

The university claims their intent from the start was to honor the integrity of the playwright’s work, and the contract for performance rights did not specify ethnically appropriate casting. Despite the university’s attempt to give Suh a page in the program to explain his casting objections and a stage speech given by a university representative on the cast’s race, Suh rejected any solutions other then removing the non-Asian actors or canceling the production.

“We have no further desire to engage with Mr. Suh, the playwright, as he made his position on race to our theater students crystal clear,” says Dr. Karen Whitney, Clarion University President. “I personally prefer to invest my energy into explaining to the student actors, stage crew and production team members why the hundreds of hours they committed to bringing ‘Jesus in India’ to our stage and community has been denied since they are the wrong skin color

This insidious inversion of racial justice is profoundly troubling. The play, set in India, has three characters named “Gopal,” “Mahari/Mary,” and “Sushil,” a strong indication of their race. Suh maintains that the university was asked about their plans to cast those roles, and his agent Beth Blickers says no answer was ever given. But when the playwright finally drew a line over racial representation, he was the one who was supposedly denying skin color, when it was Michael’s personal interpretation of the play, against clear evidence and requests, which was ignoring race in the play. So now, one must wonder whether Dr. Whitney will be spending time explaining to the students of color on campus why she is vigorously defending the practice of “brownface” on campus (white actors portraying Indian characters, regardless of whether color makeup is actually employed) and attacking a playwright of color for decrying the practice.

To be clear, there is undoubtedly great disappointment and pain among the students and crew who had been working on the production. Anyone in the arts will surely sympathize with them for having invested time and effort towards a production that they surely undertook with the best of intentions. But they were, most likely unwittingly, made complicit in the act of denying race and denying an artist’s wishes.

In the university’s press release, the extremely small Asian population of the school is noted (at 0.6% of the student body), as it has been previously in many reports. That no Asian students auditioned should not have been surprising, nor should it have been license to substitute actors of others races as a result. Any director who is part of an academic theatre program has a very good idea of what talent may be available, and often productions are chosen accordingly. So it is not the failure of Asian students to audition to blame for the inaccurate racial casting. More correctly it was the decision to produce a play which clearly called for Asian characters and the assessment that race didn’t matter that created this situation – not Lloyd Suh or any student.

In the Chronicle, Harvey Young, chair of the theatre department at Northwestern University, admittedly a more urban school, says the following regarding racial casting on campus:

“That is the magic of the university — to introduce people to a variety of perspectives and points of view.”

But at Northwestern, Mr. Young said, the department uses a variety of strategies to avoid what could be racially problematic casting. The department has hired outside actors to play some roles and serve as mentors to students, reached out to minority groups to let them know about acting opportunities, and staged readings at which only voices are represented.

“The goal is to devise strategies that allow you to engage the work while being aware of whatever limits exist,” Mr. Young said.

In her essay for the Chronicle, Michel wrote, “Perhaps Shakespeare would wince at a Western-style production of The Taming of the Shrew, but he never told us we couldn’t. He never said Petruchio couldn’t be black, as he was in the 1990 Delacorte Theater production starring Morgan Freeman.” This is a specious and rather ridiculous argument, since Shakespeare’s work is not under copyright and can be cast or altered in any way one wishes. While there are certainly examples of actors of color taking on roles written for or traditionally played by white actors – NAATCO’s recent Awake and Sing with an all-Asian cast playing Clifford Odets’s Jewish family, the Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with a black cast playing Tennessee Williams’s wealthy southern family – they were done with the express approval of the rights holders. That these productions were in New York as opposed to Clarion, Pennsylvania makes no difference as to the author’s rights. What we have not seen is an all-white Raisin in the Sun, either because no one has been foolish enough to attempt it or because the Lorraine Hansberry estate hasn’t allowed it.

Clarion’s press efforts have certainly paid off in the local community, with three news/feature stories in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (here, here and here) as well as an editorial, along with two features (here and here) in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in addition to the aforementioned essay. That the Post-Gazette’s editorial sides entirely with Clarion is no surprise, since the university was driving the story; that it fails to take into account any reporting which runs counter to Clarion’s narrative, and indeed repeats them, is shameful, a disservice to the Pittsburgh community. That the Chronicle of Higher Education ran Professor Michel’s essay, another one-sided account of the situation, is problematic, but the headline (whether it is theirs or Michel’s), “How Racial Politics Hurt My Students,” is a clarion call for paranoia about race. It ignores the fact that the problems arose from a failure to respect the work and the playwright, that the issue is based not in politics, but in art, and that the author saw his work being defaced and stood up for it. There have been countless other reports on the situation. That this has engendered vile racist outpourings online, especially in comments sections and on Facebook, and in some press accounts is the result of the university’s irresponsible spin.

Universities are in no way exempted from professional standards when it comes to licensing and producing shows; to claim otherwise is to suggest that campuses are bubbles in which the rules of the real world do not apply. While classrooms are absolutely places for exploration and discovery, theatre productions of complete works for audiences are not just educational exercises. Students need to be taught creative and legal responsibility towards plays (and musicals) and their authors, not encouraged to take scripts as mere suggestions to be molded in any way a director wishes. When it comes to race, this incident and the recent Kent State production of The Mountaintop will now insure that every playwright who cares about the race of their characters will be extremely explicit in their directions, but that doesn’t excuse directors who look for loopholes to justify willfully ignoring indications in existing texts.

It’s my understanding that there has been new contact between Michel and Suh, though I am not party to its nature or content. It’s worth noting that in the third Post-Gazette story, it is reported that “Ms. Michel took to Facebook Saturday to ask “that any negative or mean-spirited posts or contact towards Mr. Suh be ceased. We are both artists trying to serve a specific community and attacking him helps no one.” That’s a responsible position to take, but it should be expanded to include negative posts or contact about the accurate portrayal of race in theatre, since they are flourishing in the wake of this incident.

It is also now time for the university to explain the truth about why the production was shut down, namely a failure to respect the artistic directive of the playwright; insure that this incident and the rhetoric surrounding it hasn’t been a license for anyone to marginalize their students of color; and begin truly addressing equity and diversity on their campus. Regardless of the racial makeup of their community or student body, they need to be setting an example and creating a better environment for all students, not feeding into narratives of racial divisiveness.

Update, November 18, 7 pm: Earlier today, the Dramatists Guild of America released a statement regarding the organization’s position on casting and copyright, signed by Guild president Doug Wright. It reads, in part:

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.

Robert Branch and Camila Christian in The Mountaintop at Kent State University

In the many press accounts of director Michael Oatman casting a white man to play Dr. Martin Luther King in Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, stories have all acknowledged Oatman’s original concept of splitting the role between black and white actors. His intent was, in his words:

“I truly wanted to explore the issue of racial ownership and authenticity.  I didn’t want this to be a stunt, but a true exploration of King’s wish that we all be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin,” said Oatman about his non-traditional cast.  “I wanted the contrast . . . I wanted to see how the words rang differently or indeed the same, coming from two different actors, with two different racial backgrounds.”

That narrative has prevailed, even when Katori Hall let it be known that she did not and would not ever approve of a white actor playing King in her play. Just as I had in my original post on this incident, she wondered why the black actor sharing the role was so little in evidence. Even after speaking with Oatman, Hall wrote:

“It’s true that Oatman only fell halfway off the ‘turn-up’ truck; the white actor was indeed sharing the role with another black actor. But the fact that this mystery actor has remained nameless further demonstrates the erasure of the black body in this experiment. Even on the school newspaper’s website, only the white actor’s name is listed.”

As it turns out, the reason this black actor is so scarce is because no black actor performed in the role of Martin Luther King at Kent State. As part of an interview with Oatman, the Akron Beacon Journal reports:

“At Kent State, Oatman originally double cast the King role, with white actor Robert Branch for three performances and a black actor for five shows. When more than one black actor dropped out due to family and other personal issues, Branch, whom Oatman described as one of the best actors he’s ever seen, assumed all eight performances.”

Even if one gives credence to Oatman’s intellectual basis for attempting to split the role, it evaporated along with the unnamed black actor, regardless of Branch’s talent. At that point, the already unjustifiable production should have been irrevocably abandoned, since the entire conceptual underpinning had come undone. What Oatman did was not a half-measure, as Hall was apparently led to believe, as we were all led to believe, but indeed the complete erasure of a black body as she had feared. There was no rationalization left, yet despite the intense press interest since Hall published her essay on TheRoot.com, Oatman at best quietly allowed a myth to be sustained, or at worst actively sought to keep the truth of the production secret to anyone interested, until this interview.

That this fact is virtually an aside in the Beacon Journal’s follow-up, which largely affords an unfettered opportunity for Oatman to advance his reasoning yet again, with nothing but quotes from Hall’s essay as pushback, seems a conscious effort to minimize the facts of the narrative. In citing supportive messages from friends on Oatman’s Facebook page, and noting that there were only a few walkouts as if that made the casting acceptable, the Beacon Journal is complicit in failing to address the willful lack of fidelity to the playwright’s intent. Where are the quotes from Hall’s friends, who were outraged. In addition, by saying at one point of Hall that “she railed,” rather than “she wrote,” there is also an implication that Hall’s thoughts on this issue were somehow not presented in an “acceptable” manner, another unfortunate choice.

So the summary of the Kent State Mountaintop story is: the creative decision was faulty to begin with, ultimately abandoned (no matter what the reason) and possibly kept secret even as scrutiny was focused on the production. Whether by omission or misdirection, Oatman has compounded his troubling creative decision immeasurably.

Though Oatman has said he wouldn’t make this particular choice again, he seems unbowed by the response from Hall and the playwriting community. He told the Journal:

“I think artists get too touchy about this kind of stuff,” he said. “I think whenever you make a controversial decision like this you have to allow the audience their space to react as they’re going to react. That’s what theater is about.”

If a director’s ethical and legal responsibility to other artists is dismissed as being “touchy,” indeed by someone who is primarily a playwright, any questions about Oatman’s judgment in this case should no longer be in question. He finds widely accepted professional practices to be a nuisance, when they are fundamental to the field he works in.

If his goal was to court controversy, Oatman has probably succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and there may be more yet to come. But if his goal was to illuminate Katori Hall’s play for audiences, it’s quite clear that he failed, even if people applauded. He may have thought originally that what he was doing wasn’t a stunt, but in the end, that’s just what it turned out to be.

Update, November 16, 4:45 pm: In sharing my post on Facebook, Katori Hall prefaced it, in part, with the following statement:

“…When I spoke to Michael Oatman via phone October 27th, he never disclosed the fact that the black actor never went on, even when I questioned the validity of his social experiment of seeing if the ‘words rang differently or indeed the same, coming from two different actors, with two different racial backgrounds.’

I learned that the black actor never went on when Oatman was interviewed Friday night by Don Lemon on CNN. Surprise, surprise.

Howard Sherman is the 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.

Poster for Jesus in India at Clarion University

“What will you learn?” asks the home page of the website of Clarion University in Pennsylvania. In the wake of the school’s handling of the casting of white students in Asian roles in Lloyd Suh’s Jesus in India, and the playwright’s withdrawal of production rights upon learning this fact, it’s unclear at best, disturbing at worst, to consider what Clarion wants students to learn about race and about the arts.

Based on what is appearing in the press, they are learning to blame artists for wanting to see their work represented accurately. They are learning to attack artists when the artists defend their work. They are learning that a desire to see race portrayed with authenticity is irrelevant in an academic setting. They are learning that Clarion seems unaware of the issues that have fueled racial unrest on campuses around the country, most recently with flashpoints at the University of Missouri and Yale University. They are learning that when a community is overwhelmingly white, concerns about race aren’t perceived as valid.

In an essay published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Friday, Marilouise Michel, professor of theatre and director of the canceled production, wrote, “I have intentionally left out the name of the playwright and the piece that we were working on as I do not wish to provide him with publicity at the expense of the fine and viable work of our students.” What’s peculiar about that statement is that until 1:30 pm that day, when he released a statement, the playwright hadn’t sought for this issue to be public in any way. It was Clarion that had contacted the press, Clarion which had released his correspondence with Michel, and Clarion which used a professional public relations firm to issue a statement about the situation from the university and its president. It reads, in part:

The university claims their intent from the start was to honor the integrity of the playwright’s work, and the contract for performance rights did not specify ethnically appropriate casting. Despite the university’s attempt to give Suh a page in the program to explain his casting objections and a stage speech given by a university representative on the cast’s race, Suh rejected any solutions other then removing the non-Asian actors or canceling the production.

“We have no further desire to engage with Mr. Suh, the playwright, as he made his position on race to our theater students crystal clear,” says Dr. Karen Whitney, Clarion University President. “I personally prefer to invest my energy into explaining to the student actors, stage crew and production team members why the hundreds of hours they committed to bringing ‘Jesus in India’ to our stage and community has been denied since they are the wrong skin color

This insidious inversion of racial justice is profoundly troubling. The play, set in India, has three characters named “Gopal,” “Mahari/Mary,” and “Sushil,” a strong indication of their race. Suh maintains that the university was asked about their plans to cast those roles, and his agent Beth Blickers says no answer was ever given. But when the playwright finally drew a line over racial representation, he was the one who was supposedly denying skin color, when it was Michael’s personal interpretation of the play, against clear evidence and requests, which was ignoring race in the play. So now, one must wonder whether Dr. Whitney will be spending time explaining to the students of color on campus why she is vigorously defending the practice of “brownface” on campus (white actors portraying Indian characters, regardless of whether color makeup is actually employed) and attacking a playwright of color for decrying the practice.

To be clear, there is undoubtedly great disappointment and pain among the students and crew who had been working on the production. Anyone in the arts will surely sympathize with them for having invested time and effort towards a production that they surely undertook with the best of intentions. But they were, most likely unwittingly, made complicit in the act of denying race and denying an artist’s wishes.

In the university’s press release, the extremely small Asian population of the school is noted (at 0.6% of the student body), as it has been previously in many reports. That no Asian students auditioned should not have been surprising, nor should it have been license to substitute actors of others races as a result. Any director who is part of an academic theatre program has a very good idea of what talent may be available, and often productions are chosen accordingly. So it is not the failure of Asian students to audition to blame for the inaccurate racial casting. More correctly it was the decision to produce a play which clearly called for Asian characters and the assessment that race didn’t matter that created this situation – not Lloyd Suh or any student.

In the Chronicle, Harvey Young, chair of the theatre department at Northwestern University, admittedly a more urban school, says the following regarding racial casting on campus:

“That is the magic of the university — to introduce people to a variety of perspectives and points of view.”

But at Northwestern, Mr. Young said, the department uses a variety of strategies to avoid what could be racially problematic casting. The department has hired outside actors to play some roles and serve as mentors to students, reached out to minority groups to let them know about acting opportunities, and staged readings at which only voices are represented.

“The goal is to devise strategies that allow you to engage the work while being aware of whatever limits exist,” Mr. Young said.

In her essay for the Chronicle, Michel wrote, “Perhaps Shakespeare would wince at a Western-style production of The Taming of the Shrew, but he never told us we couldn’t. He never said Petruchio couldn’t be black, as he was in the 1990 Delacorte Theater production starring Morgan Freeman.” This is a specious and rather ridiculous argument, since Shakespeare’s work is not under copyright and can be cast or altered in any way one wishes. While there are certainly examples of actors of color taking on roles written for or traditionally played by white actors – NAATCO’s recent Awake and Sing with an all-Asian cast playing Clifford Odets’s Jewish family, the Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with a black cast playing Tennessee Williams’s wealthy southern family – they were done with the express approval of the rights holders. That these productions were in New York as opposed to Clarion, Pennsylvania makes no difference as to the author’s rights. What we have not seen is an all-white Raisin in the Sun, either because no one has been foolish enough to attempt it or because the Lorraine Hansberry estate hasn’t allowed it.

Clarion’s press efforts have certainly paid off in the local community, with three news/feature stories in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (here, here and here) as well as an editorial, along with two features (here and here) in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in addition to the aforementioned essay. That the Post-Gazette’s editorial sides entirely with Clarion is no surprise, since the university was driving the story; that it fails to take into account any reporting which runs counter to Clarion’s narrative, and indeed repeats them, is shameful, a disservice to the Pittsburgh community. That the Chronicle of Higher Education ran Professor Michel’s essay, another one-sided account of the situation, is problematic, but the headline (whether it is theirs or Michel’s), “How Racial Politics Hurt My Students,” is a clarion call for paranoia about race. It ignores the fact that the problems arose from a failure to respect the work and the playwright, that the issue is based not in politics, but in art, and that the author saw his work being defaced and stood up for it. There have been countless other reports on the situation. That this has engendered vile racist outpourings online, especially in comments sections and on Facebook, and in some press accounts is the result of the university’s irresponsible spin.

Universities are in no way exempted from professional standards when it comes to licensing and producing shows; to claim otherwise is to suggest that campuses are bubbles in which the rules of the real world do not apply. While classrooms are absolutely places for exploration and discovery, theatre productions of complete works for audiences are not just educational exercises. Students need to be taught creative and legal responsibility towards plays (and musicals) and their authors, not encouraged to take scripts as mere suggestions to be molded in any way a director wishes. When it comes to race, this incident and the recent Kent State production of The Mountaintop will now insure that every playwright who cares about the race of their characters will be extremely explicit in their directions, but that doesn’t excuse directors who look for loopholes to justify willfully ignoring indications in existing texts.

It’s my understanding that there has been new contact between Michel and Suh, though I am not party to its nature or content. It’s worth noting that in the third Post-Gazette story, it is reported that “Ms. Michel took to Facebook Saturday to ask “that any negative or mean-spirited posts or contact towards Mr. Suh be ceased. We are both artists trying to serve a specific community and attacking him helps no one.” That’s a responsible position to take, but it should be expanded to include negative posts or contact about the accurate portrayal of race in theatre, since they are flourishing in the wake of this incident.

It is also now time for the university to explain the truth about why the production was shut down, namely a failure to respect the artistic directive of the playwright; insure that this incident and the rhetoric surrounding it hasn’t been a license for anyone to marginalize their students of color; and begin truly addressing equity and diversity on their campus. Regardless of the racial makeup of their community or student body, they need to be setting an example and creating a better environment for all students, not feeding into narratives of racial divisiveness.

Update, November 18, 7 pm: Earlier today, the Dramatists Guild of America released a statement regarding the organization’s position on casting and copyright, signed by Guild president Doug Wright. It reads, in part:

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.

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.

* * *

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.”

* * *

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.”

Clarion’s website outlines an array of programs to address gender, racial and disability diversity. But despite the public controversy surrounding Jesus in India, Michel says that she has not spoken with anyone in those programs about what has transpired. “No one has reached out to me at this point,” she said.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

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.

* * *

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.”

* * *

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.”

Clarion’s website outlines an array of programs to address gender, racial and disability diversity. But despite the public controversy surrounding Jesus in India, Michel says that she has not spoken with anyone in those programs about what has transpired. “No one has reached out to me at this point,” she said.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.