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Who Will Survive?
A Pandemic and Racial Reckoning Converge to Test American Theater
By Steven Leigh Morris
The Legacy of White Theater
The Change Whisperer: poet-playwright-activist Luis Alfaro
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Alfaro noted, “Ten million people [in LA county] 224 languages spoken, and yet the leadership in Southern California is almost exclusively white . . . What’s up with that?”
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After the murder of George Floyd, a wide swath of L.A. theaters’ artistic directors, who are almost entirely white, expressed their eagerness to make apologies and amends with more inclusive casting and leadership changes. Had they not been paying attention to the institutional racism over which they presided, mused Michael Shepperd, artistic director of the LGBT-focused Celebration Theatre in West Hollywood – himself a community leader and a Black man. (He spoke on a theater talk-show Animal Farm, produced by Santa Monica-based City Garage Theatre.)
Two weeks later on the same show, poet/dramatist/activist Luis Alfaro noted, “Ten million people [in LA county] 224 languages spoken, and yet the leadership in Southern California is almost exclusively white . . . What’s up with that?”
Actually, a great deal is up with that. White, male power brokers have held a stranglehold on American theater since the 19th century minstrel shows and touring companies — despite demographics that have been tilting towards non-white skin color for decades.
When white immigrants poured into East Coast and Midwest meccas such as New York and Chicago at the turn of the 20th century, huge numbers of them were fleeing places in Europe and Eastern Europe where theater was in their blood. In both the Old World and the New, they were segregated, and segregated themselves, into ghettos where they put on plays. Why would they do this? The theater was how they had always given voice to their identity- and dignity-preserving jokes and songs, as well as to persecution against them in their Old Countries. In New York’s garment district, for instance, white Jewish populations, over time, adapted their Yiddish theater traditions to help create Broadway and, of any group, soon made the most sizable inroads into Hollywood’s entertainment industries.
Similarly, in literature, music and the visual arts, the artistic vibrancy of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s derived largely from the migration of African-Americans from the South, along with memories of bigotry during the Reconstruction.
Persecution, oppression and hardship fuel communal artistic creativity. This should be encouraging news for the American theater in 2021.
New York and Chicago are “theater cities” (in contrast to so many of America’s other urban centers where live theater occurs) not just because so many plays are put on there, but because the act, the habit, the ritual, of going to the theater is a legacy of their founding immigrants. And those immigrants, at the time of their arrival, were largely white, Jewish, and denigrated by the White Supremacy movements of their era.
Any exclusion in the theater, for cultural or financial reasons, is obviously antithetical to the interests of an American theater in which the dominant narrative is not the story of any single ethnicity, but of the interweaving threads of cultural experiences that comprise our culture.
The U.S. election of 2020 may have repudiated the most White-Supremacist president this country has seen since the days of George Wallace, but down-ticket, the latest iteration of the Republican Party, which for reasons of expedience should be called the Party of White Supremacy, made gains across huge swaths of the Midwest, and even in California and New York.
Particularly alarming to the Democrats is how minorities voted in higher percentages than in 2016 for the Party of White Supremacy – despite Trumpism’s demonization of them. (To be clear, the results did not represent a consensus minority viewpoint, but a disturbing uptick in votes for Trump and/or Trumpism over the four years of that administration.) For all the beautiful national narratives espoused by the enlightened, the United States remains profoundly calcified in its bigotry. Chalk this up to human nature?
Susanna Bryant Dakin is the author of A Scotch Paisano (1939, University of California Press) – ostensibly a biography of a little-known adventurer named Hugo Reid who winded his way to, what was in the early 1830s, the Spanish territory of Los Angeles, California. The book, however, is also a survey of local indigenous tribes, including the Tongva (called the Gabrielenos by the Spanish), who presided from Malibu through the L.A. basin. The Gabrielenos had all the good, fertile land, and the oceans to fish, which they traded for acorns and ornaments created by the less affluent Serranos, who occupied the San Bernardino Mountains to the north, and the desert beyond, where the soil was more rocky and sandy than in the fertile valleys below. Dakin points out that though the two tribes were certainly cooperative, no self-respecting Gabrielena would marry a Serrano. No, not somebody from there, not one of them. And these were tribes that co-existed for a thousand years.
This was the United States before the United States had even showed up, a brand of subtle bigotry enacted by people who had never heard of the Hatfields and the McCoys, or the Capulets and the Montagues.
It’s the Economics, Stupid
Celebration Theatre Artistic Director Michael Shepperd
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The same market forces that established the Broadway theater as an international destination are the same market forces that are wreaking havoc on America’s network of professional regional theaters that also aim to pay artists a wage, if not a living one.
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The larger argument for changes to the institutions of our culture goes beyond the moral call for “social justice” and “equity and inclusion” that are now anthems trying to drown out the roar of the sea.
For we are in a tempest, exacerbated by the pandemic, and it’s not in a teapot. It’s as large as the oceans themselves, which shift eternally from the force of their currents and under-tows. The sea appears eternal, yet the actual waters, like market forces, are never in quite the same place from one minute to the next.
The same market forces that propelled hundreds of daily newspapers to the forefront of trustworthy and credible journalism in the 20th century are the same market forces that have decimated those same newspapers in the 21st.
The same market forces that established the Broadway theater as an international destination are the same market forces that are wreaking havoc on America’s network of professional regional theaters that also aim to pay artists a wage, if not a living one. These not-for-profit theaters have always depended, by design, on patrons and funders for revenue. But as foundations divert their funding from the arts to emergency social services necessitated by growing income inequality – also a product of market forces — these theaters have found themselves increasingly dependent on box office revenue, i.e. the commercial pressures these theaters were created to offset. Their box offices were intended to provide a revenue supplement rather than to actually support these institutions in their totality.
And yet, for reasons that may or may not be related to regional theaters literally selling out their missions, or at least tilting the delicate balance of those missions away from works that challenge audiences, theater attendance has nonetheless been declining since 2002, according to the National Endowment for the Arts.
And then came the Pandemic.
Playwright-Director Chay Yew
Equity and Inclusion: Too Little Too Late?
Hero Theatre’s Elisa Bocanegra
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Yew mentions that shortly after his arrival as Artistic Director, Victory Gardens Theatre lost about 50% of its subscribers. And yet, over time, those who fled Yew’s changes were slowly replaced by a younger, more ethnically diverse demographic. A metaphor for the American theater?
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Is interest in the theater among ethnic audiences enough to supplement declining arts attendance by the usual white suspects? Perhaps it is. How can we and they not explore that possibility? Though it might have been more prudent and visionary to act on this 30-40 years ago, which is Michael Shepperd’s point and which, as Chay Yew points out in a later episode of Animal Farm, is precisely what founding artistic director Gordon Davidson did with his minority workshops, when he served at the Mark Taper Forum.
The American non-profit theater may need to brace itself for the harsh realization that, for now at least, it is decreasingly economically viable as a vocation, and increasingly viable as an avocation. Important work – commercial as well as experimental – may be more possible beyond the confines of the larger established institutions than within them.
Playwright-director Yew, who ran Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre as its Artistic Director from 2011 to 2020, brought that theater from the red to the black in its final three years while straddling the line between traditional David Mamet-style realism that Chicago audiences embrace and more experimental, non-linear works. He mentions that shortly after his arrival, VGT lost about 50% of its subscribers. And yet, over time, those who fled Yew’s changes were slowly replaced by a younger, more ethnically diverse demographic. A metaphor for the American theater?
“I don’t believe in throwing things out,” Yew explained. I believe in evolution, in making room.”
Post-pandemic, Broadway will most likely, hopefully, thrive (as have such behemoth newspapers as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal in the journalism sphere).
But perhaps the rest of theater is tilting in the direction of classical music and poetry, into the terrain of rented salons, and storefronts and churches. That gives local groups the license to recruit and form companies comprised of whatever genders and ethnicities best serve their missions and spread their gospels. It’s a future of theater at a less daunting scale, where the reduced burden of administration and real estate permits greater risk-taking in the art itself. And though there’s no hedge against bigotry even at such a micro level, the odds of institutional racism are at least mitigated by the flexibility permitted in the absence of a crushing financial overhead. If people are yelling “I can’t breathe” at the doors of a theater, a smaller institution is in a better position to actually do something about it than a larger one.
The question is, in some ways, a question of how to survive during cultural climate change: In the midst of a tempest, do you stake your survival on the smaller rafts that have demonstrated some capacity to ride out harsh waves but can easily topple, or on the massive ships adrift at sea, vessels that can be brought down by an unseen iceberg or pandemic.
A case can be made for both, but it’s the weight of those larger vessels that prevents them from making quick, necessary turns. They are, almost by definition, inexorable, which might explain why they’ve remained white for so long.
Four examples, from Los Angeles, illustrate the resilience and tenacity of small theaters run by artistic directors who are people-of-color.
The Celebration Theatre and Playwrights’ Arena, both 501(C)3 non-profit corporations, have been around, respectively, since 1982 and 1992. With a few notable exceptions, neither has performed in a venue of larger than 99-seats, while their productions have frequently played in storefront theaters with a maximum capacity of 35 to 50 seats.
Playwrights’ Arena, still run by its founding artistic director Jon Lawrence Rivera, has leased three different theater spaces during his tenure and is currently preparing to operate out of a church space about two miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles. From its inception, the theater has dedicated itself to producing new works exclusively by Los Angeles-area playwrights. By policy, the proportion of scribes and of the actors in their plays are at least 50% people-of-color, which conforms to the demographic makeup of the city. Performing entirely new plays by little-known authors can hardly be called a formula for commercial success, particularly in such a marketing-centric city as Los Angeles. And yet, by virtue of its scale and nimbleness, Playwrights’ Arena has not only endured but thrived with full-houses and critics’ respect, while remaining true to its founding mission.
Playwrights’ Arena’s Jon Lawrence Rivera
A similar story can be found at Celebration Theatre, currently on the edge of West Hollywood and helmed by Michael Shepperd, with its focus on LGBT-themed work.
There are also savvy new companies operating with similar nimbleness and modesty-of-scale, in order to execute their commitment to telling the kinds of stories that have been traditionally excluded from Hollywood’s narratives of who we are: theaters such as the TV-industry-laced collective Ammunition Theatre Company, and Elisa Bocanegra’s Hero Theatre Company.
A thought expressed by Yew is that so long as there’s a fire to tell stories, storytelling will endure, but “not necessarily in those beautifully lit, 1,000 seat theaters.” If the economy is going to be bad, he surmises, that recession is going to be global, potentially driving down real estate prices and offering, literally, new avenues for the theater to return to the streets where they were driven out by soaring real estate costs. We could easily see the re-emergence of smaller theaters, Yew postulates, like New York in the 70s, or L.A. in the 80s – an opportunity to explore new forms and draw new audiences. But if we return to business the way we were doing business in February of 2020, he concludes, “We will have failed. The whole world will have failed.”
Luis Alfaro says he’s been Zoom-flitting around the country, counseling universities and theaters on how to change not only what’s on the stage, but the makeup of boards-of-directors and company leaders. Alfaro says that the change envisioned by the enlightened must come about through diplomacy.
If we don’t have at least a flicker of faith in the good that art can bestow, and a means to bestow it to and for all groups who wish to participate, then what do we have at all?
(Disclosure: Over the decades, Playwrights’ Arena has produced five of the author’s plays.)
