THEATER AND RACIAL DIVERSITY IN HOUSTON

Infernal Bridegroom Productions' artistic director Anthony Barilla responds to my recent post on IBP's production of The Hotel Play, which Tony directs, and in which I play a small role. From Real Art comments:

I'm glad you're having a good time, Ron: we're having a great time having you on board. You're a very good actor and you deserve good work.

Just wanted to mention that we pitch hard to "multi-cultural" actors to get them involved in all our shows that we cast from outside the company. I mean: we've practically begged. My experience had been that most actors-of-color in Houston are very focused on getting regular paying gigs.

This is really a drag for us as there are certain shows that we simply can't do without, for example, black actors. And yet we've only rarely found black actors willing to work with us.

Lemme know if you know anyone who would like to work with us in the future: of-color or otherwise.

Wally's a genius? Hell yeah.

Curious which two shows of ours didn't live up to our rep - thanks man: tony (the director)

First off, thanks to Tony for the compliments--like most actors, I crave such life-affirming ego-boosts.

Second off, and more importantly, Tony's statement reminds me that achieving racial diversity is quite often much more complicated than simply, say, supporting affirmative action. As I mentioned in my previous post about IBP, the dearth of actors-of-color seems to be a problem affecting the entire underground theater scene in Houston. This is an irony, indeed: the vast majority of theater artists, and artists in general, are politically liberal. That means that theater people are extraordinarily sensitive to racial and ethnic issues--generally, white actors and directors want to work with non-white artists. What do you do, then, when it appears that people of color, on the whole, don't want to work with majority white theater companies? Short of all-out recruiting drives which would, conceivably, deplete much needed resources for creating shows, thereby rendering moot the diversity issue, I have no idea.

Case in point: my experience as a high school theater teacher.

There are two high schools in the district where I work. Both have theater departments. Ours is white. The other one is black. That is, our department has only four or five non-white students participating in advanced classes and after school production work, and our two person faculty is all white. The other department, however, seems to have closer to a 50-50 white to black student ratio; their single faculty member is African-American. The other school, overall, has fewer white students than ours, but not by much.

It's tempting to conclude that the difference must have something to do with the color of the faculty at the two schools, and I think that there's something to that, but there's more to consider. For instance, our season, chosen by our department chair, is composed of plays written exclusively by white playwrights. Their season showcases both white and black plays. Furthermore, they offer an entry level theater class that focuses on black writers; we offer nothing like that. It is clear that they provide students with much, much more black culture than we do--in fact, it's safe to say that our white department provides no black culture.

(It is important to note, however, that both departments, as far as I can tell, aren't doing Hispanic students any favors.)

Again, it is tempting to conclude that their department is more racially diverse because of its strong dose of black culture, and, again, I think there's something to that: in fact, my gut instinct is that the other department, with a black teacher and black plays, makes African-American students feel more comfortable, like theater is a place that they can call home. The truth is, however, that I don't really know what the deal is. It has been very frustrating, year after year, to see so many talented non-white students come through my Theater Arts I class to get their fine arts credit, and then decide to not continue with the program. I seem to have good relationships with most of my students of color, and the few non-white students who do continue with the program seem to enjoy themselves.

Ideally, one would think that it might be a good idea to introduce a strong, black cultural component to our department in hopes that this might increase retention of black students, but then we don't live in an idealized world. My second year as a teacher I tried to mount a staged reading of Beah Richards' fabulous poem, A Black Woman Speaks, for Black History Month. I called for an open audition of black actresses and fifteen or so showed up. Not everybody was great, but there was so much excitement, so much happiness that our theater department was doing a black show, that I decided to cast all of them.

A few days later, the grandfather of one of the girls, a conservative minister at a black Pentecostal church, knocked on my classroom door. The conversation that we then had out in the hall startled me so much that it still makes me angry: he essentially ordered me to cease production of the show. His reasoning was weird: this poem talks about slavery; today's black kids get so upset about slavery that they can't be friends with white kids. Or something to that effect. He told me that it was better to confine myself to plays about black leaders and inventors. He also told me that, in choosing such a radical piece (in fact, I had chosen it because it seems, at this point in history, utterly non-controversial), I had insulted the entire black community in the town where I teach--of course, I knew that this was bullshit, but he seemed to completely believe in what he was saying. He also told me that Alex Haley's Roots, a book he called "trash," had started all this slavery nonsense. I was in the Twilight Zone, but I didn't back down: I told him that there was no way that he could barge in here and tell me what shows I could and couldn't do. He trumped me by calling the principal who then shut me down. No black faculty members would support me; in fact, some of them found new problems with the poem: one had a problem with the mention of rape; another had a problem with the n-word (which has, ironically, been censored from the above-linked text of the piece).

I've never again tried to do a black play. It's almost as though those in power, black and white alike, believe it's not my place to do so.

So this brings me back to IBP. Infernal Bridegroom is a fairly high-profile company in the city of Houston, just as high schools are high-profile within their respective communities. It is fair, indeed, obligatory for a person of conscience to criticize both schools and theater companies for not being racially diverse. However, it is very important for me to admit that if IBP is guilty of shunning diversity, then I am, too. The thing is, on the other hand, that, like Tony at IBP, I feel like I've exhausted any realistic options for recruiting and retaining non-white actors: I have absolutely no idea what to do at my school, and I have absolutely no advice to give IBP.

One thing's for sure: in the post civil rights era, the politics of race are maddeningly complicated and baffling.

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