San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
What Bay Area’s Black artists ask the industry as nation rebuilds.
Last month, I wrote a column posing questions to theater leaders, particularly white ones, about how our art form and industry can rebuild from the pandemic and from antiBlackness. Now I present the promised Part II, in which I ask local Black theater artists and workers what their own questions are.
Even those who declined to participate often gave thoughtprovoking reasons why. One was “consumed with reclaiming Black joy and time.” A second wrote, “I feel like the work needs to come from these theater companies. The questions have already been asked but not answered.” A third, the playwright Cleavon Smith, said, “Questions seem to put me in a position to be reactionary, and frankly that’s not a place in which I feel comfortable right now. It’s as if I’m asking, ‘What are you willing to give or give up?’ rather than stating clearly what it is I expect in a relationship that’s mutually beneficial, a relationship where all parties are acknowledged, a relationship in which our efforts support all parties’ wellbeing and the actualization of our best selves.”
Those who did participate were equally thoughtful. Here are their questions, edited for length and clarity.
Elizabeth Carter
Oakland actor and director
What are you doing outside of theater to dismantle white supremacy?
What would it be like if Black women theater artists were financially compensated for our emotional labor as the cultural and intellectual resource we are in our theater community? What would that world look like?
How can you make me feel safe in the room? How do we own our own stories when we can’t control the rooms? How can we have more control over the rooms we work in? What support are you willing to give (labor, financial, institutional) when we do lead the room?
How do we protect our hearts and still risk? Will you back me up even if I don’t ask you to? How can you make space for my full self ?
Where are my stories of joy on your stages?
Dazié GregoSykes
Oakland playwright, performer, educator, author
Can the making of antiantiBlack art change the way we experience caricature or racism in the Black psyche?
Champagne Hughes Oakland administrator, actor, executive director, board chair, writer and DJ
How are the Bay Area theaters, predominantly those whose administrators are noncolor — my vanilla babies — how are they protecting the psyche of the actors and administrators who are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color)? What practices are they going to have in place so that we are protected, given the external conditions and the racial systemic practices that are embedded consciously and subconsciously within these institutions?
When are they going to put a BIPOC on the marketing team so that we can actually have theater exposed to the BIPOC watering holes?
Look who’s on your team, especially when you have a show that’s of color, and then we feel like we’re singing and dancing again because the audience is not of color.
Regina Y. Evans
Oakland social justice performer and playwright
What do the streets know that theater doesn’t?
How is it that my work (turned down by most theaters that I’ve approached) gains traction on the streets?
Rotimi Agbabiaka
San Francisco actor, playwright and director
How do you address antiBlackness knowing that Black people are not a homogeneous blob with the exact same backgrounds, levels of privilege and aesthetic values? How do we disconnect from corporate values (like celebrity and marketability) that get in the way of true equity?
What does it say about theater’s relevance to society when the most vocal industry responses to police violence are demands for greater recognition and compensation and not how we can use theater to push for the political change our communities so desperately need?
Ellen Sebastian Chang
A theatrical director and arts educator who resides in both the East Bay and the Pacific Northwest
Are we entering the age of real change or another phase of ‘performative’ antiracist ‘lip service’?
What is your private (behind closed doors) response to Black Lives Matter? What is your plan to educate yourself, your staff, your board to create transparent equity, restorative justice, reparations and space for Black lives?
How will you consider the reality of the cost of living, the cost of real estate, health care, food, transportation and the direct impact of the latter in regard to ‘play making’? And I ask you as I would
ask anyone who lives in the whiteness mindset: Are you ready to challenge an entire civilization?
Margo Hall
Oakland actor, director and educator
Why now? Why has it taken you so long to step up?
Are you willing to share your funding resources with Black theater companies?
How will you protect my Black body in your white space or your white institution?
Michael Gene Sullivan
San Francisco actor, director, playwright and activist
The board of directors model is basically rich donors and organizations keeping an eye on the artists, making sure they don’t blow the money. But if you spend all your time asking the economic aristocracy for money, eventually, you will do what they want to get it — and that will include erasing any activist theater. Can theaters commit to having more economically diverse boards?
Can artistic directors recognize that their experiences, because of their skin and gender privileges, have been limited, and that unless they are willing to cede some power of representation, their position as arbiter of relevance narrows their theater’s scope and importance?
Look around your office. Look at your stage. If they aren’t peopled about the same, you are exploiting somebody’s experience. What are you going to do about that?
Stephanie Wilborn
San Francisco theater administrator and educator
We have talked about the systemic racism within a lot of largescale historically predominately white theaters, but are theaters and their leaders really ready to let Black theater makers lead?
How do we as Black artists, makers, administrators not get burnt out when you’re having a constant range of micro and macroaggressions, having the same conversations on why Black lives matter, having an idea stolen or making way less than your white colleagues? You begin to think, “Is this worth it?”
Are we as a theater community really ready for the accountability and intentional change that we keep claiming we want? I see a lot of organizations having “these conversations,” but are there Black people in these rooms? Are the Black people who have been having these conversations for years now — are they part of these current discussions and steps of changes? Or are we still further excluded from these conversations?
And are these organizations willing to put their money where they need to, and be better, and continue to grow and challenge the organizations built on white supremacy — such as by diversifying boards, mandatory DEI (diversity, equity and inclusive) trainings, inclusive hiring and renter job practices, hiring Black staff in positions of power (and not just as the DEI director), mentoring and supporting incoming Black artists and administrators, admitting their faults and making an actionable plan addressing the hurt that was caused and how they will measure success of antiBlackness in organizations?
Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak