White director of Berkeley’s Theatre-First steps aside to clear way for new leaders of color.
TheatreFirst director steps aside to clear way for perspectives and voices of color
TheatreFirst doesn’t have an artistic director, the standard title for a theater company’s leader. Shortly after Jon Tracy joined the company, in 2016, he gave himself the title of “artistic facilitator,” reflecting his desire to “decentralize” the role that leaders — who are disproportionately straight, white, cisgender and male — tend to take in their companies.
Now, Tracy, who is white, is stepping away from that position in the small, Berkeley company to one where he’ll report to someone else. The reason? To create a pipeline for rising leaders of color, he told The Chronicle in an exclusive interview.
He calls the move more a “repositioning” than a “demotion.” He says he has always envisioned his current role as working for and supporting the company’s diverse artists.
“I love walking into TheatreFirst (to find) a creative team and being there to figure out what resources they need and how to get them for them,” Tracy says. Now, “it’s time to narrow and sharpen that focus so that the full promise of my title could be fulfilled.”
Tracy says his and his company’s thinking on this move predates recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, but that “what this recent wave of protests inspire is a clarification of objective.”
Tracy said he will transition into the role of company manager in June. He is adamant that those who take over the top position in the future will not be in some kind of fellowship position, where he’s a shadow leader.
TheatreFirst can’t legally require that artistic director applicants be people of color but plans to make clear what the goals of its new leadership structure are.
The company expects to announce its next artistic director this year. The plan is for that person to spend four years leading the company, using the first year to plan productions for the following three seasons while a predecessor is still in charge. In each leader’s final year, TheatreFirst will appoint an associate artistic director, who will take over the following year, beginning a new cycle.
A new leader every few years means “new ways of thinking, new ways of working, new communities they’re connected to and collaborators they are connected to,” said TheatreFirst Board President Domenique Lozano.
“We want to hopefully be a pipeline or a lab so we can launch these leaders out into the American theater.”
But creating a new pipeline alone doesn’t guarantee greater diversity in the field.
In a 2016 report called “Moving Arts Leadership Forward: A Changing Landscape,” Emiko Ono, now the director of the performing arts program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, wrote, “What was once characterized as a pipeline problem can now unequivocally be described as a bottleneck.” Younger generations of arts leaders, who tend to be more diverse, have more formal training than their predecessors, she noted. But the number of top jobs at major organizations does not change much, and “latecareer leaders are staying in their organizations longer,” creating scarcity, she wrote.
Michael Courville of Open Mind Consulting has partnered with the Hewlett Foundation on a number of its studies of arts leadership. “When you observe broadly across the nonprofit sector in arts and culture, we hear a lot of, ‘We have to build the pipeline,’ ” he said. “And yet I talk to a lot of younger leaders of color who are like, ‘Uh, I’m ready. I have all these degrees. I have all this experience. But there are no positions.’ ”
A small company like TheatreFirst, whose annual budget is approximately $300,000, can’t be expected to change the field on its own. But its restructuring plan has the potential to get larger, more influential organizations thinking about how they might redistribute leadership power.
Efforts to diversify programming, audiences, staff and boards are common at theater companies, and socalled distributive leadership models — in which a group shares the authority and responsibilities historically born by a single manager — are becoming more widespread. Theater boards are also gradually hiring more leaders of color in positions formerly held by white artistic directors; recent examples include Tim Bond taking over for Robert Kelley at TheatreWorks and Eric Ting following Jonathan Moscone at California Shakespeare Theater. These appointees join the leaders of color at local identityspecific institutions, including Lorraine Hansberry Theatre and AfricanAmerican Shakespeare Company.
But the move at TheatreFirst is a much rarer step.
Nikki Kirk, the Equity in Arts Leadership Program Manager for Americans for the Arts, an advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., said she hasn’t seen such a scenario before.
“In previous organizations that I’ve worked with, I’ve often been met with, in the mix of cultural equity training, racial diversity training, white theater leaders saying, ‘Well what am I supposed to do, quit my job so that somebody of color can come in?’ ” Kirk said.
Under Tracy’s leadership, TheatreFirst has had a history of leading progressive initiatives. It created mandates that the board and all hires have a certain percentage of women, people of color and LGBTQIA2+ communities. In 2017, the theater company created a “Callbucks” program to pay actors for their time auditioning, as well as providing child or elder care during their auditions. In 2018, it announced a policy of paying everyone in the company, from community engagement workers to artistic facilitator, the same $15 hourly wage. (Many theater workers make honoraria or nothing at all.)
But progressive policies are no insurance against the limitations in
herent in cisgender straight white male leadership, says board member Brendan Simon.
“The reason it’s problematic is not because of Jon Tracy as a person,” he says. “The reason it’s problematic is because it signals a larger challenge or obstacle to visibility.”
In his role, Tracy has made some choices, which he now regrets, that he attributes to his limited point of view as a white man. One example was the decision to commission and produce a play about Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who, as she was dying of cancer, had cells harvested from her body without her consent — cells that later led to medical breakthroughs. “HeLa” had good intentions, Tracy says, but it didn’t have Black artists in the roles of playwright or director. Some Black artists felt betrayed.
For Cleavon Smith, a playwright and a TheatreFirst company member, the new leadership model is a way of “doing the work rather than just talking the work.”
Tracy says TheatreFirst’s decision was a long time in the making but was spurred on by both the pandemic, which gave the company time to reflect, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations. He uses the idea of defunding the police as an example of the imperative of new leadership. Many theater audiences, he says, don’t know what a defunded police would look like, which creates a “call to action” for theater artists to be “documentarians of the future.”
“Who should be leading that movement?” he says. “Should it be the folks who have traditionally held the leadership positions, that have brought us to the place where we are now, on the backs of multiple intersecting oppressed communities?” Or should we “give the microphone over to the folks who have built this country and built this world through the hardest possible challenges, and have prevailed, and have the maps in their bodies and in their communities of a more just future?”