A call for action at theater
Exemployee says Sonoma County’s Transcendence company fell short on antiracism
When Nikko Kimzin started working in education with Transcendence Theatre Company, it was partly because he was tired of getting typecast in regional theater and touring shows as “a young Latino man with a gun and a gang and a big accent.”
He wanted to tell “complex stories,” he says, but casting directors and the American theater canon weren’t offering him those roles.
“The charge became: Do I wait for the industry to change, or do I learn new skills in order to change the industry?” Kimzin, 31, recalls from his Petaluma home.
One way to make change: switch to education, in order to bring theater to more youths of color.
Working as director of education and community engagement at Transcendence, which is best known for an outdoor summer season of musical theater in Sonoma County’s Jack London State Historic Park, was an early step in that new path, after a stint with Project Broadway in New York. Kimzin got a full ride to study theater at the University of Arizona, and now he wanted to pay that support forward to the next generation of artists of color.
Kimzin started at Transcendence in 2018, after having previously performed with the company. But by 2021, Kimzin decided he had hit a wall. After he resigned on Jan. 6, he published a post on the website Medium on Feb. 10 alleging an array of leadership problems that, to him, show a mismatch between the theater’s rhetoric about race, education and community and its actual priorities and actions.
Kimzin’s post comes as the theater industry nationwide is in the midst of a racial reckoning. Locally, the “Living Document of BIPOC Experiences in Bay Area Theater,” published in June, gave artists of color a platform to share their honest accounts of working at local theater companies. (Transcendence is not among the theaters mentioned.) Days after Kimzin published his post, the collective We See You, White American Theater released an accountability report detailing which theater institutions responded to its wideranging set of demands, published in July, that theaters take concrete steps to eradicate systemic inequities from their practices and culture — and that they be transparent and accountable to the theater community about how they make those decisions.
Kimzin’s post and its peers reflect a growing feeling among many theater makers that it’s not enough for companies to not be overtly racist. They must be antiracist — actively working to dismantle racism from the level of unconscious bias all the way to institutional policies and social structures. It’s the difference between reacting with passivity when you hear a racist remark and combating it both in the moment and afterward, working to ensure such incidents don’t happen again.
“Our performance as an organization and leadership team has not always met the high standard we set for ourselves,” reads a Transcendence board statement dated Feb. 22, supplied to The Chronicle. “We have faced the same pitfalls and errors that many young organizations, whether enterprises for profit or nonprofit, encounter as they grow from startup to maturity. Our processes were incomplete and not entirely formalized.”
Among its promises: “Transcendence will establish a committee with diverse memberships of employees, leadership, board members and community members to draft a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) statement and action plan for implementation.”
He alleges that Transcendence never provided staff with DEI training, despite guaranteeing to do so in his employment contract (a copy of which he shared with The Chronicle, stating that this stipulation was not standard and that he specifically requested its inclusion); that company leadership never attended any of his department’s events that focused on people of color, despite being invited and despite Kimzin’s launching new programs; that a donor told him he didn’t want his funds supporting Latinx youths and that the company took no action on the incident and had no process for dealing with what he viewed as a racist encounter; and that Artistic Director Amy Miller “has repeatedly made
comments that Transcendence offers ‘African American’ actors contracts but they are all working or uninterested.”
He saw that last instance as “blaming people of color for not being present at their organization,” he elaborates by phone with The Chronicle.
He further claims that when he spoke up about these issues, he was subject to “gaslighting, discrediting, and the deliberate exclusion from senior leader communication,” which ultimately led him to resign.
Transcendence Executive Director Brad Surosky (who is married to Miller) and Board Chair Susan Hoeffel declined to comment on most of these matters, citing liability concerns about discussing former employees.
Regarding the incident with the donor, however, Hoeffel says, “I can affirm that did not happen. I was in the room, but I will not divulge what the real communication was. It is private.”
In his post, Kimzin claimed to have a witness to the incident, but that person declined to speak with The Chronicle.
“What we’re trying to do here is take the past and have it inform the future for us,” Hoeffel adds. Questions about these allegations “are dragging us back into the past, and we want to learn and move forward.”
Kimzin is not alone in his feelings about company management. On Feb. 16, Leah Sprecher, another Transcendence cofounder and former contract worker and board member, published her own Medium post. During her tenure with the company, “individuals were brought on board to inspire donors and receive grants,” she writes, “but when it came to the execution of actual programming, they and their efforts to implement programming were often suppressed by the Executive Team.” When employees brought up their own ideas, “they were often met with lectures by the Executive Team for having conversations without their permission. When the Executive Team did not like their ideas, rather than have open and honest communications ... they were quietly stripped of responsibilities.”
This culture, she says, led her to resign in 2017.
Kimzin’s experience with company leadership “unfortunately is not an anomaly,” says Robert Petrarca, another cofounder and former employee and board member.
As artistic associate, Petrarca says he frequently fielded complaints from other workers.
“There were so many cases of people not being allowed to truly do their job, having responsibilities cut off,” he recalls. Leadership was “not willing to or wanting to hear any complaints with any real honesty.”
“There was this environment where you’re 100% aligned with the executive and artistic director or you weren’t,” he continues, “and then you were not to be trusted, and it sort of meant that you were against Transcendence as an organization.”
Petrarca resigned as an employee in 2016 and as a board member the following year. He and Sprecher, both white, felt they could not speak to racial issues at the company as Kimzin could.
Surosky and Hoeffel note that the company hosted DEI trainings for the board and the executive team in the fourth quarter of 2020, though the one for the full staff came later, on Feb. 3, after Kimzin had already left the company. Each of the three sessions covered subjects including unconscious bias training and the idea of intent versus impact, though Surosky and Hoeffel say there is more to come. Kimzin says that before he left, he knew about the board’s training but not about the one for leadership. That knowledge doesn’t change his perception of the company, he adds.
Transcendence’s board statement also pledges to recruit more nonmanagement board members (currently, three of five board members are on the leadership team) and to hire an outside human resources professional who will review the company’s workplace culture and issue recommendations and who will create “a new nonexecutive HR presence to serve as an independent ombudsman to company staff.”
Kimzin calls the statement “progress but not justice,” adding, “what we need now isn’t words. It’s actions.” He laments that it doesn’t assume culpability, that it’s still written by leadership instead of being created by Transcendence’s full community. He wants to see restorative justice.
“The community needs to be brought to the table: What does justice look like for you?” he says. “People were allowed to inflict this much harm because they were given this much power. They’re still in that much power. How do we remove that power and give them opportunities to learn and grow and be held accountable with timed outcomes?”