Theater’s other diversity snag: Yours truly
11 inclusive shows to check out in Phoenix this fall
“I can’t imagine any of my friends from high school or college going to the opera,” said the bright-eyed young intern, noting something of a generation gap when it comes to the supposedly highbrow art form.
Well, I have news for you, whippersnapper. None of my friends from high school or college was an opera buff, either. And I’m old.
In other words, Millennials aren’t killing the arts along with every other past-its-prime institution they have been accused of offing. The opera, the ballet, the symphony, the theater: These legacy entertainments, some of them very much the popular culture of their heydays, have been weighed down by that honorific article — the arts — for a long time, and the passionate few who are called to these crafts are perpetually pulling their hair out figuring out how to proselytize to the next generation.
Whether you call it diversity, inclusion, representation or equity, the quest to make more room for women and people of color has been the debate of the decade in the theater world.
As both a reporter and a critic, I’ve grappled with the issue on numerous occasions, from a controversy over the casting of Phoenix Theatre’s “In the Heights” to the news that Arizona Theatre Company’s “diverse” search for a new artistic director yielded five white finalists, four of them men.
It was the latter story, a year ago, that prompted one of those “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” emails from a reader, who noted that it’s not just artistic directors at major theaters who are overwhelmingly white and male — so are critics.
When a reader has a point, a reader has a point, so I promised to turn the question around to my own profession.
Another old-white-guys club?
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First, I have to say that journalism as a whole, and my news organization in particular, has made strides in diversifying the reporting pool, although may- be not as much progress as one might hope. But among professional critics, the white-male model is predominant.
This hardly needs proving. Every full-time professional theater writer in the Phoenix area over the past two decades has been a white guy. So are the fine online reviewers (four of them by my count) who now regularly cover local productions. If you expand the scope to
include music, movie and dining critics, I can name a handful of women, but no people of color.
I’m including myself, of course. As a cisgender straight white man, I check all the major privilege boxes except for young, thin and rich.
So, am I the problem? Thankfully, I got one friendly “no” from a colleague, Houston Chronicle theater critic Wei-Huan Chen, who is the son of Taiwanese immigrants.
“People calling out white critics don’t really see that the whole ship is sinking,” he says.
That is, fewer and fewer big city papers have theater critics at all anymore. So Chen was concerned about last year’s controversy in Chicago, where nearly 4,000 people signed a Change.org petition to get theaters to stop inviting longtime Sun-Times critic Hedy Weiss, a white woman, because of several reviews about minority-themed plays that were deemed offensive. The newspaper defended her in public, then laid her off earlier this year.
“I’m mourning Hedy Weiss because she is a theater critic, she is an independent voice, and we need that in this environment,” Chen says.
Who tells whose stories?
It wasn’t the answer I expected, because Chen has been outspoken on identity issues, stirring controversy last year with a review of Houston Grand Opera’s “Nixon in China” that called out what he considered offensive stereotypes and “yellowface” acting by white performers in Asian roles.
If the question in the theater is who tells whose stories, the question in criticism is who interprets those stories.
“What separates me from other critics is that I can see whiteness as a construct and talk about it,” he says. “I think a lot of white people aren’t able to even acknowledge themselves as white. They don’t see the different elements of identity politics that are going on. ...
“I’m always trying to make art speak to the rest of the world, and I’m trying to involve art in the mess of our current social and political environment.”
So I guess there’s a problem after all. And it may not be solvable, at least in professional journalism, where retiring critics often simply aren’t replaced at all.
But no matter, you might say. There’s plenty of excellent writing about theater available on the Internet, where there are no gatekeepers to keep out diverse voices.
Can the Internet save arts criticism?
Not so fast, says Hailey Bachrach, a writer based in Portland, Oregon, who by all accounts looks like a new-media success story. Inspired to pursue criticism by the feminist-leaning film critic Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, she started out as a blogger and then started freelancing for local and national outlets, including HowlRound and American Theatre magazine.
Noting that women’s voices predominate on theater blogs almost as much as men’s do in the mainstream press, Bachrach also checks her own privilege as a white woman and says that the Internet opens some doors, but not all.
“How you get experience writing about theater is you have to see theater, and there’s obviously a cost barrier to that,” she says. “When I started blogging, I was paying for most of my tickets. It can be a massive financial burden just to get enough experience and clips to get the paid jobs in the first place, and the people who have that time and money tend to have a certain level of privilege.”
And that may always be true. Live theater can be expensive, but even at the more affordable price point of say, Stray Cat Theatre, audiences remain largely white, at least here in Phoenix. This is one reason inclusion and representation have become such a hot topic in the theater world in the first place.
Calling out the critics
To the credit of many white-male artistic directors in this town, a lot of progress is being made. Arizona Theatre Company’s upcoming season spotlights two Latino playwrights as well as the great August Wilson. And Childsplay, the Valley’s professional theater for young audiences, has made inclusion a central value, from casting to play selection.
The question is, are the critics keeping up with the times to fully appreciate those changes? At least that was the implication I got in a long conversation with Childsplay’s director of production, Anthony Runfola.
Runfola, who is also a talented director, was speaking only for himself when he went on Facebook to take issue with my “mini review” of “The Snowy Day” for what he thought was an insensitive viewpoint on what sorts of stories best serve the goal of representation.
It was a gutsy thing to do in a town that, unlike Chicago, only has a couple of professional theater critics. But Runfola, who describes himself as “fully Cauca- sian,” says, “It’s our job as white people to talk to other white people, to call these things out.”
OK, so at the very least we’re all talking about it. But what to do about it?
“What we’re trying to do at Childsplay is very consciously make sure we are making space for people of different backgrounds within the company,” Runfola says.
“Are we acknowledging the privilege, and are we making a space for others? These are the two big questions.”
Within journalism, one way to “make space,” says Chen, is mentorship — experienced critics helping nurture emerging voices.
“Criticism is dying,” he says. “It’s been ossified into this museum form of writing that is essentially the same format that it was in1980. So I don’t want to say we need to diversify criticism. We need to re-energize criticism, and diversity is part of that, but so is mentorship. ...
“We need to stop having conversations about the death of criticism and start conversations about how we can re-energize criticism with women and trans people and people of color.”