The audiences at theaters for young people around the country are often quite diverse, reflecting the schools whose field trips fill the seats.
But the programming and creative teams: not so much.
A new study finds that about 80 percent of the shows presented around the country are by white writers, and 85 percent of the productions are led by white directors. Also of concern: Much of the industry’s diversity is concentrated in a small number of productions about people of color, while the shows that dominate the industry’s stages, generally adapted from children’s books and fairy tales, have overwhelmingly white creative teams.
The study, by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at the University of California, Los Angeles, was commissioned last year, well before the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis set off a wave of national unrest over racial injustice. That unrest, in turn, has prompted renewed scrutiny of inequities in many aspects of American society, including theater.
“The numbers don’t lie,” said Idris Goodwin, the director of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. Goodwin is a playwright who has written for young audiences and who previously ran StageOne Family Theater in Louisville, Ky.
“In the world of theater, the efforts at inclusion have not been effective enough,” he said. “What this report shows is that we’ve got to interrogate the ways white supremacy has built structures that keep whiteness pervasive.”
The study was commissioned by Theater for Young Audiences/USA, an organization representing about 250 theaters around the country that produce professional work for audiences ranging from infants to adolescents. (The casts are generally adults, and are paid; these are not youth theaters featuring unpaid children as performers.) The industry’s willingness to study itself differentiates it from other segments of the cultural world, including nonprofit and commercial theaters for adults, that are generally studied by academics or advocacy organizations.
“It’s important to recognize the gains — playwrights of color doubled over the last 10 years, which is a sign of progress,” said Jonathan Shmidt Chapman, the Theater for Young Audiences executive director. “But we have a long way to go in terms of reaching equity across the field.”
The industry is fueled by titles familiar to children: During the 2018-19 season, the most-produced show was “Elephant & Piggie’s ‘We Are in a Play!’,” based on a series of children’s books by Mo Willems.
“Our industry for a long time has relied heavily on book adaptations as a driver of ticket sales, so the problems are the same that exist in the book industry,” Chapman said. “When we do invest in new work, we are far closer to reaching our goals.”
Among those investing in new work is the Chicago Children’s Theater, which in recent years co-commissioned Cheryl L. West to adapt two well-regarded children’s books, Matt de la Peña’s “Last Stop on Market Street” and Christopher Paul Curtis’s “The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963.” The theater’s artistic director, Jacqueline Russell, said the new study sends a message to the industry, “making us question again where we’re looking for our source material, and how we’re putting together our seasons.”
The report also raises questions about why the most commonly produced work — adaptations of fairy tales and well-known titles — has less diverse creative teams. “Possibly it is because the underlying intellectual property is written by white people, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hire someone of color to adapt it or direct it,” said Yalda T. Uhls, the founder and executive director of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers.
The study compared the 2018-19 theater season to that a decade earlier, reviewing 441 productions at 50 theaters. Some of the key findings:
“Culturally-specific productions,” in which people of color were essential to the narrative, made up 19 percent of all productions. Playwrights of color wrote 69 percent of those shows, but only 8 percent of other shows.
Among playwrights whose work was produced at theaters for young audiences, 36 percent were women, up from 33 percent, while 20 percent were people of color, up from 9 percent.
There was gender parity among directors: 52 percent were women, up from 38 percent. But only 15 percent of directors were people of color, up from 10 percent.
There was also gender parity among actors: 52 percent were women, up from 45 percent. Among actors, 37 percent were people of color, up from 24 percent.
The coronavirus pandemic poses a new challenge to the sector, as it has hobbled theaters financially. Chapman said there is a risk that theaters for young audiences will recover even more slowly than other theaters because schools might cut arts spending and be reluctant to resume field trips. There is also a risk that, once theaters for young audiences do reopen, they will rely even more heavily on familiar titles in an effort to sell tickets.
But the events of this year, including not only the pandemic but also the unrest, could also inspire new plays. “We’re talking with colleagues around the country about ways to commission new work that is reflecting the resilience of young people that we’ve seen over and over in this unusual year of 2020,” said Julia Flood, the artistic director of Metro Theater Company in St. Louis. She said the study’s findings were not a surprise, but should be a spur.
“I think it’s going to help galvanize the field,” she added.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
