Theater

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. More

The Upright Citizens Brigade comedy organization, which has been financially troubled in recent years, has announced an effort to diversify its ranks and remake itself, at least in part, as a nonprofit.The group’s founders, Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh, who control operations of the organization’s training program and theaters, said that they have been seeking nonprofit status since February, and that they intend to pass control of their theaters to a new board “of diverse individuals.” They revealed the outline of their plans in an email on Saturday addressed to the “U.C.B. community.”The statement said that they want the board to address “the questions of systemic racism and inequality within the theaters,” among other issues. The news comes less than two months after U.C.B. announced the closing of its two Manhattan locations — a theater in Hell’s Kitchen and a training center on Eighth Avenue — after they had gone dark in response to the pandemic.U.C.B. still has two locations in Los Angeles, and has been operating online improv and sketch classes as part of its efforts to weather the pandemic’s financial impact.Even before it closed its New York locations in April, the organization had been under strain: In what was not the first round of cuts in the last few years, it laid off many employees on both coasts in March, and early last year it closed a third New York location, in the East Village. More

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.On the streets of New Haven, Conn., Margaret Holloway was known as the “Shakespeare Lady,” a tall, striking woman in ragged clothing who recited dramatic monologues for spare change.Her stage, often, was outside Willoughby’s coffee shop, a hangout for Yale students and professionals. Her repertoire included “The Tempest,” “Macbeth” and the Greek alphabet, which she acted out letter by letter.Many regarded Ms. Holloway as an eccentric local fixture; in the view of some business owners, however, she was an aggressive panhandler and public nuisance. But for those who knew her personal history, her life had tragic dimensions not unlike the material she performed.Ms. Holloway was a 1980 graduate of the Yale School of Drama and a once-promising director, playwright and actor. In the early 1970s she was a drama major at Bennington College in Vermont“She was star of the theater department,” Laura Spector, a college friend, said in an interview. “She was so talented, so powerful, so magnetic.”Ms. Holloway’s career was cut short by mental illness and drug addiction soon after she left Yale. But she never stopped seeking understanding, human connection and, above all, artistic expression.“She loved people — she had relationships with everyone all over New Haven,” said Joan Channick, a Yale drama school professor who struck up a friendship with Ms. Holloway in the 1990s. “She called herself a great thespian. She had a lot of confidence in herself.”Ms. Holloway died at 69 on May 30 at Yale New Haven Hospital. Gloria Astarita, her court-appointed conservator, said the cause was the novel coronavirus.In “God Didn’t Give Me a Week’s Notice,” a short documentary about Ms. Holloway released in 2001, Ms. Holloway said she began experiencing signs of mental illness about 1983. She described her mental landscape this way: “I’m being raped. I’m being raped 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”Living in a dingy rooming house or on the streets, Ms. Holloway performed in the shadow of Yale’s campus, clinging, in a way, to a time in her life when she was healthy, successful and full of promise. Through it all her aspirations remained high-minded.“She would want to have a disquisition about directing some Shakespeare play,” Ms. Channick said. “Having those conversations with someone who was living on the streets, it was jarring. Here’s this person so connected to people, well-educated, with a love of art and theater, whose life was destroyed by mental illness.”Margaret Ann Holloway was born on Sept. 7, 1951, in Albany, Ga., to the Rev. Walter Holloway, a minister, and Bertha (Prince) Holloway, a homemaker. Ms. Holloway became estranged from her family as an adult.Through a nonprofit group that provides scholarships to gifted minority students, Ms. Holloway attended Northfield Mount Hermon, a prep school in Massachusetts. She attended Carleton College in Minnesota for a year before transferring to Bennington, where she came into her own as a drama student.Ms. Spector said she vividly remembered the one-woman autobiographical play that Ms. Holloway wrote, directed and starred in for her senior thesis, a work that dealt with her upbringing as a young black woman in the rural South. “She brought down the house,” Ms. Spector said.After decades out of touch, Ms. Spector reconnected with Ms. Holloway in 2005 after reading a newspaper article about her. She found the same lively, gregarious, emotionally intelligent person she had known. “I knocked on the door and from the top of the stairs she called out, ‘Laura, how the hell are you?’” Ms. Spector said. “She didn’t miss a beat.”Ms. Holloway, who stopped performing in the street about three years ago because of failing health, found a measure of stability and calm in recent times. Residing in a nursing home in New Haven, she had clean clothes, regular meals, a shower and monthly visits from Ms. Channick and other friends, who brought her money and the small luxuries she asked for, like lipstick.“We would talk about what was going on in the world,” Ms. Channick said. “But mostly, we would talk about theater.” More

[embedded content]A virus. A lockdown. A city in crisis. A nation inflamed.And against that backdrop, Broadway — one of New York City’s most recognizable industries and powerful economic engines — shuttered indefinitely.How to reflect this unsettling moment, and provide insight and entertainment to readers who have largely been confined to their homes, was the challenge in creating the debut installment of “Offstage,” a New York Times streaming series about the theater world on pause.First, at 7 p.m. Eastern on June 11, the critic-at-large Wesley Morris will hold a conversation with four African-American artists who had shows in the 2019-20 season: the director Kenny Leon (“A Soldier’s Play”); the actress Celia Rose Gooding (“Jagged Little Pill”) and co-stars Adrienne Warren and Daniel J. Watts (“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical”). The topic: What it’s like to be black on Broadway, and how the nation’s biggest stages should change.On those stages this season: a gender-bent revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company”; shows set to the songbooks of Bob Dylan and Alanis Morissette; “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”; and the girl-power extravaganza “Six,” which was 90 minutes from opening before Broadway closed down.Dramatically, there was “Slave Play,” perhaps the season’s most provocative production; and “The Sound Inside,” an intense character study that gave Mary-Louise Parker one of her finest roles.[Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris, hosts of the “Still Processing” podcast, will reunite to unpack the reckonings of the past few weeks. R.S.V.P. to join their live conversation, this Friday, June 12 at 4 P.M. E.T.]Following the conversation are the special performances: join the Times critics Ben Brantley and Jesse Green; the theater reporter Michael Paulson; and the editors Aisha Harris and Nicole Herrington as they present highlights from those shows and more.There will be song, dance and discussion — a chance to meet Sonya Tayeh, who choreographed “Moulin Rouge!,” and Jeremy O. Harris, who authored “Slave Play.” You’ll hear from Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, and learn how artists stay creative in lockdown.R.S.V.P. for this event. [Join the conversation on Twitter using #NYToffstage. |Sign up for The New York Times Events newsletter and Theater Update newsletter. | Subscribe to Times Events on YouTube.] More

More than 300 theater artists — black, Indigenous and people of color — on Monday published a blistering statement addressed to “White American Theater” decrying racial injustice in their industry.“You are all a part of this house of cards built on white fragility and supremacy,” said the statement, which was published on the web. “And this is a house that will not stand.”The signatories include the Pulitzer Prize winners Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Quiara Alegría Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda; the film and television stars Viola Davis and Blair Underwood; and many Tony Award winners, including the actor and director Ruben Santiago-Hudson and the playwright David Henry Hwang, who is the chair of the American Theater Wing.The American narrative is shaped by storytellers,but for too long the White theater community has negated, censored or prevented our stories from being fully told.We must protect,support & amplify the voices of our truth tellers & change seekers #weseeyou https://t.co/Wsbqwtbry5— Lynn Nottage (@Lynnbrooklyn) June 9, 2020
The statement is the artists’ response to the unrest that has roiled the United States since George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25.In the weeks that followed, as discussion of race relations has intensified, numerous black theater artists have taken to social media to describe experiences of racism.Two playwrights have begun surveying theatermakers of color about their experiences.The Broadway Advocacy Coalition, an organization pressing for social change, this week is holding a three-part forum “for the Broadway community to heal, listen, and hold itself accountable to its history of white supremacy.”In Britain, a group of theater artists has put together its own letter, calling for greater disclosure about diversity statistics by theaters there.There is even a petition circulating to make the Apollo Theater, the historic Harlem venue, a Broadway house.The statement addressing “White American Theater,” outlining the ways in which, it argues, artists of color are unjustly treated in the theater world, declares itself to be “in the legacy of August Wilson’s ‘The Ground on Which I Stand’,” an important 1996 speech by the playwright about race and the American stage.Headlined “We See You, White American Theater,” the statement repeatedly uses the phrase “we see you” to punctuate its observations about the theater world, and adds, “We have always seen you. And now you will see us.”It expresses concerns about programming (“We have watched you program play after play, written, directed, cast, choreographed, designed, acted, dramaturged and produced by your rosters of white theatermakers for white audiences”); labor unions (“we have watched you turn a blind eye as unions refuse to confront their racism and integrate their ranks”); media (“a monolithic and racist critical culture”); and nonprofit organizations (“asking us to politely shuffle at your galas, talkbacks, panels, board meetings, and donor dinners, in rooms full of white faces, without being willing to defend the sanctity of our bodies beyond the stages you make us jump through hoops to be considered for”).The statement comes at a time when most American theaters, including all of those on Broadway, are closed indefinitely because of the coronavirus pandemic and most theater artists are unemployed. As unrest in the country over race relations has intensified, many theaters, as well as many commercial theater productions, have issued statements decrying racism and pledging to support systemic change; some have also opened their doors to protesters.It was not immediately clear who organized the statement, or what the collective’s next steps will be. Several signatories referred press questions to an email address; an inquiry to that address was not answered. The statement was posted as a petition on change.org, where tens of thousands of people signed. More

New Yorkers are reluctant to return to the theater this fall, according to a survey commissioned by The New York Times. What about out-of-towners, who make up more than two-thirds of the Broadway audience? What would it take for them to be comfortable?We put that question to readers of the Theater Update newsletter (subscribe here) and received hundreds of responses, most of them pessimistic — and pained. Here is an edited sampling:I’m ready now. I’ll wear the mask, I’ll wash my hands, I’ll sit every third or fourth seat. Whatever I need to do to get back in front of a live performance while safely and respectfully protecting my neighbors and theater staff! CORINNE ROSSI, Stonington, Conn.Without a vaccine or a cure, to attend a performance would not be a rational choice. The issue is not the statistical probability of getting the virus. Rather, it is the anxiety of being infected that prevents devout thespians, like yours truly, from going back. I actually had the virus and survived, and I do not wish this experience on anyone. ALEXANDER WAINTRUB, Los AngelesMy husband and I talked about this because we miss the theater so much. He would go back right now to Broadway as long as people were wearing masks. I would go back at 50 percent capacity. BARBARA PARKER, MiamiWhat might it take for us to come to Broadway again? Well, to start, probably a car drive rather than a flight, and socially distanced seating with mask wearing. Does that mean Broadway would have to present twice as many performances to accommodate playgoers at a safe distance? Have to leave that to the analysts, bean counters and presenters. PHILLIP LEVY, Raleigh, N.C. More

Our writers suggest works that illuminate and tackle issues of police brutality, social injustice and racial inequity. More

How Adam Schlesinger and his writing partner created what may be the most outrageous opening number the broadcast has ever seen. More