ARTS EXPOSE: Something Rotten in the State of Harvard Theater

ARTS EXPOSE

Picture yourself. It's a clear afternoon in September, and you're standing on a brick patio behind the Loeb Drama Center at the kick-off barbecue of the fall drama season. On a day like today, you could really believe. And you want to believe, you really do, that these people want you. That there is a place for you and your tight-curled hair or your Asian eyes in Harvard theater. You start to believe.

Nicole Saffold '02 believed, too, as she surveyed the plays offered last year. After one audition, she reached a point all too familiar to minority drama hopefuls. That point is the nauseous realization that because of that hair and those eyes, there is no place for you in Harvard theater. "I felt alienated not because of not being cast but because of who I saw [involved]," recalls Saffold, an African-American.

Saffold is just one voice in an often silent chorus of minorities who have felt the chill in that September afternoon. How are the players in Harvard's dramatic community reacting to the perception that theater is a white-only world?

Choosing The Stories To Tell

For many Harvard minorities, the feeling of alienation begins as soon as the theater schedule is published. The vast majority of directors at Harvard are not minorities, nor are the majority of featured playwrights. The Harvard Theater Database indicates that since 1995, August Wilson, a pivotal African-American playwright, has been performed once at Harvard, while European writer Tom Stoppard has graced the stage 4 times and Shakespeare 17.

Most directors attribute their current choices of plays to their own personal tastes. Dorothy Fortenberry '02 of Uncommon Women and Others notes that while she is concerned about the absence of minority playwrights in Harvard theater, she as a European-American woman would be uncomfortable attempting to direct a work by a minority. "Would I be able to do it justice?" she wonders.

Why is there so little literary representation of minorities? As Fortenberry indicates, the assumption is that works by minority playwrights will be chosen by minority directors. Max-Joseph Montel '01, director of Women Beware Women opines: "As a director at Harvard with a limited number of shows I'll have time to direct, I choose plays that are worth it to me. I don't particularly look for diversity either in a play's potential for it or in the casting of it, but as a rule, I leave myself open to it." Perhaps it is that noncommittal stance that discourages many minorities from auditioning at all.

Casting With Your Eyes Closed

What barriers do minority performers face inside the audition? Some directors note that they let their vision of a particular character be shaped by the actors who come to audition. "I actually had a slight bias toward a diverse cast," says director Dan Berwick '01. "The main character in Jesus Christ Superstar is a mob of people, and I wanted people who looked different from each other." Fortenberry notes her own decision to cast an African-American woman in a part written for a Jewish woman. "She was the best person," she says. "I decided to be race-blind and deal with issues as they came up."

Yet there are some, like Fred Hood '02, who disagree. "The Importance of Being Earnest is an upper-class British play and that's where [Oscar] Wilde takes the humor. I saw a lot of minorities try out, and I came into it pretty open, but the world I'm trying to create is British. [As such] everyone needs to be white. I casted as color-blindly as I would allow myself within the context of 18th-century England."

Other Harvard actors confirm that appearances have a great deal to do with casting decisions. Susan Long '02 attended a performing arts high school where color-blind casting was the norm. "There's a lot more physicality in casting here." Ashley McCants '02, an African-American actress, agrees. "People will potentially not cast you because of how you look. Sometimes at an audition I've had the feeling of polite attention."

"Theater is an unfair business," Hood explains simply. "Minorities inevitably will not have equal opportunities in casting because most plays are written for a white realist audience."

But the assumption of a white audience doesn't necessarily preclude minority participation in theater. For Marcus Stern, a Harvard lecturer and frequent director at the American Repertory Theater, he would be "hard-pressed to believe there is almost any script that can't be casted color-blind. As soon as you start making racial lines in your work, your work becomes half of what it could be. That's true of any field."

Fixing The Problem?

Justin Krebs '00, a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, has long been attuned to the problem of minority representation in theater. "Harvard puts high priority on racial and ethnic diversity, and our organization lags behind," he explains. On the subject of color-blind casting, "part of the board thinks it's not important enough to mention, and the other part thinks it's so obvious that it doesn't need to be mentioned." What will it take to make people of color a greater presence in Harvard's dramatic mind?

One part of the struggle will involve educating the theater community about the dramatic range of minorities. Some directors seem woefully ignorant of what they actually have to work with. "If acting's the problem, shows need singers and dancers, too," says Montel in an unintentional nod to the common relegation of minorities performers to minstrelsy. Hood mistakenly asserts that "African-American drama did not come about until Langston Hughes in the 1920s." "African-American drama started a long time before that,"says Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chair of the Afro-American Studies Department. Indeed, the first published play by a black writer dates to 1859.

Groups like the Asian American Players (AAA) and Black Community Action Student Theater (CAST) also figure into the process of increasing minority representation in Harvard theater. Both troupes seek to give performance opportunities to minority actors and playwrights and to treat theatrically the concerns of their respective ethnic groups. "It frustrates me that a place as diverse as Harvard doesn't seem to see the opportunity presented to it by its diversity," says Vanessa Carr '02, who is currently revitalizing CAST with Saffold.

Krebs warns against the easy assignment of dealing with ethnic issues to groups like AAA and CAST. "If I'm a director picking a show, I have a responsibility to be flexible or make theater a venue to discuss important issues."

But Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts '00, herself a minority playwright, warns against assuming that dramatic success can only be found in the dramatic mainstream. "I'm not really sure where I stand on things like color-blind casting. It seems like it all ends up in tokenism. When it comes right down to it, the lack of minority roles isn't going to change unless minority writers and directors create them. I am not so disturbed by having to do my own thing. I don't mind working outside of institutions. How terribly backwards of me.

How terribly backwards of all of us to have fostered the idea that the only place for minorities in theater is outside of the mainstream. We are not eighteenth-century Britain but a diverse university community. In theater, it is long past time for all our colors to mix.