Attached is the speech I gave at Arena Stage’s From Scarcity to Abundance, New Play Institute Convening. My panel was called: Massive Thoughts from Four Big Thinkers and included: Lydia Diamond, Kirk Lynn, Marc Masterson & Meiyin Wang.
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I’ve written my thoughts down – and since I’m a writer and owe a discomforting number of people in this room plays, it seems appropriate that I do indeed, show that on occasion, I write.
This has been one of the most well prepared panels I’ve had the pleasure of being on. Thank you Deborah… We had a wonderful conversation about those things which we value and worry about and are inspired by around the future of new work. And I said several things, some of them passably well articulated, some brilliantly muddled through, among them the things you have or will hear from my co-panelists, thoughts about new models of management, sustainability, conversation about where is the conversation about aesthetics, talk of self-production, and diversity (when I speak of it today, mostly I’m thinking racially, though generational, aesthetic and class concerns
So I was identified as the person who would introduce the theme of diversity and share Big Big Massive Big Thoughts. I think partially because its sort of a given that the Black girl should address that which we have been exhaustively addressing long before the twenty years I’ve been a part of the professional theatre world. It would be weird maybe if I didn’t. Also I have little sense of self-preservation and much practice alienating both those who hire me and most likely those who I presume to identify with and champion, who see me working again and again with institutions and people I regularly take to task in public.
I think always of August Wilson’s “The Ground on Which I Stand”… I think of the many theatres I’ve been blessed to have been produced by – big ones with grand budgets and thoughtful, smart, passionate artists, and smaller ones with not so grand budgets and thoughtful, smart passionate artists. I note that usually the smaller ones have had the most generationally and racially diverse audiences and have been nimble enough to produce my most “controversial” work. And I note that the majority of African American Theatres fall into this category. August would not approve – it feels not like progress.
And I wonder if the word Diversity is not killing us all a little bit. It just feels slippery. It feels a bit like screaming into the wind. It feels over-used and undervalued. I wonder if the conversation is not as much about diversity, our philosophical commitment to diversity, but rather the doling out of resources, the making good on promises to funders and artists about an institutional commitment to diversity…racial, cultural, aesthetic.
When I go to the theatre, let’s even say to see a “Black Play” (and we will speak to this a lot this weekend, I am sure, about what that means.) So, when I go to an American play written by a Black person inhabited by mostly Black actors…. And I’m in a town that is reasonably diverse…where at the bus stop or the drug store, or high-end restaurants, I see lots and lots of people who look like me… but the demographic in the theatre is startlingly not the same, I am concerned.
I wonder how the traditional subscription systems in Lort theatres make room for audience expansion? I wish for us to acknowledge a certain elitism, and address how that figure into our floundering around audience diversification, funding of culturally specific, non-white theatres and selections of plays produced.
I have a complicated relationship with this notion of theatres producing the hot person of color. And, I do see it as a problem that should be addressed. I also notice that theatres produce the hot playwright of any color and those of us with melanin stand out, as yes, we are vying most often for one slot…. But certainly the phenomenon is not limited to us.
I see my students, my young, brilliant students at Boston University, I see young artists (like really young) having a completely different paradigm around race. Out of this will come great work. The phenomenon, this strange lack of race affiliation and a kind of, “kumbianess,” threatens me, as it shakes my overly articulated notions of race and class and who and how we are disenfranchised, celebrated, marginalized…. And I feel great encouragement, for the making of new art, w/ all the tweeting and the texting and facebooking, there’s a way that the work will land, and I’m excited. I think, I see also, in the younger artists, still a desire for social justice and equality in artistic expression and resources… and that too heartens me.
