Drama of Race: Minority actors, directors and playwrights rare in local theater

The air goes out of the room when Desireè Myers finally speaks up.

“I just don’t feel like I fit here,” Myers tells the two dozen or so participants in a Gazette-organized discussion about the lack of diversity in local theater. A trained actor, she hasn’t been cast in a professional production since 2008. Before that: 2004. “I’ve given up.”
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Myers is black.

It’s possible, of course, that she’s not cast because she’s untalented. Maybe she’s sensitive about racial issues. Or maybe Myers has good reason to feel excluded.

In 2009-10, the major companies — the Fine Arts Center Theatre Company, TheatreWorks and in their first seasons, Springs Ensemble Theatre and the newly resurrected Star Bar Players — cast 15 minority actors. With the exception of TheatreWorks’ and New York artist Ping Chong’s “Invisible Voices,” which was built around the stories of six locals living with disabilities, none were leads.

The final score: 15 actors of color to 174 Caucasian actors.

The numbers are even starker when you go back a few years. Since the 2006-07 season, the FAC and TheaterWorks have cast 928 roles. Fifty-six minority actors were cast: The FAC with nine and TheatreWorks 47.

Producers and directors explain the imbalance by saying the minority talent pool in the Springs is small and non-white actors don’t show to auditions. At a Fine Arts Center audition for the Gershwin extravaganza “Crazy for You,” 51 actors came out. None were actors of color.

Maybe that’s no surprise when most plays and musicals are written, produced, directed and acted by whites — white men, in fact. In city of 325,921 whites (according to 2009 numbers provided by the city), audiences, too, are predominantly white. If you’re among the city’s estimated 88,000 non-white Springs residents, you will rarely find yourself on stage, hear your stories and even see someone there who looks like you.

“If you don’t see yourself on the stage or on the screen, you’re erased,” says Sharon Jensen, director of the New York-based advocacy group The Alliance for the Inclusion in the Arts. Jensen is white. “You’re invisible.”

“I used to hear about things that sounded of interest, a part I have a shot at,” says Myers, who has a theater degree from University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and works at the Sunflower Farmers Market. “That’s not that often now. It’s kind of like a fight.”

Myers sees every new season as another rebuff. Season 2009-10 wasn’t any different. Productions included “Broadway Bound,” a play about a Jewish family in New York; “All My Sons,” a work about suburbia in the ’50s; “Twelve Angry Men,” a ’50s legal drama; “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” a play about warring spouses in the ’60s; and “Arsenic and Old Lace,” a ’40s comedy of errors.

Season 2010-11 began on Sept. 16 with a play about a white family and the ghost of a famous inventor, who is also white. This year doesn’t look much better than last.

“It all looks pretty white to me.”

THE BIG PICTURE

The lack of diversity in theater, while particularly acute in the Colorado Springs, certainly isn’t unique to us. Even theater meccas like New York City fall short of equal casting, especially in lead roles. How many Hispanic Broadway stars can you name? Or playwrights or directors?

“It’s not an equal playing field yet,” says Jensen, who, as head of the New York advocacy group, has been at the front lines of this issue for 21 years. “Far from it.”

In fact, a four-year study of professional theaters revealed more than 90 percent of actors in American shows from 1982 to 1986 were white. If “cultural” productions like “Dreamgirls” were discounted, those numbers went even higher.

“It wasn’t so much overt racism,” Jensen says carefully, “as people doing business as they always had. Those people were primarily Caucasian. They were drawing on a pool of talent that was Caucasian because that’s what they knew.”

Ultimately, Jensen says, it’s not an issue of employment, but of doing the right thing. Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, who is Asian American, puts an even finer point on the problem in a 1990 interview by The New York Times.

‘’The real issue is not who gets cast,” he said, “but that any organization continue(s) to perpetuate and encourage stereotypes at the expense of artists of color, which borders on 19th-century imperialism.’’

Hwang was referring to the casting of Jonathan Pryce, a white actor, as the Eurasian lead of “Miss Saigon.”

The Actors’ Equity Association agreed, first barring Pryce from playing the role he originated on London’s West End and then reversing their decision. Pryce won a Tony for his portrayal.

“These actors are not even allowed to play themselves,” Jensen says of non-whites, “let alone anyone else.”

OBSTACLES TO CHANGE

It seems simple enough to solve, doesn’t it? Produce more mixed race or minority-themed plays or musicals. And then cast against type in other programming.

Local directors certainly say they want diversity, but add that it’s not that simple. They cautiously offer up the reasons.

• “Minorities don’t show up for auditions.”

“They don’t show up,” says Alan Osburn, who, until August, was director of the performing arts and artistic director of the Fine Arts Center Theatre Company. “Never have. If you don’t come, I can’t cast you.”

Just five actors showed for a recent Star Bar Players audition for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” says director Beth Clements Mosley. Like Mosley, they were all white. “If you want more of anybody to show up, you have to go looking for those people. The fact is we’re a small company. There’s only three of us. ... We don’t have much time.”

Osburn, who is white, is even plainer: Every audition notice clearly indicates everyone is welcome. Period.

• “Colorado Springs has a very small talent pool.”

Murray Ross has always wanted to direct August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars.” “It’s an amazing play,” says the co-founder and artistic director of TheatreWorks. “But it requires seven characters, all of them black and most whom play guitar. ... Finding that in Colorado Springs is a real challenge. It’s an almost impossible challenge. And then being able to afford it? And bringing people from bigger cities with a more diverse population?”

He’s done it, though, mounting many works from the recognized minority repertoire: Wilson’s “Fences” (1993) and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (2004), “A Raisin in the Sun” (2000),  Suzan-Lori Parks' “Top Dog/Underdog” (2007), an adaptation of Isabel Allende’s “Zorro” (2007) and many others.

They sell well, he says, to white and non-white audiences. But to do it, he says, pricey Denver actors sometimes have to play key roles.

• Non-traditional casting — a black man, say, playing one of the poker buddies in “The Odd Couple” or even more radically, in Brando’s part in “A Streetcar Named Desire” — doesn’t always work.

Even at TheatreWorks, minorities are rarely leads of contemporary plays. Although actors of color often find themselves as Shakespearean leads, Ross is uncomfortable with casting an Asian woman, say, in a Chekhov play about a rich Russian landowner. Which seems to contradict to his fondness for challenging audiences.

Why not, for instance, cast a non-white actor in last season’s “Twelve Angry Men?”

“Or, for that matter, a woman?” asks Ross, who is white. “There are elements in the play of racial overtones. There’s a racist in the (play). Conversations in the room, they’ll be guarded (if a minority were present).

“Diversity has always been important. All the time we're looking for the opportunity when we can produce a more diverse play. The bottom line is we really want to do excellent work, excellent plays,” says Ross. “I don’t want to do diversity for the sake of diversity.”

• “I wonder if it’s my story to tell.”

Can white directors authentically produce stories embedded in other cultures? Further, is it better to have minority-themed works directed by Caucasians than have none at all? They are questions that test whether such non-white communities have ownership of their own stories.

“No one can tell the stories better than we do,” says Anthony Garcia, executive artistic director of Su Teatro, a Hispanic-Latino company in Denver. “We have the access and capacity to tell the stories that are going to be relegated to a marginal space. I don’t think people from the outside can capture that complexity.”

ANOTHER VOICE

Local actors, directors and producers proceed gingerly when you ask who’s to blame. It’s bad business to be labeled racist or to alienate potential employers, employees or audiences.

But then there’s director Clinton Turner Davis.

“The question that really needs to be asked and answered is ‘Do you really want colored people in yo’ house?’” says Davis, who is black. “Do you want to sit next to them?

“Because what you want to see reflected on that stage is a total white existence.”

The Colorado College associate professor of drama and dance started his career at the Negro Ensemble Company in New York City at a time when the idea of black power was more than an artifact from TV documentaries and old movies. He was also a prime mover in the Non-Traditional Casting Project, which, in 1986, held the first national symposium on casting outside the box. More than 1,000 of the country’s movers and shakers attended.

So, after more than 30 years at the forefront of American theater, Davis is OK with blame, and he answers most questions with an edge that’s not quite cutting.

Davis scoffs at directors’ claims there aren’t enough actors of color for a musical like “Ragtime.” “That’s a lie. If you would program something (minority actors) honestly feel considered for, they would come.”

He also maintains that you can’t task a white director to helm “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s classic exploration of black family life.

It’s a slap in the face of every minority director looking for work, he says.

“If you have a true commitment to increasing diversity, then the programming would change,” concludes Davis only days before heading to Asia to translate the national poem of Vietnam. “You don’t do ‘1776’ (the Revolutionary War musical running this season). You do something else.”

To the question of whether he’s contradicting his own high standards by presuming to interpret someone else’s culture, he laughs.

“I’m a very culturally sensitive person,” he says. “I’m stepping into this with tremendous humility and profound respect.”

NOT DARING TO HOPE

If all the players agree on one thing, it’s that no one has any answers. And when someone dares a suggestion, it’s tenuous and prefaced with the cautionary “If you’re really interested in changing things ...”

Still, they like the idea of outreach: Maybe posting audition notices in minority-dominated churches, groceries stores, beauty shops and community centers. They like theater community conversations, sponsored by The Gazette or not.

But after years without change, skepticism creeps in, especially among the actors.
“There’s an attitude of hopelessness here,” says Susan Rose, an actress and costume designer. She’s white. “People feel like nothing’s changing, so why bother? I don’t know who’s supposed to go out and rock the boat. There are a lot of hurt feelings. Some of it completely self-inflicted.”

Larry Young, who stopped looking for auditions in 2005, left the round table discouraged.
“What I would have done is ask for our contact information,” the black actor says of the company managers who attended. “That would have been just four or five addresses or e-mails. They didn’t even do that. If you’re serious, do that.”

Local actors demure when asked if it’s a case of racism or if it’s wrong to focus on the bottom line over high-minded risk-taking.

“In Colorado Springs, it’s just so hard,” says Nicole Benton, a winsome beauty with a singing voice to match. “I think it’s a mix of both the director having a vision and wanting to provide the vision of what the audience wants to see. Colorado Springs isn’t a town where non-traditional happens a lot.”

Benton, who is black, is a manager at a local call center and sings lead in a semi-metal band called Born in Winter. She likes it, she says. She gave up on auditioning for the Fine Arts Center musicals two years ago, after losing a key role in a production of Stephen Sondheim’s dark fairy tale, “Into the Woods.” She doesn’t sound angry as she talks about her experience. Like every actor I talked to, she sounds alternately frustrated and resigned.

“I’ve done supporting roles and lot of chorus roles in town,” she says. Directors call with roles, but they’re wallpaper parts that seem to say “‘You don’t look the part for the lead, but we need your voice.’ I’m, like, ‘no.’ ”

“They call me the ‘stand-by hooker,’ ” Benton goes on. “I’ve been a call girl. I was in ‘Sweet Charity.’ I was one of the hookers in ‘The Threepenny Opera.’”

“Is there a slutty girl or someone who needs ethnicity and needs to belt it out? That’s me.”
She laughs, but it doesn’t sound like she thinks it’s funny.

What does she think the fix is?

“Getting more venues and getting more people who aren’t afraid to take risks,” she says. “But I don’t know if it’s a fix for me.”