Tom Loughlin, who is actually a professor of theater at a real live university (according to him, "Distinguished Teaching Professor of Theatre Arts/ Acting and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the State University of NEw York at Fredonia") has posted on his blog an infuriating entry. One quick little example: "I think it's safe to make the following conclusion: Theatre is primarily for white people, as both audience members and practitioners."
Whoa. Whoa.
I'd like to say that this makes more sense or is less offensive in context.
I'd like a lot of things.
But as hopping mad as I am about what he wrote, Mr. Loughlin has clearly "touched a nerve," as he wrote when closing the comments on his blog. Quite deservedly, people all over the blogosphere have taken up arms against Mr. Loughlin and his post. Maybe some of them, like me, had never even heard of him before this incident. In any case, suffice it to say that the article has caused a riot, with publications as notable as the UK's Guardian taking up the issue.
What Mr. Loughlin wrote was based on Broadway audience demographics, which, as has been pointed out by many responses to his piece, is "an entirely different beast" than the majority of theater. For one thing, it happens in a tiny geographic area, populated by a great deal of tourists. It happens in a tiny economic bubble, where production values are astronomical, and so are the ticket prices. It is entirely commercial, whereas much of theater as it exists today is not. The fact that he wrote " is it so bad to admit that theatre is for white people?" alone discredits much of his writing. The amount of flaws and assumptions in those dozen words is a little dizzying.
It's not enough to point out the flaws in his arguments or deride his unknowingly racist remarks, or even the fact that he defined theater as a linear story told through spoken word. There is a deeper problem here, and he was kind enough to point it out in such offensive terms that people perked their ears up. Tom Loughlin, with all his faults, did a really good thing. He got a discussion going. It seems to me, though, that many responders are reacting with selected deafness. They hear only the offensive and the unacceptable in his writing. But in actuality, Mr. Loughlin was pointing to a real issue.
At New York University at theater school, I often found myself in a room full of only Caucasians. My sophomore year, when there was a theater festival at Tisch celebrating African-American theater, our studio sent several submissions where white actors played black roles, because there weren't enough black actors. There was a great disparity between race in the program, but then again there was also a great disparity between people from New Jersey and people from everywhere else, and a great disparity between gay men and straight men.
How many shows written by women have been on Broadway in the last fifteen years? How many shows by women directors? Three plays by women have won the Tony Award for "Best Play," in the entire history of the award, if we're sticking to Broadway-only criteria. Two of those plays were written by Yasmina Reza. That in and of itself is a little shocking. Two Tony-winning women playwrights? Out of six decades of giving this award?
Perhaps more shocking, as far as I can see, David Henry Hwang is the only non-white to win a Tony Award for best play. Again, faulty because this is based on the Tony Awards standards, something that I don't quite trust. Faulty because it's based on the money-making monster that is Broadway in this current moment, faulty because it's based only on straight plays. But again, my skewed statistics, like Mr. Loughlin's still point to a real problem.
The problem is social, yes. The problem is economic, yes, and the problem is cultural.
But what shows have I been seeing? What shows have I been supporting? The last Broadway show I saw was Jerusalem, nearly a year ago now, which, admittedly featured an all-white cast with a white male writer and a white male director.
Off-Broadway, I've seen an all-white production of The Threepenny Opera, directed by a white man and written by a dead white man. I've seen We Live Here, an atrocious show about upper-middle-class white people by a white woman. (Now that was a show about #whitegirlproblems.)
Let's call it what it is: I support Caucasian theater. I haven't seen Chinglish and I likely won't. (I take issue with some of Mr. Hwang's writing. We'll save that for another day, though.)
But I've also seen Milk Like Sugar, which featured an all-black cast and was written by a black woman. I've seen Choreography for Blackboards, in which one participant was Filipina and another Latino. I'm about to see Untitled Feminist Show, conceived and directed by an Asian-American woman. None of these pieces were on Broadway and all of them are smart, relevant pieces of theater.
What theater, what art are you supporting? What is it that you're spending your time with? I know I would appreciate a little more diversity in mine.
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