Lack of Diversity in Damning Numbers

I leave town for a week to get a much-needed vacation away from New York City, and to clear my head. And while I'm gone, what comes out? A continuation of the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (which I wrote about last year here and here) 2012 survey of the racial breakdown of actors on Broadway and in the not-for-profit theater in New York City. The news was the numbers in the 2011-12 season.

And they were not pretty.

On Broadway, the casting breakdown was as followed:

• Caucasian: 74%
• African-American: 19%
• Latino: 2%
• Asian-American: 3%

For the top 16 not-for-profit theaters in New York City, the numbers were:

• Caucasian: 77%
• African-American: 16 %
• Latino: 3%
• Asian-American: 3%
• Others: 1%

It looks like a season where there were three plays by African-American playwrights on Broadway, as well as one by an Asian-American playwright, there was more diversity on stage. Who is not surprised by this information? I am interested to see what the numbers will be like for this season, considering playwrights of color are not nearly as proliferate this year on the Great White Way. And don't even get me started on how mono colored the cast of Broadway's "Cinderella" is, save for Ann Harada. It's definitely not the Brandi version.

What is more troubling is the fact that these stage numbers don't even correspond proportionally to the population in New York City. According to the 2010 census, the demographic for New York City is as followed:

• African-American: 26%
• Hispanic: 29%
• Asian: 13%
• Caucasian: 44%

If we're considering that the mission of not-for-profit theater is serving the needs of a community, then primarily serving only 44 percent of that community is laughable. Why would the other 56 percent come to an institution where they are not represented on stage? I'm not saying that theaters should program things that they think their audiences would want to see. But I am saying that when an institution, an industry, has more often than not presented the story of one particular group of people, then what does it tell the community?

It tells the community that this theater caters to a particular group of people and if you are not part of that group, then your story does not deserve to be told. An audience will not come to the theater if they've always felt alienated. There's only so many times you can present a play about a white, middle-aged couple before the faces in the audience match the faces of those on stage. And to present one play, in the February slot, is not enough.

Yet if Clayton Lord's blog post called "The Weight of White People" is any indication, then the problems run much deeper than a playwright not being able to imagine his characters as anything but white, or a casting director thinking a character that is not racially specific is white. It's a structural issue, Lord writes:

The inertia of whiteness is strong and pervasive, which makes the problem relatively easy to identify and very difficult to consider tackling.  The monoliths that are our older, white, wealthy subscribers, many of which directly prop up our organizations and without which we would horribly destabilize, make thinking about the people on the other side of that monolith difficult.  The conscious effort required to attempt diversification...is tiring, even moreso for the fact that the benefits, if there are any, won’t be reaped for a decade or more while the discomfort begins as soon a you take the first step.

I would love to see a study similar to AAPAC's done for other diverse cities, such as Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and, especially, Los Angeles. I have a feeling the numbers won't be much different, especially seeing that according Lord, in the top 25 theaters in the Bay Area, 80 percent of the audience in those theaters are white.

Considering that the United States is getting more and more diverse with each passing generation, it's inevitable that expensive past times like the theater (and by extension, classical music, opera, ballet, etc) will need to broaden its overall demographic (audience, artists, board, etc) if it wants to remain healthy, especially when its wealthy, white subscription base begins to die off. It's also more prudent as well, since Asian-Americans are starting to increase in our philanthropic activities.

It's not enough to cop-out and say that audiences of color don't naturally like theater (an excuse I find to be the most ignorant and racists of cop-outs). Or they should just be happy seeing a play with an all-white cast. Or that there's not enough actors of color.

But society is only going to become more diverse. And theater needs to reflect that and actively pursue more actors and playwrights of color (ie: walking the walk instead of just talking about the problem). I emphasize the word active, since unconscious bias is very real in the entertainment industry.

If not, the industry may very well become as archaic as the Republican party, a past time primarily for old white men. After all, out of the Top 10 Plays produced nationally in the 2011-12 and 2012-13 season, only two were written by women. 

P.S. Talking about the experiences of people of color, I contributed an essay to a book called "Miso for Life," an anthology of Asian and Asian-American essays, stories and poems. Give it a read, there are more experiences out there.