At times, we lie. We assert that theatre is universal and that it reflects the experiences of everyone. We maintain that theatre creates community because it grants equal access to people without regard to their race, gender, physical ability, or socioeconomic status. We allege that a good actor can play any role. These statements are not untrue. However, they are not entirely truthful. The fact is that the theatre—mainstream, commercial, university, and pre-college—is not nearly as diverse, inclusive, and welcoming of difference as arts practitioners often pronounce. Why lie or, more elegantly, stretch the truth? Theatre has the potential to exist as both a place and a set of practices that reflect not only global diversity but also the many differences that exist more locally. Theatre can be universal. It can create community. To realize this potential, we first must acknowledge that not everyone has the same experience within or access to the performing arts and then actively work to make art and the process of making art more inclusive.
This special issue casts a spotlight on the challenges faced in drama classrooms and community-based theatre programs when they attempt to directly address the thorny, uncomfortable, difficult subject of race. Although sometimes awkward and often anxiety-producing, these conversations, which aim at inclusion by recognizing the experiences and realities of young people, are important and necessary. We live in a world in which people, especially youth, cannot check their identities at the door. We need to acknowledge the prejudices, biases and microaggressions that they face everyday. To proclaim universality or to assert that we do not see race is to deny the legitimacy of youth experiences and identities.
The authors assembled here spotlight the need to attend to race and the embodied experiences of young people when creating theatre. They reflect on their intentions and efforts, and share both their successes and challenges. In several instances, authors reveal their own struggles and missteps and, in so doing, remind us that the process of engaging race is not easy. It takes a lot of labor, both physical and emotional, to create a diverse, inclusive, and mutually respectful performance community.
Elizabeth Horn writes about her experience with The Justice Project, an initiative codirected by Horn and bridging Orlando Repertory Theatre and the University of Central Florida. She chronicles how a group of high school boys, all of whom “were of color, primarily black,” participated in The Justice Project’s effort to improve police and civilian relations. She reflects on how “the students, none of whom had previous theatre training, performed a short devised piece in a three-hour workshop held with current and future police officers at a local police academy.” In addition to addressing the potential of theatre to create dialogue across difference, she reflects through a series of self-aware moments or “blinks,” as she terms them, on the operation of her social privilege in the rehearsal room.
In “Casting Youth/Developing Identity: Casting and Racial and Ethnic Identity Development,” Claire Syler and Anna Chen share their experiences working on a college production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Inspired by the scholarship of theatre critic Brian Herrera, Syler asserts a commitment to appreciating the complicated racial dynamics of theatrical casting especially within applied theatre. Determined to be open and aware of the impact of her casting decisions, she was caught flatfooted when an e-mail from an undergraduate, Chen, compelled her to reexamine her casting and directorial choices and inspired her to develop a collaborative process of co-creation that invited students, regardless of racial identity, to consider the meaning of race within the play.
Roxanne Schroeder-Arce outlines best practices and advice that she has given to educators seeking to tackle race and representation in their classrooms and programs. The author addresses the topic of whiteness, both hers and her students, and explains that “[w]ithout intentional conversations about white people owning whiteness in theatre training programs, new teachers inevitably reinforce hegemony in their classrooms and on their stages.” Schroeder-Arce’s intervention helps remind us that our conversations about race cannot and should not overlook whiteness as a racialized subject positioning that needs to be addressed and seen along side other social identities.
In “Hope Despite Hopelessness: Race, Gender and the pedagogies of Drama/Applied Theatre as a Relational Ethnic in Neoliberal Times,” Kathleen Gallagher and Dirk J. Rodricks studied verbatim theatre, a theatrical technique made popular by Anna Deveare Smith which creates opportunities for actors and audience members to “walk in another’s words,” as exercised in a racially diverse theatre classroom in a Toronto secondary school. The authors “offer two micro-encounters from our data to illustrate how drama pedagogy both reproduced and interrupted the established classroom social relations of race and gender for seven different youth, provoking them to negotiate who they are, what they know, and the world in which they live.” Rather than projecting identities onto participants, Gallagher and Rodricks allowed students to name their identities, such as “African-Canadian, middle-class, female,” and “white as hell, straight enough, upper middle class, sort of agnostic, sort of atheist, female.”
Jacqui Scott-Papke recounts the history of the Harlem Children’s Theatre Company. Having interviewed HCTC cofounder Aduke Aremu, the author chronicles the rise of the theatre company during the Black Arts Movement in the early 1970s and the efforts of Aremu to employ theatre to empower young artists. A prominent force on the New York City theatre scene, HCTC was regularly featured in the New York Amsterdam News and “attracted at least three well-known Black Arts Movement artists who supported its work: poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez; director and playwright Gilbert Moses; and playwright Joseph Walker.” Scott-Papke’s focus rests not on the adults but rather Aremu’s reflection on the experiences of HCTC’s youngest participants. Through HCTC, young artists were introduced to professional performance theatre and given the opportunity to perform extensively across New York City and, occasionally, across the Atlantic.
In “Performing the Black Epistle and Transmission of Racial Embodied Knowledge: Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Word Becomes Flesh,” Leslie Gray applies performance analysis to closely read Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s play Word Becomes Flesh. Gray investigates “how a black identity is performed, taught, and constituted through the epistolary form and its efficacy in a cultural product.” Influenced by the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ntoshake Shange, Gray explores how direct address, often in the form of a “letter,” offers a glimpse into the black experience, especially the similar experiences of black youth. Further, she helps readers consider the fragile metaphorical and embodied triangulation of race, youth and hope.
This special issue concludes with recommendations for future reading. We list books, articles, and essays that provide additional insight on the intersections of race, youth, and theatre. These texts include studies on casting, reflections on race and biraciality, histories of racial impersonation onstage and more. It is our hope that those additional readings when coupled with the issue’s original articles will provide a critical foundation for anyone interested in cultivating diverse and inclusive theatre that trusts young people. It is, afterall, the children and youth who most embody the complex promise of our collective stretch toward truth.