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The theater is an iceberg.
And theater organizations are icebergs too.
Below each public-facing performance, theres a gigantic mass of administration and funding and marketing and programming.
Or, rather, it wasnt the protests that prompted this sudden public accounting.
It was the institutionalresponseto the protests.
And the Vivian Beaumont, LCTs premier Broadway theater, last programmed a black playwright in … 1987.
LCT isnt, of course, the only place like that.
Being a major Establishment venue, of course, is deeply intertwined with whiteness.
So what can the field not just learn butdo?
Given the years of promise-making and promise-breaking, where are the paths forward?
There clearly needs to be restructuring.
Suddenly, after decades of inaction, theaters are casting around for models they can imitate.
First, there must be a true accounting.
He goes further: You wonder why black people or people of color have so many underlying conditions?
Because we have been forced for so long to swallow pain, he says.
I swallowed the pain and showed up the next day and said Good morning, How are you?
I just swallowed it.
Nobody is saying get rid of all the white people in theater, he says.
Unlike them, blacks, indigenous, and other persons of color dont choose to eradicate or murder anyone.
But what we are suggesting is a true partnership, an accountability, a lifelong promise to share.
The performer-playwrightDaniel Alexander Jonesis a little wry about it.
Plenty of theatersarenthaving this particular crisis, he points out.
My allegiance has been to people of color and queer institutions, he says.
I represent a lineage of artists who sought that kind of sovereignty.
But he does think theres a way for historically white-led theaters to hew closer to their ideals.
Jones encourages us to look for those theaters where the lobby is a meeting place, not a gate.
So how do you reestablish trust that has been so profoundly broken?
If a ritual is needed, then at least ritual is right in black theater-makers wheelhouse.
(She succeeded Kwame Kwei-Armah, who set the anti-oppression labor very much in motion.)
Ybarra committed herself to anti-racism in 2017.
You cant unsee it, and your reality is never the same.
And its not just about representation onstage, she says.
It is about economic power.
Who has the jobs?
Hierarchy reaffirms a supremacist state.
And this is the kernel of all anti-racism work: reallocating power.
How, exactly, would that work in for-profit Broadway?
But in the nonprofit sector, it does happen.
The proof is there.
Learning and unlearning in public can be embarrassing and painful.
This work requires thick skin, says Ybarra, and deep humility.
More and more people do at least seem to be seeing that light.
The vocabulary of the anti-racism movement is spreading too and change follows language.
I dont feel alone in using the language of anti-racism and anti-oppression and white supremacy anymore, says Ybarra.
It cannot be a coincidence that flexibility in structure has led to resilience in mission.
And even the aesthetic mission has been recharged.
And if anyones still worried that theater doesnt have a place in the revolution, she has an answer.
The last show she directed wasTJ Loves Sally 4 Ever, which closed at JACK on February 29.
But to enter, each audience member must choose to deliberately enter a paradise that is equal for all.
Im so grateful thats the last show I worked on, she says.
The message of that show is about collective freedom and liberation.
Its your choice to move to the future.
People of color are not stopping you; they arent the ones saying you could or cant join us.
Its up to you.
Art can be our silent companion, the accompanying thought as we move through the world.
Its allowed me to be more active on the streets.
People showing up is giving me the strength to keep moving on.
The play and the protests are one and the same, she says.
We dont move to the future in pieces.
