August Wilson Revival Raises Diversity Issues

August Wilson was the most prolific black playwright ever to conquer American theater.  A lion of the stage, Wilson’s iconic ten plays — including the 1987 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner “Fences” — illuminated the black journey of struggle and triumph.  Wilson, who died in 2005 at age 60, was a known advocate for blacks in the theater who understood the hurdles black directors faced in the field.  He, in fact, had an unofficial rule of only wanting black directors to stage major productions of his plays.

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So given Wilson’s cultural pedigree, Lincoln Center Theater’s decision—albeit with Wilson’s widow’s blessing—to choose its resident director Bartlett Sher, who is white, instead of a black director to direct the $1.7 million budgeted Broadway revival of Wilson’s 1988 play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone—which this week earned six Tony nominations including best director and best revival–has sparked a heated debate on the overall lack of diversity on Broadway with regard to African American directors.

Arguably, the biggest issue for most African Americans in the theater is not whether a white director should be able to helm a play by a black playwright–particularly a revival–the more cogent issue is the overall paucity of opportunities for blacks on Broadway. This season alone there are currently no black directors on The Great White Way, which contributes $5.1 billion to the New York City economy, according to the Broadway League’s 2008 biennial study. In fact, there have been a mere four black directors over the past ten years: Kenny Leon, Debbie Allen, Marion McClinton, and George C. Wolfe — a dearth that underscores a great need for change and new opportunities for directors of color.

“Joe Turner has come to Broadway and gone and come back again,” says actress, director and choreographer Debbie Allen, who directed last season’s hit all-black revival of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. “That’s the good news,” adds Allen of the play, which has grossed $1.2 million at the box office to date. “But the lack of opportunity can’t be weighted on one production,” adds Allen, who will soon direct the Tennessee Williams play in London’s West End.

Notwithstanding Wilson’s support of black directors, some suggest that his position was more nuanced. “August was not opposed to white directors directing his work,” says director Kenny Leon, who directed the Broadway productions of Wilson’s 2007 play “Radio Golf” and 2005’s “Gem of the Ocean,” both of which earned Tony nominations for best play. “He had white directors direct his plays when he was alive; however, he fought for opportunities for black directors to direct his plays because he felt it was not an equal playing field. We weren’t getting an opportunity to direct Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neil.”

Artistic Freedom?

Furthermore, Leon and others, who had the privilege of working with Wilson, contend that white directors are allowed to express themselves artistically in a myriad of ways. Yet black directors are virtually pigeonholed into expressing themselves only in terms of their race, thereby limiting them solely to black productions and limiting their chances to direct on Broadway and at the regional level. That explains in part why the reaction to Lincoln Center’s decision to hire Sher, who won the Tony last year for the musical revival of South Pacific, has been so pronounced.

“If we were getting directing jobs, this wouldn’t be an issue. But it’s so hard for us to get a job, overall, and now we can’t even direct plays of our own milieu,” argues actor/producer Wendell Pierce who was a producer on “Radio Golf” and who starred on Broadway in “The Piano Lesson“. In addressing why the general Broadway hurdle exists, some attribute it to old-fashioned biases: “It’s racism. You hear the same argument that ‘we don’t know any black directors,’” says Pierce.

Of course, there have breakthrough exceptions to Broadway’s walls. George C. Wolfe, for example, has directed a range of work including the 2003 Tony winner for best play Take Me Out and 1996’s “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” for which he won the Tony for best direction of a musical.

And while many see Wilson’s work as sacred, cultural masterpieces, which   must be handled deftly by a director of any ethnicity, few suggest that race should be a deciding factor when it comes to directors equipped to direct his work or that of any playwright. “The world of the arts is a world where cultural barriers should not exist,” argues Allen, who cites her production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof as an example of artistic freedom.

“The arts should not be wrapped in a ball and chain with cultural divisions, restrictions, or limitations,” she adds.

One group that must play a critical role in theater diversity going forward is the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSDC), the union representing nearly 2,000 theater directors and choreographers.  To date, the 50 year-old organization has, unfortunately, not found it necessary to collect any racial demographic information of its members; hence, the percentage of African American members is unknown.  “I can’t say right now that we are doing work in diversity, ” says Laura Penn, SSDC’s executive director.

“But I would say that we are creating a vision and some imperatives for ourselves.  There’s a lot of work to do,” adds Penn who acknowledges that anecdotally the membership of the union is largely male and Caucasian. Penn sees the collecting of empirical demographic data on its membership as a critical first step in addressing the diversity issue. Penn is also optimistic their initiatives will create access points to directors of varying backgrounds.

Creating Opportunities

Equal opportunity for blacks ultimately rests with the theaters and producers who have the power to stage productions and hire directors. In a largely clubby, collaborative and subjective business where relationships and word-of-mouth play a principal role in who gets hired, black directors frequently find themselves locked out of the network as demonstrated by their absence this season.

Furthermore, theater directors of every hue must compete in a field, which like other artistic careers, lacks any clearly defined career path. For theater directors—particularly for directors of color—- some see the field as the most impenetrable of the theater crafts. “Theater is extremely hard for everybody, but there are access points for the other crafts. Actors have auditions, designers have portfolios and writers have scripts they can submit. But directors only have their ideas and visions,” explains Penn.

For black directors, the Joe Turner situation has illuminatedan ongoing problem in theater and has begun what seems to be a serious discussion to address the matter. “The wonderful thing that has happened with this controversy is that it has caused a lot of people—mostly black directors—to call and write me, and I’ve invited them all to come and meet with me,” says Andre Bishop, executive director at Lincoln Center Theater.  I feel that Lincoln Center Theater is beginning—much too late but nonetheless—to have a dialogue with a lot a directors whom we haven’t worked with and that it will yield, in time, more opportunities than we’ve provided before.”
In recognizing black directors’ desire for work beyond the black experience, Bishop argues, “A major theater such as this one needs to do a sterling production by an African American director of something completely different than an African American play; that will lead the way just as my hope is that with Bart directing Joe Turner some people, who feel that a white director can’t direct August Wilson, will change their minds.”

Echoing Bishop, Sher, who in addition to his post at Lincoln Center Theater, also serves as the artistic director at Seattle’s Intiman Theater, emphasizes the role that people at the top of the theater chain can play in creating a broader range of opportunities for black directors. “I run a theater and we’ve done lots of African American work but I’ve also hired African American directors to do non-African American work,” says Sher. “You can’t solve all of the problems at once, but it’s important for theaters to develop long-term relationships with individual directors to give them opportunities.  I think this will start to happen all over where there will be African American directors doing the Chekovs, the Shakespeares and the August Wilsons.”