Theater Education & Training, Part 3

 

[In the third installment of my series on “Theater Education & Training,” comprised of two more articles from the “Theatre Training” issue of TCG’s American Theatre magazine, I’ll be addressing theater programs in high schools through the lens of LGBT+ inclusion and the training opportunities and sources for stage designers as experienced by artists of color and women. 

[As a reminder to readers who are just coming upon Rick On Theater and this series, Parts 1 and 2 were posted on 3 and 6 October.  I urge all newcomers to check the previous articles out as they each cover different aspects of the topic of theater instruction.] 

“TOMORROW’S TAMORAS AND TITANIAS:
HOW TO HEAL THE HIGH SCHOOL SPACE”
by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho 

[Gabriela Furtado Coutinho’s “Tomorrow’s Tamoras and Titanias” was published in the Winter 2024 issue of American Theatre (40.2 – 22 March 2024): “Theatre Training: Passing the Torch.” As AT editor Rob Weinert-Kendt writes in his editor’s note (see Part 2), this series entry touches on efforts of “throwing off, or at the very least working around, the limitations of historic assumptions and oppressions” in the professional and scholastic theater.]

High school theatre programs have often been sites of harm, particularly for femme and non-binary kids of color, but some are paving a better path forward.

As some kids grow, they shrink. Standing tall and speaking loud can become impossible when every morning you wake for a school theatre curriculum that denies or defiles your existence. Stories, you quickly learn, can harm as easily as they heal. There are stories that crack open a teenager’s mirror with an outreached pale grip binding them to centuries of tropes and words like barbarous, savage, exotic, ethnic, sexy to the white male gaze. 

In high school, there was a tall swiveling chair, man’s legs opened wide. The gaze scanned, pointed finger cast, eyes morphed.

Histories of power hid behind them. 

Long after, the memories would prod, corrupt. If I looked in the mirror, my soul would erupt.

For years, I regarded my body as merely the memory of violence. Playing Titania and Tamora in high school, I had initially trusted that both roles offered magical opportunities to embody power. But a white male director’s increasingly abusive sexualization, racialization, and fetishization withered my hopes. Caved my chest. 

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s common to fuse the casting of Titania and Hippolyta—meaning that the actor’s body may not only be disrespected as Titania by Oberon, but also colonized as Hippolyta by Theseus. Brazilian and femme, my body carries this ancestral memory, and as the director casually demanded Titania and Hippolyta each be assaulted “harder” through the course of the play, I couldn’t help but wonder who that choice was serving. I was told, “Lines are so blurry in the theatre.” 

In Titus Andronicus, once the title character conquers Tamora’s people, a cycle of violence ensues. Throughout rehearsing, the warm expressiveness I had inherited from my foremothers was called “barbaric.” Tamora’s experience unfolding alongside my own made me yearn to erase my very self as I heard, again and again, This is how you are. This is how it is.

I wouldn’t have recognized agency if we had locked eyes on the street.

Speaking with other artists, I’ve learned that my high school experience was not at all unique, but one among many. The reality stands that there is still a deep gap between the culturally responsive theory that now prevails in many academic and professional settings and its application in theatrical secondary education (and that’s all without taking into consideration the current legislative war on teaching from a culturally conscious lens and sharing queer stories with youth). While the industry is seeing more intimacy and diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging (DEIJB) practitioners join work spaces, most high schools haven’t yet implemented such practices, leaving femme and non-binary kids of color in particular at risk of racialized, sexualized tropes like those seared in my memory. Though Shakespeare and other classics are often seen as race-neutral, royalty-free, “safe” options, the bodies cast in them are not always left free from harm.

In the worst case scenario, the identities of femme and non-binary students of color asked to portray these characters are not affirmed but desecrated. Beyond expansive and conscious casting, which opens many roles to young people, we also owe them a deeper, more thoughtful infrastructure that critically considers how and why we tell these stories, and in what ways their bodies exist in space.

In a spirit of communal resistance, I’ve sought the guidance of visionary high school educators, intimacy choreographers, and trauma-informed professionals on building an environment that centers femme and non-binary kids of color. It’s a truism that when we uplift the most vulnerable, we widen the possibility for us all to encounter collective liberation. By equipping our classrooms with actionable tools, we can glimpse a future in which young Tamoras and Titanias can look proudly on their work and their own bodies when coming home to the mirror. I believe in my gut that, in today’s fractured world, only a proactively empowering environment can successfully stage the intimacy, violence, and catharsis inherent in storytelling. By revolutionizing our values systems with young artists early on, we can hope to further unlock this beloved form’s full potential.

[Of the concerns Coutinho mentions at the top of the preceding paragraph, there’s coverage of intimacy coordinators and LGBTQ+ issues in theater in several posts on ROT: “Theatrical Intimacy Designer” (26 May 2019), “More On Theatrical Intimacy” (29 August 2019), “‘The Reformation’ – Article 3: ‘Shutting the Door On a Hard-Knock Life’” (29 September 2022), “‘How intimacy coordinators ensure safety on theater and film sets’” (17 June 2023), and “‘The Courage to Produce” (21 June 2024). According to SAG-AFTRA, the union for film and television actors and other on-camera performers, “Intimacy coordinators provide coaching for actors performing intimate scenes and ensure that proper protocols are followed while they are at their most vulnerable” (“Safety, Dignity & Integrity: SAG-AFTRA to Standardize Guidelines for Intimacy Coordinators,” SAG-AFTRA 8.2 [Summer 2019]; posted on ROT in “More On Theatrical Intimacy.”)]

A Dreamy Alternative

Enter Pythio.

Hallways full of high schoolers lift their heads as Head Over Heels posters decorate the School of the Arts within Central Gwinnett High School in Lawrenceville, Ga. Whispers become proclamations around the show’s outrageously joyful queer love story, which uplifts its performers at intersections of sexuality, race, disability, and gender. A revolution of eye-sparkling and heartbeat-skipping begins.

The polychromatic musical uses several tunes by The Go-Go’s to trace the unveiling of people’s true selves from beneath fearful disguises in the fictional kingdom Arcadia, and their revolutionary guide is a genderqueer/non-binary oracle named Pythio. Teacher and director Emily McClain saw the transformative potential in producing the show—if done within an empowering environment. To offer real belonging, McClain communicated extensively with every student actor, especially those involved in intimate scenes. A young student playing one of two femme characters in love, Pamela and Mopsa, shared that the show’s onstage kiss would be her first in real life.

[Head Over Heels is a jukebox musical comedy conceived by Jeff Whitty, who wrote the original book, adapted by James Magruder; the songs are by The Go-Go’s. The plot is adapted from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (published in 1593) written by Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86). Head Over Heels opened at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland) in June 2015, running for five months. Three years later, it opened at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway on 26 July 2018 and closed on 6 January 2019 after 37 previews and 188 regular performances.  Critical reception was cool and Head Over Heels received no nominations for Tony or Drama Desks Awards. The SOTA production was in October 2023.]

“We sat with just those students, asking what they were comfortable with and what direction would convey the characters’ journey,” McClain said. “Was it hands on the face? A peck on the cheek? The hand? There are many ways to tell the story. What are the possible points of contact and levels of physical closeness? We’re not bubble-wrapping them—they are teenagers who express themselves and take part in love, in this valuable human experience. But there are lines and boundaries, especially in high school, and it’s important to consider both physical and emotional safety.”

The kiss between Mopsa and Pamela ended up being very romantic—and the first time, too, that a queer couple kissed onstage at the school. McClain said, “The actors told me they were excited to cross this milestone for our school.” She paused as hope caught in her throat. McClain and her theatre department chair, Lilliangina Quiñones, laughed together as tears introduced themselves. Unifying art, Quiñones recognized, had taken the place of divisive historical harm. 

“It would have been really empowering for 16-year-old me to get to see this story,” McClain reflected. “And it was impactful for a student who wasn’t even playing those characters. It made the uphill battle for this show worth it.”

Values and Agreements

In 2016, a harrowing history of abuse at Off-Loop company Profiles Theatre [non-union theater in Chicago which dissolved in 2016] surfaced in an exhaustive Chicago Reader report. The city held its breath, considering the systems that had enabled this violence and reinforced power imbalances.

Operating with Not In Our House [an advocacy organization for victims of sexual harassment in the theatre industry], Lori Myers and Laura T. Fisher assembled theatre practitioners and lawyers in an extended partnership that would lead to the Chicago Theatre Standards (CTS) [a document and tool for self-governance that seeks to nurture communication, safety, respect, and accountability in all participants in theatrical production; see “Theatrical Intimacy Designer” on this blog]. Myers and Fisher recalled how activists around this issue would previously be labeled as “difficult to work with,” blacklisted for even attempting to initiate the conversation. 

The teenage girl in my mirror knew this—she’d been warned not to speak up. I wish she could have known about the comprehensive tools that Not In Our House created for self-governance designed to prevent, reduce, and repair harm. CTS outlines cost-free practices, including a reporting concern/resolution pathway template; the employment of a non-Equity deputy; basic health and safety around hours and physically intensive work; and each collaborator’s role in upholding standards and implementation. CTS also acknowledges its own positionality and blind spots, reading, “This document is a non-binding set of principles. It reflects the current state of a continually evolving interest to establish standards in theatre spaces.”

[‘Equity,’ when it’s capitalized as here, refers to the Actors’ Equity Association, the union that represents stage actors and theatrical stage managers in the United States. ‘Non-Equity,’ therefore, refers to entities that aren’t or don’t employ union members.]

The first time I saw CTS was on my first day rehearsing as a Northwestern University [Evanston, Illinois] student. The director passed around printed copies, pencils, and highlighters for us to annotate what especially resonated. Fingerprints brushed against each page, taking in the document’s sheer length, depth, and accessibility. I wasn’t the only freshman who saw ink bleed when tears greeted the page. It told us there might be space for us, with kinder cultures of accountability.

Back in high school, the power imbalances felt even more jarring to me than they would in college or the professional world, with daily reminders to address teacher-directors as “Mr.,” “Ms.” or “Dr.” and the regular lobbying for grades and college recommendation letters. Added layers—going to school on scholarship, say—can reinforce a sense of dependence and deference.

When you’re young, you sincerely believe, This is how it is in the professional world. You have to do it this way.

Magic Spaces

But it doesn’t have to be this way. At Miami Country Day School, Cristina Pla-Guzman [a writer and educator based in Miami] finds tremendous hope in taking both everyday and long-term actions, even considering the state’s increasingly draconian legislature. Bright with student-made art, the air feels lighter in her classroom, a hub of student laughter and imagination some call “my Disney World.” Pla-Guzman curates the very antithesis of my past, a futurism I didn’t think possible.

Optimistic and relentless, she meets every Monday with a student board of directors to discuss their departmental “state of the union,” from figuring out who will source snacks for rehearsal to discussing trauma-informed approaches. And every summer she travels for professional development to stay up to date. One tool from a recent workshop with Actor Therapy, she shared, was the crafting of a written classroom agreement asking for honest dialogue. 

Recognizing her own blind spots (even as a femme of color), her document promises she will do her best to support every student, prevent harm, and repair when needed. 

“There’s no reason why you can’t apologize to a student,” she said. “Ask what they think you could have done better, and then go find it and do it.”

On the first day of every course, she reviews the document with students, asking for their suggestions and hopes. After they sign the document along with parents, Pla-Guzman reinforces the culture with consent-based exercises to embrace the word “no.”

When any major shift occurs or cast lists go up, she asks students to consider planning a meeting with her to ensure open communication and trust. “You have to be intentional,” she said. “You can’t just say you’re going to do it once and then not follow up again.”

After all, kids’ bodies will know their own limits before educators’ minds; they just need the space to notice and speak. Lilliangina Quiñones at School of the Arts described the ways she decenters herself to uplift students at each moment, emphasizing the importance of classroom culture.

“So much of the theatre education conversation surrounds production, casting, and rehearsal, but what happens inside the classroom day to day really informs what ends up onstage,” Quiñones said. “The affirming of identity and the empathy practice happen inside the classroom.”

Before introducing techniques or terminology, she grounds the room in seeing that, as she puts it, “The core of everything is humans. Our program is primarily composed of students of color, and they live at various intersections of identity. Our interactions with them have to be with the person who’s in front of us now. If that person had a different name or pronoun last year, or if they were unpacking a part of their racial identity last year, those are last year’s things. Right now, today, who are they? And how are we willing to see them, converse with them, teach them, grow with them here and now?”

Quiñones’s values manifest in front-loading her own preparation to enter the classroom with both a primary lesson plan and backups. “It is a sign of respect to them to hold a schedule and do things in some sensible fashion,” she said. “It should be a given, but a lot of high school environments don’t have that.” In balance with her rigorous planning, she also builds open time into the schedule so that students can meditate, process, or simply do nothing. She calls them “magic spaces . . . an intentional disruption to the pace and expectations that school and career can have on us all.” In a world fixated on production and perfection over the human, Quiñones strives for opportunities “to truly access the humanity we need to become new characters and build new worlds together.” 

She concluded, “I think those ‘little big things’ we do day to day set us up for belonging and beautiful storytelling, because we practice when nobody’s watching.”

Culturally Responsive Intimacy in Practice

Teaching at Georgia’s Brenau University [Gainesville] and intimacy directing frequently in Chicago, Greg Geffrard [educator, intimacy professional, culture worker, actor, poet, and facilitator] differentiates between discomfort and pain, and further breaks down the latter into kinds of trauma: resolved, digestible, or unresolved. In this work, he’s concerned with what is actually sustainable for a young person to tackle while their brains are still developing and their bodies are caught in busy schedules, which too often exclude therapy.

When offering performance and spoken word as a valuable outlet to young people, he said he reminds himself, “We are asking these young people who are traumatized to tell that story, and they don’t necessarily have the resources to be able to process it. They are essentially finding their way to a stage and asking an audience to hear them. Heal them. But all they’re getting is adjudication on their experience. They’re putting their humanity out there for applause. This can be therapeutic, but it can’t be therapy because you’re hoping people who are here to be entertained will give you what they’re not here to give you. This is a very specific forum.”

As Nicole Brewer [acting department at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and formerly the theatre department of Howard University] puts it in her anti-racist theatre training [Conscientious Theatre Training (CTT)], we need to understand the physical, spiritual, and emotional exhaustion involved in this work. In her workshops, she discusses developing a “mixed fluency,” an awareness around the nuanced daily impact of oppression on the body.

My own experiences inspired me to become trained in culturally responsive intimacy, a common value among educators I interviewed. Brewer and Kaja Dunn, an intimacy professional, equity arts consultant, and Carnegie Mellon professor, have both trained me in this more sensitive awareness of the body’s relationship to forces both within and outside the rehearsal room. As suggested by its name, culturally responsive intimacy encompasses more than just choreographing physical touch. Geffrard said he resonates with Theatrical Intimacy Education’s (TIE) [a consulting group specializing in researching, developing, and teaching practices for staging theatrical intimacy] expanded definition of intimacy, which reminds us to consider emotional safety.

“If any parts of your intersecting identity—race, gender, sex, age, ability, religion—are levied in the story, then it is very likely that there will be a moment of intimacy,” he explained. “That’s because what we’re asking for is not only what lives in the professional or with the character, but is part of your identity when you’re no longer in the space.”

Dunn mentioned one fruitful tool: TIE’s “button,” wherein artists are invited to say the neutral, “de-loaded” term “button” when a boundary has been crossed or a pause is needed. Once “button” has been called, the facilitator or partner in the room asks what the person needs, hears and affirms the need, fulfills it, and asks how the person who called it wishes to proceed. 

When I’ve offered this tool to high school theatremakers and watched them practice it, they smile and glance around the room at one another. The camaraderie of simply breaking down the exercise together helps alleviate the pain around why it’s needed in the first place. Once implemented out of necessity in real time, students have told me, this practice becomes one of many sustainable, approachable ways to consistently engage with a traumatic activation. When it’s easier to ask for more breath, agility, and accommodation, we can share processing and healing.

Counting on Community

Early in her tenure at Miami Country Day School, Pla-Guzman geared up to produce Rent. Having put on an expansive In the Heights at a previous school that included panel events around gentrification and identity, she knew it would take a village to tell a story truly representative of the student body. 

[Rent is a rock musical loosely based on the 1896 opera La bohème by Giacomo Puccini with music, lyrics, and book by Jonathan Larson. It premièred Off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop (26 January-31 March 1996) for 49 performances. It transferred to Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre (29 April 1996-7 September 2008) for 16 previews and 5,123 regular performances.

[In the Heights was conceived by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the music and lyrics; the book was written by Quiara Alegría Hudes. It ran at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre from 9 March 2008 to 9 January 2011 (29 previews and 1,184 regular performances).]

For Rent, she connected with school advisors specialized in socio-emotional work to prep the school for both moderated and informal dialogues. She carefully considered how the show would impact each child’s life and how the school could offer necessary resources. Wanting to set the scene for Angel, a genderqueer character who battles HIV/AIDS, to be embraced by the community, Pla-Guzman looped in parents and counselors. It was important for both the actor playing Angel and students who identified with the story to experience love, not fear or trauma.

“The role of Angel could be so hard for someone to play in high school,” Pla-Guzman said. “And the student told me, ‘This is the most transformative thing that has ever happened to me.’” She was relieved, but added, “When you do shows with difficult conversations, I think we need to know the student doesn’t exist in a silo. How does this affect their life? We really combed through the script looking at terms that were used and what they meant to every student. By the end, our school as a community had never been so united.” By building culturally responsive conversations around each show into the curriculum, Pla-Guzman activates an opportunity for artistic leadership on campus and deeper integration of arts into the school’s culture. She said that high schoolers tell her, “We’re rock stars to the lower school kids when we walk around campus.” By centering her students’ agency, she’s not only helping to build young artists, but energized humans who feel seen enough to speak loud and proud.

Walking in the South Florida sun after visiting her class, our shadows stretched as tall as trees.

Approaching my mirror later that day, the girl didn’t look as small as I had remembered. 

I imagine the effects rippling, with more and more young people repairing their mirrors. Standing taller than they ever imagined. It’s not too late, I hope, for bodies to shed history and memory and layered trauma—transforming into something more like being.

“The way that I have hope is this,” Pla-Guzman’s offering echoes in mind. “I know that I have my little candle here. You think, ‘It’s only this little light. What could this little light do?’ Then when you look around you realize, ‘Wow. My little light just helped light all of these candles.’ We turn around and we realize years and years and years upon years have gone by wherein every single time somebody else dipped their wick into our candle, we have flooded with light.”

[Gabriela Furtado Coutinho (she/her) is the Chicago associate editor of American Theatre, as well as an actor, playwright, and poet.  She guest lectures at her alma mater, Northwestern University, and did previous work with the Kennedy Center and the Emmy’s/Television Academy.  A Brazilian immigrant, she’s conversant in three native languages.] 

*  *  *  *
“THE PIPELINE: ALL SET TO SUCCEED”
by Crystal Paul

[Crystal Paul’s “The Pipeline” was published in the Winter 2024 issue of American Theatre (40.2 – 27 March 2024): “Theatre Training: Passing the Torch.”]

The diversification of theatre design starts—but doesn’t end—with training.

“I got some hot grits over there on the stove. Why don’t you give Carlos some?,” says Madea, the titular character in Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion, to a young woman who’s being abused by her fiancé. Madea is suggesting the woman use the pot of grits as a weapon against her abuser.

[Madea's Family Reunion is a musical play written, directed, and produced by Tyler Perry, who also composed the songs. (Perry also played the title character in the stage production as he did in the 2006 film version.) It premièred at Bell Auditorium (a facility of the James Brown Arena) in Augusta, Georgia, on 4 January 2002. It played there again on 5 January and then went on a year-long tour of the United States, ending on 1 December at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans (where a live performance was recorded for video release in late January 2002).]

When a choreographer referenced the scene to lighting design student Deandra Bromfield a few years ago, she wasn’t urging Bromfield to vengeance but indicating the level of passion she hoped to convey in a Black History Month show at their arts high school. Bromfield understood the Madea reference immediately and took to the switchboard to bathe the stage in ambers and oranges. Their white design teacher, however, was surprised—he was not familiar with the Madea oeuvre.

“It’s very important to just listen and hear people out, especially if you’re not from that demographic,” said Bromfield. “Even better: If you don’t know, research.” 

Several other student artists also opted to work with Bromfield because they felt she understood their work best. This kind of understanding, Bromfield said, is why it’s important that theatres consider diversity behind the scenes as well as onstage: to represent different perspectives, to tell stories in more accurate ways, to make theatre more expansive.

Since the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations and the open letter “We See You, White American Theater” [Statement — We See You W.A.T. (weseeyouwat.com)], there has been plenty of conversation about inequity and lack of diversity both on- and offstage. Theatres and theatremakers made promises of change and shows of support. Three-plus years later, theatre designers say that while they’ve seen more diversity on stages and in rehearsal rooms, the production side of theatre has been largely neglected. For years, designers of color have described difficulties getting hired for shows that aren’t specifically about people of color, feelings of isolation as the only or one of few designers of color on a show, and cultural misunderstandings or even outright hostile working environments.

Bromfield, for example, is the only Black student in the lighting design program at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts [Winston-Salem], which she described as “very isolating.” 

When costume designer Harri Horsley, who serves as assistant professor of costume design at James Madison University [Harrisonburg, Virginia] and has been working in the field for 10 years, looks back on her time as a graduate student, she uses the exact same words: “Very isolating.” She also described the pressure of being one of the few Black queer designers in most of her academic and work spaces. Bromfield said she feels the same pressures today.

“I’m hyper-aware of the fact that I am the only Black person in this space,” said Bromfield. “It kind of gives me a feeling that I have to be on my Ps and Qs every single time and work way harder than anybody else does to make sure that I don’t slip up, because I’m the only person that looks like me.

“If I slip up,” she said, “it’s over.”

Since the 2020 “reckoning” brought many of these issues out into the open, new programs and fellowships have sprung up, joining existing programs for emerging designers of color, all in the hopes of creating a more equitable landscape for young designers of color to learn and navigate some of the same difficulties faced by their predecessors. Designers of color have begun more concerted efforts to forge connections with each other, sharing experiences and resources. As leaders of some of these newer programs look to the future, they have hopes to expand their offerings, while others fear the door of opportunity, cracked open just a bit by recent conversations, has already begun to close.

Making Connections

When Dr. Stephanie Anne Johnson talks about her 49 years as a lighting designer, she doesn’t use the word “isolating,” but it’s there, unspoken, in her stories about her all-white, all-male co-workers in the 1970s and early ’80s having trouble believing that she, a Black woman, was the designer in charge on a show. It’s clear when she talks about not taking union jobs 40 years ago because “it was hostile. These guys didn’t want me there,” she said. 

The majority white male crews may not have wanted to work with her, but throughout her career, she said, Black women and white allies in the field helped her navigate these environments and find her footing in the industry. Johnson’s first job out of college was with a Black woman psychologist who hired her to light a play she had written. A few of her white male bosses over the years helped keep the hostility of crew members at bay, or simply offered encouragement and empathy for the challenges she faced as a Black woman in the industry. These allies vouched for her work and recommended her to others.

This, she said, is how the design field has always operated: on apprenticeships and personal associations. Working designers take newbies under their wings and mentor them, then launch them into the field bolstered by experience and professional connections. The problem, of course, is that most designers with clout have historically been white men. Lighting designer Shirley Prendergast became the first Black woman admitted to the United Scenic Artists labor union in 1969, but it wasn’t until 1986, 17 years later, that designer Kathy Perkins, a Prendergast mentee, became the second. For decades in this sector of the industry, white men tended to mentor and recommend other white men within largely homogeneous networks.

That is why veteran lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes, 71, said the work of preparing the next generation of designers of color cannot fall solely to people of color. 

“Every diversity program looks to Blacks for support,” he said. “I think it helps for white people to train and work with people of color, because a team of just Blacks, in some cases, is easily dismissed. People should think it’s their duty, and not just the duty of Black people, to train people of color. They don’t get off scot-free.”

That’s the idea that Arena Stage founder Zelda Fichandler had when she launched a fellowship there in 1990 and named it in Hughes’s honor. Now called the Allen Lee Hughes BIPOC Fellowship, it offers hands-on training to emerging theatremakers. After the 2020 protests, the fellowship has put a stronger focus on recruiting Black and Indigenous designers, specifically.

[Zelda Fichandler (1924-2016) co-founded Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in 1950 and served as artistic director from then until 1991. She was artistic director of the New York City-based Acting Company, co-founded in 1972 by John Houseman (1902-88) and Margot Harley (b. 1935) out of the first graduating class of the Juilliard School’s drama program, from 1991 to 1994. Fichandler was also chair of the graduate acting program of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts from 1984 to 2009. Two books about Fichandler were published this year: Mary B. Robinson,To Repair the World (Routledge); Zelda Fichandler, The Long Revolution, edited by Todd London (Theatre Communications Group).]

Johnson notes that people like Hughes—one of the first Black designers in the field—and the Black women who helped Johnson didn’t just open doors for young Black designers. They also helped create an environment where designers of color feel welcome and supported, a place where they actually want to stay.

“It’s critical,” said Johnson. “I speak as an African American: It’s important to be part of an African American network or networks, because that’s where you’re going to find your sustenance and hopefully sustainable relationships that are going to get you somewhere.”

Forging and maintaining relationships is part of what motivated freelance lighting designer and educator Jorge Arroyo and set designer Regina García to launch La Gente: The Latinx/é Theatre Production Network. At the height of the George Floyd protests, Arroyo and García put together a casual Zoom gathering of Latiné designers, technicians, and managers. As the group shared their experiences, they realized they had the ingredients to create more opportunity and visibility for Latiné designers and technicians. Out of that meeting came the idea for La Gente. 

“In order for us to make change, we need to know each other, we need to support each other,” said Arroyo. “When I can’t do a job, I can send you the name of three amazing Latino lighting designers who are ready to jump in and do the work.”

La Gente currently offers an online directory of designers spanning the country and touting a variety of expertise. Arroyo hopes that the network can eventually become something more by reaching out to emerging Latiné designers and connecting them with established Latiné designers who can help them forge a path into design work, or even connect with Latiné students who may have never thought of design as a career option. 

“It’s sad that we are the elders,” said Arroyo, who is 50. “There should be those folks that are 65 and 70 in the field. And they’re just not in the profession. They’re just not there.”

A Pathway for Young People

When Mark Stanley was coming up as a white man in the very white and very male design field of the 1970s and ’80s, he said, there was very little awareness about the lack of diversity in design.

“No one ever thought twice about the fact that white men were mentoring younger white men to become lighting designers—it just was what it was,” he said. “You kind of didn’t look around to see what color everybody else was, or the fact that there weren’t any women or almost no designers of color.”

There were voices calling attention to the problem over the years, he said, but since the protests in 2020, there has been no way to miss the lack of diversity in the field. Everything that had been “swept under the rug,” he said, came rushing out. That’s when the idea for the Studio School of Design began to percolate.

Stanley, resident lighting designer at the New York City Ballet and head of the lighting design program at Boston University, and some of his colleagues were inspired by the New York Studio and Forum of Stage Design. Founded in the 1960s by costume, lighting, and set designer Lester Polakov, the studio brought fellow Broadway designers in to teach emerging designers (usually college graduates preparing for the entrance exam for the United Scenic Artists designers union) whenever they weren’t working a show.

As they assembled a board and conversations continued, Stanley and Studio School co-founder Clifton Taylor realized the inequities start earlier in the pipeline. They reflected on the demographics of the students who came through their programs at BU and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, respectively, and saw firsthand how the failure to engage students earlier in their education restricted the applicant pool.

“It’s been pretty clear in the 20 years I’ve been teaching that there is no incoming talent other than mostly students coming from school systems that have theatre programs that are well-funded,” Stanley said. “And, as you can imagine, the result of that is mostly white. One of the big problems was accessibility of training that was holding back, or even blocking, the ability for young designers of color to feel like they had a place in this career.”

So they turned their sights to high school. The Studio School of Design [at the New York Center for Creativity and Dance, 287 East 10th Street, New York, NY 10009], incorporated in 2021, has now had two successful summer programs bringing in high school students from Title 1 schools in the New York area for tuition-free, hands-on education and training in lighting design. 

When Deandra Bromfield and Darius Evans met at the Studio School’s summer program in 2021, it was a game-changer. Neither had met another Black student interested in lighting design before, so they were excited to no longer be the only one in the room. They reveled in the course work and geeked out about lighting design, and now they are both enrolled in lighting design programs at the universities where Studio School founders Stanley and Taylor teach [The School of Theatre in the College of Fine Arts at Boston University and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, respectively]. 

But there’s still a long way to go. Not only is Bromfield the only Black student in her university lighting design program; Evans is also the only Black freshman in his.

“That speaks to the need of exactly what we’re trying to change,” said Stanley. “That’s why Clifton and I are concentrating so much at the high school level, because students of color aren’t even applying.”

Bromfield is keenly aware that access to programs like hers are hard to come by for people of color, especially those from under-resourced socioeconomic backgrounds. 

“The only reason that I was able to attend SSD was because it was free,” she said. “If I had to pay money for classes during the summer, I would have never known half the stuff that I do now. I probably wouldn’t have even applied to an art school to do lighting design had I not had those programs.”

Getting Work

Teaching the next generation is only half the problem, according to Jennifer Zeyl, artistic director at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre. Zeyl led the launch of the STARFISH Project, which provides free after-school technical theatre training, mentorship, and hands-on experience to high school-aged students. The other part is making sure these young people can actually find work after they’ve been trained.

Finding work has been particularly hard for designers of color and women designers, points out lighting designer Porsche McGovern. That’s partly why she began reporting the demographics of designers by pronoun at League of Resident Theatres establishments back in 2015. 

“I knew I had a responsibility to tell people these numbers, because I often wondered if I had had these numbers when I first thought of this after undergrad, would I have gone to grad school?” McGovern wondered. “Or would I have been, at the time: Do I think I’m going to be one of the women designers who worked in LORT over those five years? I’m not saying that means that if there’s a slim chance you shouldn’t do it. But I have bills to pay. I had undergraduate debt.”

A 2020 demographics survey by the United States Institute for Theatre Technology found that of approximately 1,770 respondents, people of color accounted for 13 percent of the staff at participating technical theatre organizations. The study also found that younger respondents tended to be “more racially diverse, with 17 percent of the 15-34 age group identifying as a person of color or multi-racial, compared to 14 percent of those in the 35-49 age group and 7 percent of those 65 and older.”

Zeyl’s solution: an associates arts degree program with an emphasis on Technical Theatre for Social Justice. Intiman partnered with Seattle Central College to create the program in 2019. The idea, said Zeyl, is to get technical theatre students out and working faster and with less student debt, making it more financially feasible for lower-income students to explore the field. Students who graduate from the associates degree program are also eligible to transfer to four-year programs. 

“I think it’s just unconscionable to be taking $150,000 off a young person in order for them to practice something that, if they had access and opportunity, they could work out in real time,” she said. “I’m in education to cut the line.”

One thing efforts like these can’t offset is the drain of artists and potential mentors who have left the field in the last few years. In fact, McGovern herself isn’t sure she’s going to stay in design, citing the difficulty of getting work as a designer of color, and low pay when she does get it. She and other designers of color note that, even after the so-called “racial reckoning” of 2020, they still often get the call to work the few shows about people of color that theatres tend to put on for Black History Month or other cultural occasions, but their phones are silent the rest of the year.

Hughes said he’s already seeing talented designers of all cultural backgrounds leaving the field because of the difficulty of making a living. One of his protégés, Xavier Pierce, began to reexamine his calling when stages went dark during the pandemic[.] When Pierce first set on the path to lighting design at Florida A&M University [Tallahassee], he was struck by the lack of diversity. Then he found a flyer about the Hughes Fellowship program, and put it up on the front door of his bedroom, the photo of Allen Lee Hughes looking back at him every time he walked through the door for two years.

“I came to school for lighting, and I couldn’t find anybody who kind of looked like me,” he said. “The idea that theatre has a diversity problem is fucking insane. We tell stories about humanity.”  

He eventually applied to the fellowship and was personally mentored by Hughes himself. This was a game changer for Pierce, as it helped him make the necessary connections to work in the field. One of the first shows Pierce got to design was one that Hughes recommended him for because Hughes couldn’t do it.

Soon Pierce was working full-time as a designer. But then the pandemic hit in 2020, and no amount of expertise, connections, luck, or prestige could rescue him or anyone else from unemployment. While Pierce eventually returned to the field, having found a renewed sense of purpose through moving closer to his family, plenty of others haven’t.

This exodus of talented potential mentors couples with a looming sense that the doors to these opportunities are beginning to close as the momentum of 2020 fades. Some fear that real progress toward a more diverse theatre landscape will fade with it.

“Every 50 or so years, something happens and the doors open for a little bit. Then they close,” said Jonah Bobilin, a lighting designer who is a member of Design Action [Oakland, California], a coalition of theatre designers working to end racial inequities in American theatre. “This is something a lot of the older designers of color said in 2020: ‘You need to get in where you can because the doors are going to close in two years or so.’ And it’s come to pass.”

But lighting design student Darius Evans is hopeful that things will continue to change, even if he’s unsure of what exactly the theatre landscape will look like by the time he graduates. 

“The one thing I like about theatre is that there’s always some sort of change,” he said. “I want to be a part of that change, so that the next generation has a better time. I feel like even though we’ve acknowledged the problem, the problem hasn’t gone away completely. So we need people who want to continue to change.”

[Crystal L. Paul (she/her) is a Chicago-based journalist and editor, specializing in community journalism and reporting on race and culture and the arts.

[The last installment of “Theater Education & Training” will be published on Saturday, 12 October.]