Author Archives: Jessie Baxter

Forum on Race in America – Ta-Nehisi Coates at Johns Hopkins University

Earlier this morning, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer and correspondent for The Atlantic, spoke at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland for the inaugural event in a series of forums on Race in America. Coates was joined by Dr. Nathan Connolly, JHU Assistant Professor of History, and Dr. Debra Furr-Holden, JHU Associate Professor of Mental Health for a conversation that was livestreamed here.

Initial remarks spoke to the recent events in Baltimore surrounding the death of Freddie Gray and the #BaltimoreUprising, as well as the ingrained culture of day-to-day violence that exists in communities of color. Later, conversation topics touched on historical roots of inequality and how language and policy shapes marginalized communities, before a Q&A with the audience. It’s a fantastic and timely conversation that is well worth checking out.

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

Link Roundup! – 4/24/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

♦♦♦♦♦

The ARTery has details on a report released last week by the city’s office of Diversity, calling for new strategies to diversify the city’s workforce after uncovering some sobering statistics about how gender and race are represented in Boston:

Overall, the report finds the city’s workforce is predominantly white (58 percent) and does not reflect Boston’s diverse population. Hispanics make up 18 percent of the city’s population, but only 11 percent of the city’s workforce while Asians make up 9 percent of the city’s population, but only 4 percent of the city’s workforce, according to the report. However, blacks make up 23 percent of the city’s population and 26 percent of the city’s workforce, according to the report.

But, when it comes to leadership positions (department heads) all minority groups are very much underrepresented, the report found — 74 percent are white, 18 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic and 3 percent are Asian.

♦♦♦♦♦

In his post on the Butts in Seats blog, Joe Patti looks at the Quartz post breaking down the recent Pew Research study stating that kids from different economic backgrounds use social media differently. There are some interesting takeaways for organizations looking to reach young and economically diverse audiences online:

Income and race also often determine whether someone has access to a desktop or tablet computer. In any case, it seems increasingly important to make sure your website design is mobile friendly (h/t Drew McManus) if you want teens to have positive interactions with it as that is increasingly the platform of choice.

Continue reading →

Link Roundup! – 4/18/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

♦♦♦♦♦

In the most recent post on Bitter Gertrude, Melissa Hillman examines the negative online reactions that the photo below received and how it highlights the importance of engaging with young audiences on their own terms:

Photo by Alvaro Garnero

We talk a lot about wanting to engage the rising generation in theatre, and I’m seeing a lot of “what can we do about this?” commentary on this picture. Listen: If you want to engage the rising generation, the first thing you need to do is stop lying to yourself about them. You’ll fail to engage them if you don’t approach them with honesty…This is exactly why 99.999% of “audience engagement strategies” fail miserably to bring in young, diverse audiences. This is why “tweet seats” failed. We’re not looking at this generation honestly. Instead we look at studies designed from the outset to confirm our hypotheses. We make assumptions about how the rising generation thinks and feels based on how they make us think and feel. We refuse to engage them on their own terms, instead dictating the terms to them and then blaming them for boorishness when they fail to meet them.

♦♦♦♦♦

Seth Lepore’s HowlRound essay about the importance of entrepreneurship and the blind many college theatre programs have about it has been getting lots of online buzz this week:

The blind spot of most college professors needs to be understood for what it is. A lot of college teachers who are tenure track have been in school their whole lives. Creating their own work has been in the context of academia and the relationship to both process and theory. Practitioners in the academy always have a place to rehearse and develop new work. They don’t have to worry whether people attend the performance and if it will break even or not. When showing a new work, they are part of an infrastructure that already subsidizes them. The business skill set doesn’t seem to fit into “What Would Artaud Do?” They are focused on students building a performance skill set. I’ve actually heard some of these well-meaning professors say “If they want that information, they can take a course with the business school.”

Continue reading →

Link Roundup! – 4/10//15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

♦♦♦♦♦

Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh. (Jeremiah Robinson/mayor’s office)

The WBUR ARTery featured this week’s presentation of the cities new cultural plan, Boston Creates, announced by Mayor Walsh and Julie Burros:

Boston Creates, or #BostonCreates, is the umbrella title for a 10-year plan to provide resources for the creative community, while engaging — and challenging — artists and audiences to articulate priorities for how those resources should be spent.

♦♦♦♦♦

The cast of How to Get Away With Murder. Photo by ABC Studios.

Slate writer Aisha Harris spoke to several film and television actors of color about their experience during the recent “diversity boom” in Hollywood:

There’s also the question of what diversity actually means to casting directors. Wise characterizes the goal as “digestible diversity,” or a certain type of non-white look: Asian actors with typically American or European features (like freckles, she suggests); black women with a lighter skin complexion. You’ll go into an “all ethnicities” casting call, she tells me, and “without fail, you’ll wonder who got that [part], and it’ll be someone German (whose father is kind of half-black).” This perspective seems to have borne itself out in at least one particularly notable—and racist—casting call for the upcoming N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, which made headlines last year. In it, sought-after women were, whether intentionally or not, ranked in groups from “A” to “D” by race, class, and skin tone. (Group B, for instance, consisted of “fine girls,” who “should be light-skinned.” Group D, on the other hand, was listed as “African American girls. Poor, not in good shape. Medium to dark skin tone.”)

Continue reading →

Link Roundup! – 4/3/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

♦♦♦♦♦

Shaun Blugh, 30, has been appointed the City of Boston’s first-ever chief diversity officer. Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/Globe staff

The Boston Globe has a story about the mayor’s new Office of Diversity and their efforts to make Boston workforces more equitable:

A glimpse at the city’s roughly 15,000 full-time employees underscores their challenge. In a city in which people of color constitute 53 percent of the population, Boston’s municipal workforce remains 61 percent white, according to records released to the Globe under the state’s open records law. Women slightly outnumber men at City Hall, but on average are paid 7 percent less than their male counterparts.

♦♦♦♦♦

The Non Profit with Balls blog has a post up about “Fakequity” — a term he coined for organizations that claim to be interested in creating equity, but don’t participate in active change:

So how does this apply to Equity? People seem to think that forming an equity committee, talking about equity, sending staff and board to trainings, “listening” to communities, conducting research and gathering data, and adding terminologies to websites and brochures are sufficient to achieving equity. But no, these things are necessary, but not sufficient. When we just talk about Equity and go no further, we are guilty of Fakequity. I’ve seen many well-meaning organizations and foundations spend years talking about equity, congratulate themselves on it, and don’t do anything else that would actually help to bring about Equity.

Continue reading →

Link Roundup! – 3/27/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

♦♦♦♦♦

Peter Friedman, Danny McCarthy, Michael Countryman, Hannah Bos and Carolyn McCormick in “The Open House” by Will Eno at Signature Theatre. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

In American Theatre, Issac Butler writes about several contemporary playwrights who are taking the traditional realistic living room family drama and turning it on its head:

In the current crop of anti-realist plays are Eno’s The Open House and Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, both mounted last season at New York City’s Signature Theater, and Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, a recent critical success at the Public Theater. Next season, Taylor Mac’s Hir will have its East Coast debut at Playwrights Horizons. All these plays simultaneously deploy and subvert various tropes of the genre: difficult fathers, family secrets, eccentric mothers, a compressed time scheme, money worries—and, well, white people.

They’re also all set in and around living rooms, the most common and persistent setting in contemporary American theatre.

While it can be frustrating to walk into a theatre and see yet another couch in front of yet another television three feet away from yet another cluttered bookshelf, the ubiquity of this setting isn’t hard to understand. After all, the living room’s history and linguistic roots intersect with American theatre’s primary concerns. “Living room” is simply the American term for the parlor, whose name derives from the French parler, to talk. It is figuratively, then, a space for talking. Parlors are also a middle-class (or, if you must, bourgeois) invention, much like the theatres that regularly reproduce them onstage.

♦♦♦♦♦

Jason Tseng, the Community Engagement Specialist at Fractured Atlas, has a compelling essay up at Medium about LA’s 99-seat Theatre Plan and the issue of funding for small companies:

The top 3% of arts organizations by budget size ($10M and above) received 60% of all arts and culture funding. Conversely, the bottom half of organizations by budget size ($100k and below) received only 5% of that funding.

Not only is this deeply problematic from a purely class perspective, Holly also notes that this wealth gap disproportionately effects racial and ethnic minority communities, as well as other oppressed groups. This phenomenon is also not limited to the U.S. In fact, a similar report out of Britain cautioned that drastic changes to arts funding need to occur in order to avoid a “cultural apartheid.”

Continue reading →

Link Roundup! – 3/20/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

♦♦♦♦♦

Melissa Hillman’s post on the TCG blog about what engagement really means gets at some important truths about connecting with audiences:

If we’re going to have productive discussions about diversity, even coded as “audience engagement,” we first need to stop pretending that there’s one discrete “theatre community” that’s all failing in the same way. We need to stop pretending that a lack of diversity in big budget theatre is a lack of diversity in “theatre,” as if people of color cannot create theatre unless a big, white theatre bends down to help them. We need to stop pretending that a lack of diversity in big budget theatre audiences is a lack of diversity in “theatre audiences,” as if young people of color have no theatre unless a big, white theatre creates a space for them. You can’t stop young people of color from making art. It’s happening everywhere, all the time. You can’t stop young people of color from consuming art. It’s happening everywhere, all the time.

♦♦♦♦♦

Over at The Nib, a cartoonist shares a story about the perception of race in comics:

Continue reading →

BCA PlayLab: What We’re Reading

The dramaturgy team will be periodically posting updates and highlights from the 2015 BCA PlayLab in the coming months. Follow along and let us know what you think on Facebook or Twitter!

♦♦♦♦♦

In the weeks following our first BCA PlayLab meeting, we’ve been collecting articles and essays pertinent to playwriting and life as a writer that we wanted to share with the group. The articles we share aren’t necessarily endorsements, but are a great jumping off point for discussion — here are a few to kick things off:

The Most Successful Creative People Constantly Say ‘No’ – Business Insider

No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes. Saying “no” has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know.

An artist compiled all her rejections in an ‘anti-resume.’ Here’s what can be learned from failure – The Washington Post

So the anti-resumé remains my deceptively simple answer to the question, ‘How do you do it?’: that I persisted during all those years of rejection for no other reason than that I loved writing so much I wanted to spend all my time doing it. Writing must be its own reward, even for the most talented and hardworking writers, or they’re going to have a tough time.

Continue reading →

Link Roundup! – 3/13/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

♦♦♦♦♦

Playwright Bess Wohl at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse. Photo: Cassandra Giraldo for The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal has an article up about playwrights who write for film and television, examining the way it allows for a more sustainable income than theatre:

In the nonprofit theater, playwrights like Ms. Wohl earn income from grants, commissions and in some cases fees from regional and international productions of their work. Only for a small handful does this accumulate to a living wage.

In TV, on the other hand, a complex system of generous minimums is in place to determine compensation for writers, whose salaries and fees vary based on a variety of factors, including a show’s length and where it is being broadcast or streamed.

♦♦♦♦♦

The Guardian takes a look at childcare and parent-friendly practices in theatre with their article “Parents in the arts need to stage a childcare revolution”:

Of course it’s not just women who are affected by such responsibilities. But perhaps one of the reasons that there are fewer female theatre directors sustaining longer-term careers is that it’s hard to juggle family and directing. Plenty of women set out to be directors, but then when children come along, it is far harder to keep going alongside caring responsibilities which still often fall primarily upon women…Maybe that explains why only 29% of directors in big theatres are female.

Continue reading →

#StaffChat: A Critical Look at THIS IS MODERN ART

Staff Chat posts feature articles and news that the C1 team discusses as part of our weekly all-staff meeting. We’d love to hear your thoughts too — hit us up on Facebook or Twitter!

♦♦♦♦♦

This week’s Staff Chat will focus on the conversation around the play This is Modern Art (Based on True Events), a Steppenwolf for Young Adults production co-written by Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval. We’re looking at two reviews of the play and a few articles that examine the critical reception of the piece:

Kelly O’Sullivan (from left), J. Salome Martinez Jr., Jerry MacKinnon and Jessie D. Prez in the Steppenwolf Young Adults production of “This Is Modern Art.” (Photo: Michael Courier)

The play, inspired by a real incident, follows a group of Chicago teens who decide to cover the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing in graffiti art. In their reviews, critics Jones and Weiss briefly touch on the artistic aspects of the play (which they seem to praise), but spend most of their columns taking the show to task for its portrayal of graffiti artists. From Jones:

But here is what “This is Modern Art” barely even mentions: Graffiti comes at a price. It can be invasive, self-important and disrespectful of the property of others — and plenty of struggling folks have had to clean graffiti off something they own or love. Graffiti can be inartful, for goodness sake. More importantly yet, graffiti had the effect of making people feel unsafe in the city. It terrified people. It was only when public officials declared themselves determined to wipe it out that cities finally came back to life, with broad benefits.

You wanna go back to riding public transportation in New York or Chicago in the 1980s? I do not. You do not have to be conservative or somehow not down with youth to think it reprehensible that these issues do not have a place in a show for schools that is quite staggeringly one-sided.

Weiss continues this line of thought in her review, though she takes it even further, stating:

This play is a wildly wrong-headed and potentially damaging work — one that fails to call “vandalism” by its name, and rationalizes and attempts to justify that vandalism in the most irresponsible ways. It also trades in all the destructive, sanctimonious talk about minority teens invariably being shut out of opportunities and earmarked for prison in a way that only reinforces stereotypes and negative destinies. Counterproductive in the extreme, it deepens and solidifies racial and class divisions and a sense of hopelessness among those who need to dwell on possibility.

Continue reading →