Link Roundup! – 6/10/16

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!

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A promotional photo from Profiles’s 2003 production of Blackbird. Darrell W. Cox starred as a Gulf War veteran spending Christmas with his girlfriend, a heroin-addicted former stripper./ PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: READER STAFF; PHOTO: “WAYNE KARL”

Chicago Reader has a feature about Profiles Theatre, detailing a long history of abuse and reckless behavior toward actors:

But something troubling was occurring behind the scenes of Killer Joe, something that was part of a long-standing pattern of abusive conditions at Profiles for nearly two decades. In extensive interviews conducted over the past year, more than 30 former Profiles cast and crew members described in disturbingly similar terms what they suffered or witnessed while working at the theater. They alleged that, since the 1990s, Cox has physically and psychologically abused many of his costars, collaborators, unpaid crew members, and acting students, some of whom also became romantically involved with Cox while under his supervision at the theater. Others in key roles in the theater, they say, did little if anything to stop it or turned a blind eye altogether. Although the source material Profiles favored was often violent and misogynistic, the quality of its shows and the critical acclaim they garnered—coupled with a culture of fear and silence that developed inside the theater—allowed bad behavior to flourish behind the scenes, unbeknownst to audiences or the media.

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The Huntington Theatre announced, as reported by the Boston Globe, the deal that will allow them to keep their space on Huntington Ave:

Michael Maso, managing director of the Huntington Theatre, said that under the terms of the agreement with the development group QMG Huntington, LLC, which purchased the three buildings for $25 million, the Huntington will be responsible for restoring the theater, which will abut a new mixed-use development that comprises both retail and residential units.

“We have a great deal of planning to do, and then we will have a great deal of money to raise,” said Maso, who estimated the theater company will need between $60 million to $70 million. “We can and we will fulfill the vision that this agreement makes possible.”

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MICHAEL BLANCHARD

The Boston Globe reports on the Boston Center for the Arts’ new CEO:

Gregory Ruffer, an arts administrator and educator with a deep background in vocal music, has been named president and CEO of the Boston Center for the Arts, whose South End campus provides performance, studio, and exhibition space to artists and arts groups of all stripes.

Ruffer, who currently serves as president and CEO of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee, replaces Veronique Le Melle, who left the BCA at the beginning of the year. Ruffer will formally assume his duties Aug. 1.

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The Atlantic has a post about the Los Angeles-based Asian American theater group East West Players (EWP), and how theatre is helping students access narratives about minority history that aren’t represented in textbooks:

Whose version of history makes it into textbooks—and, ultimately, classrooms—can have negative consequences, especially on minority students, as one graduate-level study about textbooks used in suburban high-schools in New York suggested. When minorities are inaccurately or stereotypically portrayed, minority students themselves question the validity of the source material and, at times, the teachers themselves. The study cites research conducted with Japanese American and Mexican American students, among others, in other parts of the U.S.: “The main conclusion which the authors were able to draw was that when minority students become aware they are not being presented with accurate and unbiased information, they will begin to resent the topic, the text, and the teacher.”

Theater, then, has become one avenue through which non-profit groups in California—a state with a 62 percent minority population and one of the most diverse make-ups in the country—ensure students learn about minorities in U.S. history, both past and present. The ramification of pushing a white-dominant historical narrative, argues EWP’s Tokuda, is erasure of minority voices: “The consequences are that no one will care, and we become invisible again.”