A playwright, a director, an artistic director and an actor share their experiences — and prescriptions for change.
What has been the impact of race, and racism, on African-Americans working in the theater world? How should that world change? Those questions have taken on renewed, impassioned life since the killing of George Floyd, the shooting deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and the nationwide protests over racial injustice that have followed.
On Monday night, 300 artists challenged “White American Theater” in a blistering statement. This week the Broadway Advocacy Coalition is holding a forum on racism in the industry. We asked four African-American theater figures — based in different parts of the country and in different corners of the business — to share their first-person accounts. Here are their edited responses, as printed in the New York Times.
Interviews by Laura Collins-Hughes, Michael Paulson and