Four Black Artists on How Racism Corrodes the Theater World

On a given day, after I leave, working hard there, you end up going to a reception to raise money, and you have to go to the governor’s mansion. So I’m shaking hands and begging for money to do the challenging stories, and sometimes people were afraid. “Now, wait a minute. You had 11 plays, and three of them were by African-American writers. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to turn us into a black theater?” And then on the way home I may get pulled over by the cops just because my car looked a little too fancy or I was laughing too much in the car and the policeman wondered why.

When producers and regional theaters don’t look at you as a whole individual, and only interested in what you can bring to the racial conversation, I think that’s a form of racism as well. And to me, it’s a form of racism when you don’t give black people, and people of color, an opportunity to write about the work that’s created. We need to work harder for diversity in terms of who is writing about what’s onstage.

I have a radical optimism, built in my heart, that says right is going to win, and we are going to get there. I’m not giving up on regional theater, I’m not giving up on Off Broadway theater, I’m not giving up on Broadway theater, I’m not giving up on America and I’m not giving up on our world. But I think it’s going to take listening. It’s going to take all of us.

What do I think our world should look like? We’re storytellers, so I think this is a great opportunity for artists to build that vision. All I can do is go by the plays that a lot of artists have been doing over the years — the Katori Halls of the world, the Jocelyn Biohs of the world, the Tarell McCraneys of the world, the Jeremy O. Harrises of the world. My world is shaped by the hopes and dreams of those plays. I definitely see a world where we don’t have the knees of the people that are supposed to protect us on our necks, suffocating the life out of us.

Kenny Leon, a 64-year-old director, served as the artistic director of two Atlanta nonprofits, the Alliance Theater, which is one of the nation’s leading regional theaters, and True Colors Theater Company, which he founded to celebrate black storytelling. He has directed 11 productions on Broadway; the most recent was this year’s revival of “A Soldier’s Play,” and in 2014 he won a Tony Award for a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.”

Interview by Michael Paulson.