 So we have these three great people who travel from various distances to join us, to have a conversation about the crisis in the casting. And we've all looked over some material and had very brief preliminary conversations. So structurally, I thought what I would do is sort of just start us with some questions, and really basically leave it to you three, hopefully four, and all of you to join in. Technically, we only have an hour, right? We have the space, I think the spaces both shortly after us. So we'll begin. Hi, I'm Melia Ben-Susan, I should say right there. I'm Chair of Performing Arts, and along with my colleagues in Visual Media Arts, I see you broke the news in the back, but my Chair of the MA, we thought what was most appropriate for our departments to host is a conversation on this teaching day. It was this conversation about casting, which has had enormous ramifications for our professions, as well as is an active dialogue in both our departments. And I know I told our panelists that I thought our audience was composed of active directors, screenwriters, playwrights, theater directors, film directors, all of you, the potential casting directors and other voices that will be shaping media and theater in the future. So we wanted to have all of your voices on. So first is Destiny Burley, who comes from New York, who does a lot of casting for films, student films, professional work, et cetera. I'll let people further introductions of themselves, my clue. Gifted playwright, who is right now in previews of The Huntington for his play, so we're thrilled that you're here in the middle of an exhausting rehearsal stretch, and we look forward to seeing the production. And Joe Wilson Jr., who comes to us from Providence, where he's been a company member at Trinity Repertory Theatre. So we're glad to have, I feel like, you know, to have all three of you in Boston right now is really a great opportunity and terrific for all of us to hear this conversation. Why don't I just start off with a question that Joe and I started discussing right outside, which is you were talking about how this conversation around casting and race has really changed during the top years you worked as a professional. Yes, I'll give you guys a quick sort of, because you're like, who are you? Oh, I know what I'm talking about. We have to stop you from talking. Oh, and we also should say we're live streaming right for HowlRound. So hello to everyone watching us through HowlRound. Just to give you a quick of who I am, my name is Joe Wilson Jr. I am from New Orleans originally. I went to graduate school, I went to undergrad at the University of Notre Dame. I have a degree in political science, but I went on to graduate school and received a Master's in Fine Arts and Acting from the University of Minnesota Guthrie Theatre Training Program. I worked in Minneapolis for seven years, including my training there. Wait, Joe, you're supposed to grab a mic. Oh, sorry. I can use the mic. I'm just trying to figure out this. I pay all this money to project, and I'm assuming it is. That's better. I hail from New Orleans, Louisiana. I went to the University of Notre Dame in graduate undergrad in political science, and then I found myself in acting. That's a whole other story. So I chose to go to graduate school at the University of Minnesota Guthrie Theatre Training Program. I worked in Minneapolis until 2000. In 2000, I moved to New York. I did my first Broadway show, Superstar on Broadway, Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway. I lived and worked in New York until 2005. The old joke is you moved to New York to work outside of New York. So in one of my jobs, I was hired as a freelance actor to work at Trinity Rep in a production in 2005 directed by Kent Gash, a musical called Amos Behavior. I then, that was actually also Oscar Eustace's last season at Trinity before he moved to the public. But then they cast me again to do a little play called Top Dog Underdog by Susan Lord Parks, myself and my co-star, Cass Camino. We actually flip-flop roles every other night. So we played both parts in this two person play, which was a bitch. And then they asked me to join the company. And so I said, sure, as everything in my life, I just jumped right in. And so I have been in the company now for 12 years. This is my 12th season. Why this is intriguing to me, and I can talk a lot about this, but I'm just going to try and hone on one particular incident. I have a classical training program where the idea was, and to find myself in a theater, that multi-cultural, cross-cultural, gender-colored, blind, whatever you want to call it, casting. We were doing this since the 60s. We were doing it before anyone knew what to call it. We had black people playing white people. We had women playing Scrooge. We had men playing, we just, that was Adrian Hall's original concept. The idea was, you care who you were, where you came from, but his attraction was to a good actor. A good actor. And so even coming into Trinity, and my dear friend Barbara Miku passed last year, who was in the company since the 60s, a black woman, she would hate it when I classified myself as an actor of color. She's like, Joe, you're a good actor. But what Barbara and I disagree on is every role that I approach, I can't deny the fact that I am an African-American gay man in that part. That's, my palette of paints rests on that, of who I am. And so I'm approaching every role from that lens, and then finding my in through being a black gay man from New Orleans single with a dog and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's no such thing as color blind when I am, when a plate is put in front of me. I have to find my way in. And I'm just fast-forwarding, and we can talk, y'all can ask me whatever you want. This came to a head for me in my career, and being in a place that allowed me to play everything from Willie Stark and all the King's men, to Scrooge, to Walter Lee Younger in Erasing the Sun, to all the classics I do, no one asks me. We talk rarely about race in our room. That has changed. It has changed as a result of my being cast last year as Judd Fry in Oklahoma. And that was a hot mess. It was a hot mess because our theater was in the midst of talking about race in very specific ways because we produced something last year called The Every 28 Hour Plays, and those were plays directed from Ferguson, Missouri. That began a continuous discussion about race in our theater. Previously in that season we did a production of Tequila Mockingbird in Conversation with Blues, Mr. Charlie, and following the tradition of our, excuse my French, fucking with casting, we made some casting choices in that show that were highly controversial. And then that led us to Oklahoma. My being cast as Judd Fry really angered some folks because specifically of the smokehouse scene in which an African-American, Judd Fry, who was being asked by a white curly to hang himself. The specific folks who started this discussion, yes. But we have a training program, a graduate actor training program through Brown University. And one of our incoming incoming graduate students who happen to live in Providence because her girlfriend, I shouldn't say that, because she was involved with someone who was also in school in Providence to issue with the production. And it began, she began a series of protests around that show. And so the theater had to come to grips with dealing with this issue around race and casting in a way that we had not in a very long time because we applied ourselves on focusing on after-driven work and not thinking about the political social ramifications of having a black person in a particular role. And so we're in the midst of dealing with that right now. We're still not dealing with that. I shouldn't say dealing with that. We're in the midst of learning how to speak about this in a new way. Our theater, because we are a resident acting company, we're in Providence, we are in some ways off the grid and in some ways on the grid. And being off the grid has allowed us to be able to do a variety of things without the hot light of judgment and critique. And so while this discussion has been shocking and jarred to the institution, it is a conversation that we're all welcoming because it's a conversation that we have to have and that I welcome having because as we ask people of color to come into our white institutions, we cannot bamboozle them by welcoming them into our spaces and being then irresponsible in the kinds of images that we present to them. An image to you may be a completely different image to her and the impact on her. And that's something that we're now learning. And I know it seems like, well, hell, y'all should have known that for a long time, we've been around for 53 years. But you guys, this is a very new conversation in terms of what we can and can't do around casting, especially when we're in already a crappy profession where people want to work and there are no roles for people of color. And so we're always having to make those kinds of choices between either working or not working, paying the rent or not paying the rent, raising the family or not having kids. Can I afford to have a dog? Will I ever own a home or should I get out of the business? So we're making real-life artistic choices and financial choices and social choices and all these things. I hope this discussion can be a conversation about all of those things, whether you're a director or a producer or an actor, all of us have to make decisions not only based upon making good art, but we have to make these decisions in concert with good social policy. We have to because we will be irrelevant as an art form if we're not more sensitive to the very people that we're trying to attract to invest in what it is that we do. And I'll talk too much. Thank you. That's a great beginning, Joe. Thank you. And I would just throw in this quote from this past Sunday's New York Times. I don't know if anybody saw. There was the back page of the Times magazine with an interview with Aziz Manzi, who I directed all his life time ago. And merchant events, but that was a good story. And the New York Times asked him, apropos what Joe was saying, you've spoken about how the limited number of roles available for South Asian and Middle Eastern actors who put them in a bind about accepting roles that might enforce stereotypes. Are there any roles that you regret taking? Aziz Manzi's answer is I don't regret taking any roles. There are roles that I would look back on now and think, oh boy, I wouldn't do that anymore. But at the time I had to pay the bills, I realized it was actually through that it was actually through that I can, in some small way, be instrumental in trying to move that conversation into a different place, where you have brown characters who actually are the source of the story, rather than just adjacent brown people in a predominantly white world. So, over to you, Mike. So tell us about your work and some of the things you've said philosophically about how your work and other work of artists of color should perhaps be produced. Hi, so I'm a playwright. I grew up in San Diego. I also am the co-director of Mahi Writer's Lab, which is the largest collective of Asian-American fairies ever assembled in history in the court of time. I think the reason that I'm in Boston right now is because my play Tiger Style is going up at the Huntington and so we have the first review site we run through November 13th, so you all should check it out. And the reason that I'm here today I think is two-fold. Within my own plays, I'm constantly navigating the sort of politics of what do I put inside my plays in terms of representation and what's pressing for me, what stories do I want to tell, and how much do I want to steer into being an Asian-American artist and sort of creating Asian-American characters as opposed to not. And that's something that all of the writers within my year really slamming our heads against because there's a wide variety of what we do aesthetically and politically in our art. And then the longer that I've been a playwright the more that I start to think about politics that are sort of outside of your work because you as a playwright are just kind of making your individual plays but then those plays live in an ecosystem and so then I am part of the Dramatist Scale Council which is like a sort of governing body for playwrights and within my year I've been doing a lot of works of activism around casting just in terms of yeah, like how Indigenous representatives are sort of thinking about diversity and how to widen the range of narratives that are being told on our stages because I think that as far as like our work that there's a potential trap of presenting your like having plays that confirm preconceptions about who we are as opposed to like sort of an authentic and nuanced version of who we are and how to get our work out there and sort of get people to widen the kind of lens that they're viewing us through. Hey, I'm Destiny Lilly I'm a casting director and I work primarily in film and digital media. I have a background in theater though. I started out like some of you I was in college and I wanted to be an actor and by the time I graduated I realized I didn't want to play maids my whole life and so I changed the course, no really this year but I think that if I were in college now I wouldn't have that same choice to face that a lot has changed in the relatively short period of time which I think is great and I feel like working in casting I've been able to be a small small part of that but there's still a really really long way to go in terms of the types of roles that are offered and so much has changed and I think it's important for us to look at that but there's still a lot of progress to be made and still a lot of understanding that I think people often don't understand why representation is important or what it means to feel represented. When you've been represented your whole life it you don't realize how rare that is for a lot of other people you know and how it wasn't until I was maybe in my 20s that I really felt like I saw anyone who was similar to me in like any kind of media which is a long time to not see yourself reflect the fact and that's like changing but yeah I consider myself both like an artist and an advocate for inclusion I'm also on the board of New York Women in Film and Television and so I'm a hardcore advocate for equality for women in the industry because as you guys all know we have a long way to go on that too so yeah I'm happy to be here. You've brought up a do I need to be I'm always so loud that the idea of a mic just shocks me. If you had brought up the Tim Burton article that you had sent me when I asked you for different you know when I asked all of us to contribute ideas of how to start the conversation and that brought up the issue of how color does speak not unlike some of the things that Joe brought up that happen in Trinity do you want to touch on that in terms of what happens when when choices are made around the certain ethnic casting deliberateness that not a great use of words there but sure I think that for a long time working in casting like you know I'm still like relatively new but a lot of people working in casting for a long time and a casting notice unless race was specified it was default white you know that's true right so like so the idea is it's like there are like regular people and then there's like other people you know because if it wasn't specified that meant that it was white and slowly over time that has slightly changed somewhat and you'll see more roles that are deliberately open or deliberately okay we're looking for you know maybe a white guy or a black guy like it there is a bit more openness but I think that you still have this idea and this applies to gender as well where there's like a story and then there's a black story or an Asian story and there's an idea that like if the story is about mostly white people it's just a story and if the story is about mostly black people, mostly Asian people, mostly Latino people then that's like a black story or an Asian story or it's like four Asian people or four black people whereas a story is forever one so that is something that you don't think is changing back to the tone deafness of that quote and I don't want to misquote him but basically what Tim Burton said is it wasn't incredibly articulate but basically he was pointing out that is a fantastical story that is not even set in reality he said things they're called for things or they don't and then he went on to talk about if he watched a black exploitation movie he wouldn't be like where are the white people but what that brings home is so in this fantasy world that he's created it doesn't call for people who aren't white and it's like well we're getting into this territory of an idea that whiteness is the default setting which is a dangerous place to be which is a place that we've been in for a long time and that I think we are slowly but surely moving out of I'm a part of a group called Origins that is specifically about black science fiction and horror and like film and television and people are always like whoa black people and science fiction it's like blowing their mind I'm like yeah that's a thing that's a really big thing there's lots of people who think whoa those things together so I think that you know as tone-deaf as that statement can be I don't think that a lot of people have been pushed to think about race as something that is just like part of who everybody is and a story if something's just a story and it can include people of all different backgrounds like it doesn't have to be like it's a story Angela Davis was here a few weeks ago we had the honor of hearing I think she said at the Berkeley event I know she said we've decided that human is by default white and male and you know and that everything else has been added on questions do you want to throw in some questions yeah would you suggest in a casting notice to write something that specifies that this is racially open so basically one of the things that I do is I work at the school of visual arts and I teach students how to write casting breakdowns as part of what I do and this is what I do so I'm not saying this is what everybody does this is what I do as someone who is consciously aware of these things I think if gender is important to the role you specify if you're open you specify that you're open same thing with race if race is important to the role you specify if you're open you specify that you're open and I think that that's important but I also think that actors have to be advocates for themselves and not everyone is necessarily as conscious of this as I am and I think it's important for actors to reject the idea of default whiteness and say well this doesn't specify so I'm applying for it no matter because you never know when you're going to apply for something it's like oh I hadn't thought of it that way because a lot of the time it's not it's not conscious discrimination sometimes people just haven't thought of it and then they get the one head shot from the one Asian actor that decided to apply for this non-specific role and they're like oh yeah maybe no I hadn't thought of this and it starts to hopefully move that conversation forward but I do think it's important also to have specific work I don't think everything should be open because there are stories that are specifically about people from specific countries or people from specific backgrounds and they don't want to create a world that is that doesn't have that specificity because that's really important culturally as well can I pass the same question on to the two of you in my place so for Tiger Style it says cast Asian actors to play Asian characters great and it's not like the characters are Chinese American but it's not apparently intrinsically obvious that you would necessarily cast Asian actors I guess because I have a friend Lloyd Sun who's played Jesus in India which takes place in India got cast in the university production with white people playing Indians which was not his intention and kind of offensive to South Asians and and that productions got shut down because they weren't honoring the intention of the writer I also have a play called Teenage Dick which is an adaptation of Richard III that takes place in high school and it says cast disabled actors to play disabled characters in the disabled community I'm able-bodied so I'm speaking for people I think that there's a lot of sort of able-bodied actors that are using disability as some kind of metaphor for triumph which defies their lived experience so in order to you know if you want to do this play you have to find disabled actors to do it so yes I think that it should be specified I think that your question though also kind of points to these like sort of multiple um like sort of multiple entry points of potential bias because it's like as artists when we're creating our work like we have potential biases in terms of how we're thinking about these characters and sort of how we want to portray the world and there's places you know blind spots that we have that we're not sort of making stories that are inclusive but then when you put that piece of art out you know to production companies or to theaters um the casting director potentially has biases in terms of like their favorite actors and maybe not you know casting as wide of a net as possible for each individual role and then audience members have biases in terms of how they think that you know that these roles should be portrayed all of which is just to say that um there's this is a very complex problem and uh specifying the role is like one part of a very large sort of puzzle that like so I mean in regards to the Tim Burton article I mean I think that it's great that audiences are so passionate about um about films to the point that they're you know that they're really chiming in about you know how they feel about um something that was in their head that when it gets you know sort of made concrete is completely different from what they thought of um so I've been following a lot of these just like in um uh in Hunger Games like over uh I can't remember the character's name uh but uh and then like the latest sort of Harry Potter like you know uh the right the Hermione right like so I just think that it's great that um there's feedback within audiences and I think that you vote with your dollars and you also sort of you know vote with social media but that I think reinforces that we're hungry for you know shifts as an actor what turns you off or allows you to enter a room really openly on a casting breakdown first of all you guys have said so much that I agree with and we could go off in an hour and either fast several facets of what you talked about in this question first of all I agree that in speaking from an actor point of view we aren't sometimes given the luxury or provide the luxury with thinking about these things in this way because again like I said in the beginning being an actor especially no being an actor it's a crappy crappy business um and so we sometimes don't give ourselves the luxury or have the space and time to be able to think about some of these big questions around casting because you simply want to work and you want to be able to hone your craft um but I think I'm going to answer that question by saying to either any actors in this room even all of you as artists that we have to think about these things because what being a part of a a regional theater a resident theater company has taught me is that as I move more out of commercial theater that my art making is hand in hand with my advocacy work in my community that my art making is a social service my art making is a public service that I'm not just making plays to make plays but I'm looking to make plays and make work that's in conversation with what my community is talking about okay we have to stop thinking about ourselves as somehow providing you know that we're part of this thing where art's a luxury item that it's for rich people to pay money and go and see if you can afford it that you know art making is a critical way that we communicate as human beings art making makes us human art making is a fundamental way that we communicate to each other as people to reflect what is that we feel and see we're all artists in that capacity to me creativity and being creative is as much about breathing and drinking and eating as a form of expression and being okay so I think the more that we think about our role in communities as that we also have to move the conversation from the powers and be in a community from oh can you please give me some sir to do our little play to can you afford not to support what we're doing for downtown can you afford not to have us teaching your children can you afford not to have us helping other non for profit raise money in this community so it takes the realm of art making out of being this luxury thing to being something that's critical that said we have to think about in casting what is the story that we're trying to tell and we have to stop with this myth that we are this post-racial society where people don't see color this cycle and eight years of Barack Obama whom I love him like love him has proven to us that we are not in a post-racial society that we still have work to do as far as race is concerned and so in that we have to take full responsibility for the stories that we tell on stage and kind of going back to my own shortcoming I wanted to play Judd Fry because I'm a baritone with ten attendances but there are no baritone roles written in musical theater ok and Judd Fry is one of those parts I knew that Dick Jenkins who was our director Oscar nominated Emmy winning that guy's the best by Sharon Jenkins directed Oklahoma and I knew that they were going to also add in the song Lonely Room which is always cut from the musical back into Oklahoma which gives Judd his humanity it's after the whole the poor Judd is dead would you kill yourself scene Judd Fry is left in the smoke because he sings his gorgeous baritone song called Lonely Room and it's always cut from the musical because no one's been interested in Judd's humanity no one's we're all interested in the iconic story of Curly and Lori falling in love and the frontier blah blah blah Oklahoma is a very dark story about people living on the frontier but living within a Native American territory and this Judd Fry character is a character whom the authors have insinuated is a person and through the text is one of darker complexion but no one's ever gone there because we have not been interested in that part of that American story ok so they were like we're going to add that song back in and we want to go there and I'm like I want to sing that song I want that part it never crossed my mind that every time I stood in that smoke house and I had that white my white dear friend Charlie Thurston a fierce Curly trying to convince me to kill myself it never occurred to me that our black audience members and white audience members and woke audience members on whatever level saw that as a lynching it never occurred to me that's my fault and I'm trying to get better about that because of course I'm trying to unshackle myself from my previous notions about being an actor and making the rent and having to take the job and not thinking about that stuff because I got to eat versus I have to think about those things especially now that I am in a community that's allowing me to have space and license and agency I got time to think about it now and I better think about it otherwise I'm going to be extinct as an artist ain't nobody going to come see me in my bullshit if I'm not taking into account what other folks are thinking about so my position in my company has given me this grace but we have to all find the space and courage to ask these same questions in our work because folks ain't going to stand for it and thank God for you young people y'all are calling us out on it and that has to continue it has to continue that's great I'm just going to throw up one quick go ahead and then I want to go back to the lighting the range so with the rise of Hamilton there's obviously a lot of talk of what is color blind cast in versus color conscious cast in and what do you think the conversation should be with that because color blindness is a thing that obviously you spoke to this that is not a beneficial thing to say that we're living in post-racial America because that's clearly not true with black Americans innocently dying all over like less than 28 hours probably every day so what are your thoughts on some theater people particularly white liberals saying that oh it's color blind cast in versus color conscious I don't know if anyone is saying color blind I feel like in the theater we're not saying color blind anymore I mean they're I'm literally writing a book on this so and I was just having this conversation because there is one place where you still do truly see color blind casting and that's usually in classical theater because you can have a Shakespeare play where you know Polonia is white and laertes is black and it's not supposed to mean anything it's not part like these related characters or different ethnicities and I mean even though we as an audience will see that these people are different colors like we're not blind but it doesn't have meaning within the context of the story that still exists but really I only see it really in classical theaters the only place that you really see that because as you get closer to the modern day I think people would start to read more into it and in the case of Hamilton I mean that is very conscious I mean it's not blind at all it's extremely purposeful and that is another way to look at casting that you know is relatively uncommon but still is a part of what's going on but then there's this idea of just being like open which is not what's happening in Hamilton which is okay I'm just gonna find the best actor the person who I think is best for this role and it doesn't matter if what race that person is or maybe even what gender that person is I'm looking for the best actors I'm doing something open so there are different ways of approaching this idea but I think it's really careful to I think that sometimes in a desire to be progressive we can forget that there's a reason that certain stories are told a certain way there's a reason you can't do like an all white reason in the sun like you know it doesn't make any sense so yeah it won't make any sense well I mean I was saying earlier that when I was in college back before I decided I wanted to stop acting because they didn't want to play me it's gross in my life I was in a nips and play I was in the master builder and that's true and I was the only person of color in that yes I think so it's been a while but again that was in an academic setting where academic settings are very different than professional settings I think that you guys know that also people I think film is very different than theater I think that in theater there's a much more openness to casting people of color in roles that are you know there's a in New York there's a sense and sensibility running where one of the sisters is played by a black actress and it's not supposed to mean anything you know it's just like she was a great actress let's have her play this role so but you wouldn't see that in film typically unless it were an experimental film you really wouldn't see like a sense and sensibility film where one of the actors was a person of color so to answer your question all these things still exist in their own way and I think each project has their own approach but one thing I like to also point out is that casting has also gotten more and more specific though because 30 years ago no one would expect necessarily that a disabled role would be played by a disabled actor and now that's starting to change slowly so yeah so there's also more specificity it's like if a role oh gosh I'm trying to remember the name of the actor who's the lead male actor I'm fresh on the boat fresh off the boat no the father Randall Reddlepark right and I think he is Korean I believe yes and there are people who feel like he shouldn't be in that role because he's Korean and not Chinese so and that's a discussion that would be like oh he's Asian where you're complaining about 30 years ago so there's a lot to talk about within that can I throw onto this conversation you talked about the production of Jesus in India that was canceled on a college campus you know even if you look around this room we're challenged in some ways in some college communities different than professionally where one could argue oh you cast a wider net but there are smaller towns smaller theater companies or colleges where there's a desire to use your freight you know to widen the range of the narratives to expose everybody to different ways of telling the story and sometimes you know the story about the cancellation of the production of Jesus in India was disturbing on a number of levels both because it was clear the playwright's intentions weren't being honored but maybe for those of us in certain academic settings where we're trying to stretch the narratives how do we handle it then if we can't meet the playwright's intentions does that mean we don't get access to that voice in that community can we meet it halfway this is uh there's two parts to this question one is about the academic setting the other is kind of going back to your question about color blind versus color conscious in regards to the color blind color conscious thing I think the terminology doesn't really matter because I think that it's very hard to disrupt existing power structures and the existing power structure co-ops and benefits from new terminology that you create to try to create a distinction and they'll sort of swallow that up and so I think that like the heart of your question is really about like how did Hamilton disrupt the existing power structure which was by you know very actively placing people of color in these in these sort of iconic roles to sort of broaden who has access to the legacy of the building of America which all immigrants do and so I guess what I'm saying is that like people came up with this term color blind to try to you know to try to create more diversity and that got swallowed and so now you're coming up with this color conscious and it's just like so I think that it's it's sort of a it's a smoke screen and so I just want to put that out there that really what it is is about democracy democratizing kind of access and yeah in regards to the sort of university thing I mean I think that that's that's really tricky because I didn't really get a lot of training and business practice in undergrad and I think that sometimes in an epidemic setting there's this sort of like follow your dreams like kind of you know art is for everybody kind of stuff that doesn't actually match up when you try to do this professionally and I think that it creates a lot of room for for you know like using a writer's work in a way that's not intended and so I think that you really have to if you're going to use it against the writer's intention that you either find other material or that you really contextualize for the students that sort of like this is how this would be done professionally because I think otherwise if you're doing a disservice to students who are coming out in the professional field and thinking that like directing means my interpretation over you know sort of like run roughshod over this person's work so I think that only certain schools are directing right you know but unless though I just think that it really requires doing a lot of searching for material that like fits the students that you have and it requires being sensitive to kind of how presenting the work in this way will be perceived and contextualizing other questions yeah that would be the profession I agree with this being an actor that I can only approach a role from my 20 years on this earth and from my experiences and then you said that when it comes to my stories there is this like weird sort of thing that if a person colors in a role that means something but we're trying to be away from that so sort of where's the happy medium between those things because yes I can only approach a role as an Indian American woman growing up in the south but then how can I do that and then also with the context of I don't want that to matter as much as it does but that's why it's so multi-layered because it's like you as an individual are advocating for yourself and you're trying to see yourself in sort of this wider range of roles as possible but then there's also kind of on the producer's side like politics and what am I presenting do you know what I mean so it's like I think that the reason why you're sensing the conflict there is because they do a lot against each other because if you as an actor sort of presume that you're completely universal and can be in every role and don't sort of you know recognize some of the inherent limitations that that's bad but at the same time if you sort of self select out of things that you would be eligible for that's bad too because then they don't get to see you and you know and audiences don't get to kind of widen sort of who could possibly fit that role so it's like I think that you know if you're advocating for yourself as much as possible you're kind of doing your job and you're seeing yourself you know the humanity of you know what you're bringing into a wide range of roles but then I think that when you have your producer hat on or the producers who are going to cast you they also have to think about what are the optics of this of casting you and you know what I'm saying so there is actually kind of an inherent question there I'd love to throw out into the mix to the phrase cultural appropriation and how that plays into choices artistic choices thinking of the mother courage production and the conflicts around CSC for those of you this was a production of mother courage where the there was a context of a different culture being put on the play not incorrectly per se in terms of taking a play by Brecht and setting it in a different culture but then issues around how the director and the actor disagreed on how that culture in the context of the play was being used being sort of intentionally vague here but wondering what your thoughts are on how casting plays in to cultural narratives and where it's okay to transform something and guessing the answers and the specificity and the consciousness and the context but what are your thoughts on that phrase I can only respond to that based upon this kind of piggybacking off of something that we've talked about you know I just returned from the TCG National Conference in DC and that's all we're talking about right now is diversity and inclusion one specific issue that's been coming up quite a bit actually in talking about these classic stories is there's discussion right now within the theater about and I think this applies to film in every genre what stories should we still be telling there's a school of thought that feels like we shouldn't be doing Shakespeare that I as an African American artist shouldn't be in Shakespeare or we shouldn't be doing these plays anymore with their value now so we're also grappling with these wonderful stories that I love what I love about the classics is the fact that we have these universal stories that people of all races and cultures can find access to these kinds of big stories about L in the big word with the big L and death, big D and these big issues and this discussion about whether we should be doing these now I love Shakespeare you know I love I want to go through every part that I can possibly play in but there's a real discussion about whether it's appropriate now and whether we should put these things aside and I disagree with that I disagree with it strongly I think there's a place for these classic stories there's a place for all of us to find access in this common humanity on stage we have to just take this by a case by case basis and we have to all think about this from this new lens I shouldn't say new I should say lens that's been cleaned a little bit that's been sharpened as the focus has sharpened we can now approach all these plays in thinking about race in this kind of way and knowing again keep going back to the simple things the images that we put on stage how we use bodies of color in space in juxtaposition with white bodies in certain kinds of stories tell certain they have power they have historical power and we can't deny that and we have to stop pretending in this world to make believe what we're all doing in license and age is just to make up shit because if we do, that has we can't do that anymore we have to respond it has power and I guess it's maybe reminding us that our work does have power you know? going back to the thing is that what we do is important so I guess that's how we answer that question I'm just thinking about it we have to just be careful on the case by case basis I'll say one more thing about this we had a big discussion even about even whether our play to kill a mockingbird what it was about and because we were making certain casting choices in that show people wanted that play to be about something that it wasn't and I kept saying no you guys y'all can make all the choices you want about mixing it up and having white people do this and black people do this but this play is about race don't tell me this play is about race this play is about a coming to age story this play ain't about scout learning how to be it ain't about that you know so in trying to in trying to justify the choices that we make on stage because we somehow sometimes we're being too cute and too clever by half we have to just be able to say what a play is about okay? I don't want to see an all black ass death of a salesman I really don't I think that play is uniquely about experience in American culture just as August Wilson is just as raising the sun is and so we have to just be honest about those things and allow things to be what they are and for whom they are for but we have that luxury now that now that we have a long way to go but there's more access for folk when there was less access we were having different conversations but there is more access we have a lot of work to do to provide more access and money towards and filmmakers to create stories that we are not passers-by in or we happen to be in but are about and for us we have to be better about that but we have to just take it on case by case basis another question Damian sort of going off of that the notion of what sort of classical stories are worth still being part of the cultural narrative of sort of the the body politic coming outside of white western classical theater how do we approach other classical tales from around the world with this sort of color consciousness in mind while also avoiding then it becoming just completely imperialized by white performers how do we start to allow for more narrative great question I think from my point of view this starts with number one in education and how we educate young people in programs and training programs again and I'm talking about audiences being bamboozled when we say we want y'all to come but when you come you come and watch an image and you're like jesus y'all don't want me to be here so we're responsible for folks who are coming to the space the same things with our young people who we ask to come and spend three years in the master's program of four years in the BA program that we can't just say well traditionally this has been a unit on Shakespeare as we invite people of color and people we have to adjust how we train kids and how we provide spaces we have to provide support there has to be a mechanism you can't just invite people and say come and we want you and then they get there and they're like oh shit they ain't nothing here for me okay so and I know that's something that we, I'm not saying we're good at it Trinity and Brown, our program we are struggling with that right now and I'm having conversations with our kids all the time and they're like Joe I'm so proud of this we have one of the most diverse classes in the history of our program this year and they all come to me and say Joe I'm happy to be here and see all these black and colored faces but I'm here now what we're going to do, what you're going to do for me you know and so we're working through that we're working through that so that's going to require the white power holders, stakeholders in these institutions working in concert with their students and working in concert with everybody to know it's about curriculum too that we can't just be training kids we have a traditional sort of white western or European notion about what's a classic so that's going to require our people in power to become less lazy and do some homework and go back to school you know what I mean because we have people who have been teaching in these institutions for a very long time out of one thing and they're like something similar ain't nobody talking fourth wall no more that was a technique when I went to school with fourth wall and made my magic nobody's talking about that we got to how we teach the methods that we use and all of us have to go back to school and stop being lazy that includes people in power but there is a combination of in the conversation you can't do in the red and brown water without reading Lorca that's right so you need your Lorca in there with red and brown water now I don't know if Lorca counts you know on what classics grid Lorca lives but you do end up in these conversations of how these writers are in dialogue with each other and impacting each other so you do need to stay awake but you can't just say okay it all starts in you know in 2000 you've got to figure out where the conversation or something as stupid as we love talking about the musicality of Shakespeare but we don't know how to even begin talking about the musicality of Wilson right you know what I mean and that jazz aesthetic is something very very specific who's teaching that I know people who are willing to have a Shakespeare class so it's this kind of stuff that has to be part of our lexicon part of our terminology you were going to say something I cut you off I was just going to say that I find it fascinating because I think that all these things are important like since I told I mean I'm part of like an academic world but I don't like engage in it as deeply as you do so I'm like the idea of like not studying Shakespeare anymore is just like what which one? Wilson's target it wasn't I was there part of it part of it but I will say that I think that it's not about excluding things from the canon it's about including so it's not like oh we should stop studying this I think it's about we should start studying this as well we should start looking at stories that weren't necessarily written down but are part of culture and that are passed down in another way I think that in academia we put a certain amount of emphasis on the written word and written tradition over cultural tradition and over performance tradition even in like performance studies and I think it takes looking at that and looking at what is there to learn from whole cultures that didn't necessarily write down their stories in the same way because they think one of the reasons and don't get me wrong I love Shakespeare he's great but one of the reasons that he's endured is because it's written down because even his contemporaries haven't endured as well and they could have been great but maybe they just didn't survive as well because they weren't written down and somebody lost the folio or whatever or they weren't written in English all these other reasons but I will also say as someone who does a lot of professional work nobody cares about that once you get in the commercial world nobody cares so any of it in the commercial world nobody cares about studying, nobody cares about cultural appropriation nobody cares it's a lot of these deep discussions that you have when you're in school that are great and will inform everything you do you get into a commercial space and nobody cares and that's just not at all what's happening so so yeah, sorry about that I'm so sorry we don't have Edie Velasco on the out front we don't want to talk about some of the county choices that they've made on Transparent along these lines and where they've honored some of these things but I also feel like I wonder sometimes when you look at a movie from 100 years ago or 75 years ago you look at The Good Earth seeing that movie Treasure of the Serial Minder where you have movies writer in actual yellow full on yellow face she wouldn't ask you for that and how at the time there was like prize and now we're like cringing and I wonder if like 75 years from now 100 years from now people are going to look at things that we love now and be cringing and saying like ooh how could they have done that like and I know you can't you can't create art for future generations like you can't be like oh I need to create this hoping that a future generation will it'll fit their you know abilities but did you wonder about that sometimes and what we're doing now are people going to be like oh gosh they were so backward back then in 75 years yeah hopefully there's progress last question because it is it's four o'clock so I'm trying to be good about time quickly Scott said about this movie about some case that the reason that he couldn't cast people who were not liking his role was because he couldn't hire Muhammad such and such and on a multi-billion dollar film and expect people to show him to the theaters the next year he gets nominated for an Oscar and a really controversial Oscar season and one of the few only non-white people in his movie is extremely stereotyped into his role do you think that people's art should stand on its own or that him being nominated for an Oscar a year after this happened almost reinforces the idea that it's okay to say these sorts of things that much power I think it catches up with you he's already a very respected filmmaker before that but I think that he's going to be swallowed by time in the short term he can get away with it but I think that audiences are demanding more thoughtfulness and I also think that on the producing side of things that were not being the idea of like sort of like a bankable star like I can't you know I can't cast this person because I need these stars like it wasn't born out in the box office for that movie that movie completely tanked and so we're guilty of this in theater a lot too because we I think pay too much stock in like the New York Times reviews but like the but what those reviews say don't necessarily correlate directly with how how well the show does so when we start making decisions listening to audiences and sort of like looking at like the actual results rather than kind of you know using select facts to confirm our biases I think will be a lot healthier as an industry I'm sorry I was going to say really quickly in relation to that I think that it's important to note the difference between like public opinion box office and like the industry because the industry is sort of film industry is relatively small and really Scott is really well established in that industry and frankly a lot of people in that industry think exactly the way he does so to them saying that is not a big deal of course they're going to nominate him for an Oscar they think the same way and you know what Mike said is totally right that film totally bombed as did like the other movie with the Gerard Butler as what was that one called they don't remember Gods of Egypt thank you when I think of Egypt I think of Gerard Butler um but I think that it's also though those films didn't do well the box office but there's also a question of getting the money in the first place and they were able to get the money in the first place so there is this disconnect between maybe you know I'm not saying he's right but I'm saying maybe it does help to have a white person in the lead to get the money in the first place well it does I'm sure it does so but does that mean that you should cast like white people's Egyptians no but there is a place in between that that's like well why is that why is that the issue and I think that's a question for like all of us to figure out like why why is like a white man considered bankable and everyone else a risk I think that's the question at the core of that and there's a huge gender piece in that too I love that because it also brings up in my our realm of theater in that you know especially as we're talking more about race and diversity and inclusion this has become big business talking about race in the workplace or in theater and trying to do the right thing and become big business and what that's translated to is there are people in our fields who have been advocates and working on the front lines for justice and inclusion within our field but now it's become a big thing and there's millions of dollars being thrown at directors or institutions to work quote on developing this kind of work it's important to remember that there are people in this field who have been advocates for a very long time during this work and just because now we're hip to it and because now there's money to be made from it we ain't inventing the wheel so don't disservice people of color who have been advocates in this industry for a very long time and throw money at white institutions or white directors to do this stuff there are people that we can invest in now that have been on the front lines forever it's disrespectful to assume that we are reinventing the wheel around this issue so it's we've never made a thing about how we advocate our resources in whether it be film or TV or in the theater it's like there are people that we should be getting millions of dollars so that we don't and we are still refusing to provide space and access for people of color and gender and all across the board so we have to just check ourselves about the chicken before the egg or the egg before the chicken it's like we are not making this up and Mike this speaks directly to some of the things you've said at least on how round I know about how important it is to have a group of writers of Asian descent or theaters of color I'm linking this back to August Wilson's speech in 96 at DCG which was about white institutions being given the money to do the color conscious casting as opposed to the African American theaters which he said at the time were in danger of dying that was the core of his very revolutionary taking a far stance of saying why are we using actors of color in white institutions instead of supporting institutions of color so over to you I agree I think that all of this really comes to sort of a thoughtlessness and we should be more thoughtful and the more thoughtful we are the more the other people will gravitate towards us in the same way that people are more discerning about the ingredients in their food and huge Nabisco or whatever they're giant corporations that don't think about these ingredients and all of a sudden all their customers are like I'm not going to eat this yoga mat in my burger so we are now at a point in the arts where you're like I'm not going to pay the misrepresented or I'm not going to pay to be excluded and the more thoughtful we are about about casting the more people will buy into it so yeah I think we should maybe end on that now