Things to think about before making your award nominations

Some other news

We're mostly talking about one topic this week, so here's the local, national and international news that I have decided for you is interesting:

Local
Soon there will be a new executive director of the Minnesota Theater Alliance.

National
Chicago is the hot new place for Broadway tryouts (sorry Minneapolis), and if you try to buy tickets to Hamilton from craigslist they're probably fake.

International
Did you know there was such a thing as illegal, underground ballerinas? In Iran, there is.

CTC update

Last week on News and Notes, we found out about a fourth lawsuit being opened up against Children's Theatre Company as more people open up about what happened during the company's infamous 1984 sex abuse scandal. This week, a fifth suit has been filed against CTC, this time citing negligence in the hiring and support of former technician Stephen Adamczak. Adamczak, who died in 2007, was one of the CTC staff accused and acquitted in the original 1984-1985 trials.

In the meantime, Jason Mclean, the former CTC teacher who is currently cited in three other suits against CTC is finding his current business being affected by the accusations. The Varsity Theater, a long-time concert and event spot in Minneapolis that Mclean owns, has been the target of a call for boycott. This week, Transmission, the popular monthly dance party hosted by DJ Jake Rudh, announced that it will join in the boycott.

This week, Minnesota Playlist has chosen to reprint an open letter about the CTC scandal originally posted by Rosy Simas, a professional choreographer and former Children's Theatre student, who also claims to be a victim of the 80s-era abuse. Simas is not part of any current lawsuit, but her impassioned plea, which originally appeared on Facebook and has been shared numerous times, is worth sharing again.

Desperately seeking diversity

As I write this, it is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a day intended to celebrate the legacy of a great champion of equality and civil rights in American history. (In some Southern states, it also happens to be Robert E. Lee Day, and, boy, isn't that just the strangest coincidence?) Unlike other federal holidays, we haven't quite managed to turn this day into another empty celebration of shopping; but we have started cherry-picking his quotes to move some merch, which makes me wonder how close we are to that tipping point where the history and meaning will start getting scrubbed.

America loves itself some MLK. We love playing the "I have a dream" speech once a year. We love looking at pictures of old marches and protests. And, apparently, we love performing Katori Hall's play The Mountaintop all over the place. But all that love comes at some expense (and I'm not talking about the fact that King's descendants literally charge you money for using King's words). All the exultation of King runs the risk of placing him as a storybook hero in a long-ago past that has little to do with our world. After all, we're not racist anymore, right? MLK fixed that. So, now we can beam at pictures of protestors from that dim past and call them brave heroes and turn around to criticize current day Black Lives Matters protestors for using literally the same tactics. Now we are free to turn Martin Luther King, Jr. into a white man. We can do this because a majority of America desperately wants to believe that racism died with Jim Crow.

But structural inequities still exist in our society. All you have to do is look at this year's Academy Award nominations. (See, I brought it back to the performing arts). In some strange twist of events that no one could have ever seen coming, every single one of the nominees for every single acting category is white. Jada Pinkett Smith and Spike Lee have called for a boycott of the Oscars ceremony. Hell, even the Academy itself pointed out (maybe unintentionally) how absurd the situation is when they released a promo featuring host Chris Rock calling the annual award ceremony "the white BET awards".

It would be one thing if this year's lily-white slate was a one-off. Even in the most equitable situations, random chance can produce strange results. Unfortunately, this is the second year in a row that the Academy has put itself in this situation. It was roundly mocked and derided then, and yet here we are again.

But it's not even just the last two years. The overall stats for the Oscars are horrible when it comes to diversity. The US is roughly 60% white, so you would expect, in an equitable system, that maybe around 40% of the winners of awards would not be white. This is clearly not the case; but we're having trouble digging up the cartoonish racist villains in this tale (even if you can make a compelling think-piece explaining that Selma was denied an Oscar win last year because it refused to include a white savior character). What we have instead is a case of systemic inequity, in which no one person is directly responsible, but in which our unconscious biases are manifested through the accumulation of many small actions and decisions that we can easily justify to ourselves within the structure of the system we work in.

It's how a Sony executive can say that black actors aren't a good bet for leading men and not feel like he's the one being racist. It's how theater leaders can say that they don't hire more female playwrights because there just aren't enough of them "in the pipeline". It's how a cop who should know better can tell people to run over protestors, not because of race, but because of inconvenience.

You don't have to be Bull Connor to contribute to inequity. You don't even have to be mean (although we can probably all agree that telling people to run over other people with their cars is kind of mean). All you have to be is a little bit intellectually lazy.

But, here's the other thing: you don't have to watch the Academy Awards, either. I've been refusing to watch them for years, and I feel great! The Oscars were not sanctioned by some all-knowing god to be the final word on our culture. It's part of an entrenched system of inequity, but it's a part that you can easily unplug.

I know that I'll have to miss out on knowing immediately what the best movie of the year was supposed to be. I won't be there the moment the Academy has crowned the next film that will live on in the hearts and minds of subsequent generations, like those still beloved "Best Picture" winners of the past Out of Africa, Ordinary People, Chariots of Fire, The Apartment, The Greatest Show on Earth, and Gentleman's Agreement… you know, the great ones that everyone studies in film classes. I'll just have to live with that.

Anyway, in my heart of hearts, I already know what the best movie of the year was. I don't need the Academy to tell me that.