Color (un)conscious

Congratulations are in order

Before we get started this week, let's give shouts out to all the people who are lucky enough to be honored in the only way America really knows how: with money.

First of all, a big, big congratulations to St. Paul's TU Dance, whose founders Toni Pierce-Sands and Uri Sands were named USA Knight Foundation Fellows for 2015 by United States Artists. The award is nice, and I'm sure the plaque they'll get is very pretty, but it also comes with that most coveted prize of all: $50,000 in unrestricted funds.

You didn't have to be recognized by a national foundation to enjoy some winning this week. Last Thursday was Give to the Max Day, Minnesota's "Yay! Everybody wins!" celebration. Last week I encouraged you all to give enough to crash the GiveMN site, but I guess Minnesotans just don't love nonprofit organizations enough to murder an innocent website. Still, you all gave over $18 million to nonprofits this year, so you shouldn't feel too bad about yourselves.

Sure, all the participating nonprofits in Give to the Max Day are winners, but let's be deliciously capricious in declaring some organizations more winners than others, shall we? According to GiveMN's leaderboards, some performing arts organizations clawed their way into the top 100 most funded 2015 campaigns: Hennepin Theatre Trust (#14); Ragamala Dance (#26); HUGE Improv Theater (#41); and Children's Theatre Company (#77). Also, Springboard for the Arts came in at a respectable #21.

But it wouldn't be Give to the Max Day without something that feels suspiciously like gambling. GiveMN gives out bonus $1,000 gifts to randomly selected organizations who received donations in a given hour throughout the day. While I would love to honor all of these winners (especially ones with names that sound like they should be the title of a play already, like the Apple Valley High School Trap Shooting Club), I'll just limit myself to the performing arts organizations who got lucky this year: Interact Center for Visual and Performing Arts; Workhaus Collective (which my autocorrect insists on changing to "Workhouse", because it's too stupid to know that that's an entirely different company); and, again, HUGE Improv Theater.

I just love applying for stuff

Do you not feel like enough of a winner after all that? Want to improve your life and seek, respect, fame and fortune? You're really in the wrong business. You're in theater, dummy!

However, you can still apply to be a part of a festival where you can finally show them all how amazing you are. Applications for the 2016 Fringe Festival are now open, and those are chosen completely at random, so your amazing talent better come with a dollop of luck. Also, applications are open for Red Eye's 2016 Works in Progress festival, which is chosen by an arcane process that no mere mortal can understand (or, at least, that I could find on their website).

Colorblind

Recently on News and Notes I've talked a bit about the Jubilee, a grand project to make every show in American in 2020 a show by a person from a traditionally marginalized group. As it turns out, Minnesota is signing up more theater companies for the pledge than any other state. However, the list of companies that have signed on so far is actually smaller than I had expected.

Maybe this is because half of America believes we live in a "post-racial" society. I'm guessing that this 50% of Americans are the reason why stories like what I'm about to share with you just keep happening.

The first is from about a month ago, when an amateur theater group at Kent State University in Ohio announced that they would be putting on Katori Hall's The Mountaintop. This play, which debuted to great acclaim in 2009, is about the last night in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. before his murder in 1968, and if you look at the press photos for the production, you might find it strange that the famous reverend doesn't appear to be in them. There's just this white guy who is… oh… OK, it's a white guy playing King. To be fair, the director of the show actually cast both a white man and a black man to play king, who each performed the show on different nights, but I guess the black actor must have missed the photo shoot or something.

Playwright Katori Hall was none too pleased when she found out, but, in the strictest legal sense, there was nothing she could do about it at the time. The performance license for The Mountaintop didn't actually stipulate that MLK be played by an African-American, because, really, do you need this explained to you?

But that's America for you: leave any loophole, and someone will climb right through it. (Am I right, DraftKings?) Hall has since closed that loophole by adding such a stipulation to the contract, the whole time probably shaking her head and muttering, "Seriously? Seriously?!"

So, here's the other story, in which the playwright definitely did have the forethought to stipulate the race of the actors involved; and, yes, it's at another university.

This time, we're looking at Clarion University in Pennsylvania, which was putting up a production of Lloyd Suh's Jesus in India, which tells the tale of, well, Jesus visiting India. Unfortunately for the Clarion University department of visual and performing arts, the play specifically states that actors playing the three Indian characters in the show, should, in fact, be of Indian descent, and less than 1% of Clarion's entire student body is from any even remotely Asian background, so the production was cast just a little bit differently than Suh intended.

So, when Suh found out, he moved to have the production shut down, because, as he stated in a letter to the school: “The play is called JESUS IN INDIA. India is not irrelevant.”

Howard Sherman gave a pretty nuanced look at the Jesus in India situation on his blog, and let the director of the show explain her side of things; but it has since become apparent that Clarion didn't actually have the completed contract to do the show in the first place.

It's easy to push these stories off into a strictly legal framework. The U.S. copyright code, for all its complexities and failings, is pretty clear when it comes to the control an author has over his or her work. In both of these cases the intentions of the playwright were not respected. But, let's get out of the cut and dry legalese and look at the wet and messy socio-political aspects: Now that Hamilton has opened up the world to famous white people being played by actors of color, you're going to see more and more people in our "post-racial" society arguing for it to go the other way as well. So, I'm going to do something I don't normally do, and give the last word in this section to someone at HowlRound. Let them explain to you the concepts of color conscious casting and color conscious directing, because, seriously, we still have to explain this?

Fit

And, finally, in the realm of things that still somehow need to be explained to people, here is your guide to costume fitting etiquette. Please try not to screw this one up, at least.