Los Angeles Times: For Netflix’s “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” writer-director-star Radha Blank channeled the frustrations of a career in theater into her first feature film. Chief among them: the white producer who helps her on-screen alter ego debut a play on Broadway. This gatekeeper’s less helpful notes include saying her piece isn’t “Black” enough, requires a white character to “grab the core audience” and would be perfect for a white director who just staged “A Raisin in the Sun.”
2 comments:
It is good to read as many stories like this as you can in the current theater world. I think the more exposure we as white theater makers get to the injustices that our fellow collaborators are experiencing, the closer we can get to actual equality in theater. Simply reading these 40 different snippets of stories is a really good way to open our eyes to what injustice really means. I have to think there are times where I have made some off hand remark like these discussed in the article that has had a way bigger negative impact than I could imagine. As a white person, I have the privilege to brush these things off, but it stays with those who receive them, which is why it is so important to see them in writing like this. Actually reading the words that have been the instrument of harm for people is powerful and can give us more insight into how our behavior has impacted others and what we can do to change that.
I really appreciate this article and how they gathered so many stories of racism in theater. I have been interested to know the history of racism in theater and the BIPOCs experience so that I can learn from it and know how to be better and better the industry. Listening to stories are critical to understanding someone else’s experiences. It seems like a lot of the experiences center around erasure and adapting plays for the white gaze. I have noticed that most plays about the Black experience are about Black trauma. Multiple playwrites brought this up and that it’s not fair to them to have to endure that? They shouldn’t have to dull down their blackness and should be allowed to write plays where the characters are authenticity Black. The white “gatekeepers” insist that they change the characters or explain certain things to cater to the white audience. But stories with white playwrights and white cast are considered “universal” and are allowed to just exist without explanation. The problem won’t get better either if the “gatekeepers” or leaders are all white. Unless there is equity and diversity in leadership, theaters with continue with these racist practices that continue to harm and erase Black artists.
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