AMERICAN THEATRE: Marion Grey felt blessed. It was the fall of 2019 and she was finally walking the hallowed halls of the acting school she’d “worked and prayed” and auditioned twice to get into: Juilliard Drama. A 27-year-old from Roanoke, Va., who’d gotten her undergraduate theatre degree from James Madison University, Grey (she/her) threw herself into her classes at the prestigious New York City school, and even after the pandemic hit last March kept herself active and engaged: Last summer, as president of the Juilliard Black Student Union, she helped make a video anthology of music, poetry, and dialogue titled “We the Black Artist.”
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This is such a profound article, and I felt myself resonating with it for so many different reasons. First, obviously as a student in another PWI drama conservator with a partner who teaches at yet another PWI drama conservatory, this is not unique to Julliard. The entire industry needs to have a moment of reckoning with how its actions are harmful. A moment without defensive retorts, without mansplaining why that’s how it has to be, a moment without gaslighting students about how their lived experiences aren’t valid or aren’t correct. From ArtEquity to A.R.T. so much work is ostensibly being done at these institutions, but for the most part, individual behaviors aren’t changing. Harm is still being done to BIPOC folks. For one example, we could look at what Colston said about the canon. That is work that is being done by so many BIPOC theater artists to get some representation and some acknowledgement that the “canon” is a tool of white supremacy. We are constonatly being told that this is good art, and that theater came from Greece to Italy to England to America and no one else in the world is doing theater. Theater history textbooks will some chapters on medieval Europe, they will dedicate a whole chapter to Shakespeare (who I like but he’s one dude). Meanwhile, the rest of world gets lumped into one chapter with Kabuki and Ta’ziyeh getting lumped together.
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