Monday, October 25, 2021
The Week That Shook Center Theatre Group
AMERICAN THEATRE: “We knew we had to pivot and let folks know,” said Meghan Pressman (she/her), the managing director of CTG, which had on Sept. 30 proudly announced a 10-show 2021-22 season at two of its Los Angeles venues (the mid-sized Mark Taper Forum and the intimate Kirk Douglas Theatre, though one Taper production, The Lehman Trilogy, would be presented at CTG’s larger Ahmanson Theatre). It was by many measures a diverse mix of plays and musicals, blending new work and revivals by both local and out-of-town writers, a majority of them people of color, but for one significant metric: gender parity. Only one of those 10 plays was written by a woman, Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky.
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In Anti-Racist Theatre we often touch upon the idea of intersectionality, which is defined as the understanding that complexity of different identities and how those identities overlap. When working in social justice theatre, you have to be aware of intersectionality, and this incident is a great example of why. Because all oppressed identities have overlap, you must be aware of all identities when trying to uplift a specific group. In this article, the diversity aimed event gave BIPOC artists a platform, but only the identity of race was prioritized, so the event ended up excluded a lot of women, and BIPOC women. In trying to help the BIPOC artistic community, harm was unintentionally created that isolated BIPOC women (and women in general). We must always be aware of intersectionality. It can keep us from excluding groups, whether the exclusion was intentional or not.
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