20 Years Ago: A Letter to the Editor. Now: The Getting Played Symposium.

By Kathleen Antonia Tarr

This year is the 10^th anniversary of the Getting Played Symposium on Equity in the Entertainment Industry and Awards which I founded in response to what I observed as rampant discrimination in casting, direction, and production.

2015 was also the year I delivered the General Session at the Annual Meeting of the State Bar of California with my guests Amy Pietz and Edward James Olmos. That experience speaking to over 1,000 of California’s attorneys about a blind spot inspired me to pen a law review article, “Bias and the Business of Show: Employment Discrimination in the ‘Entertainment’ Industry,” later published in the University of San Francisco Law Review Forum in 2016.

More than five years earlier, I produced a feature length documentary, “Getting Played: Who’s Playing You?!” that was Honorable Mention at the 2010 International Black Women’s Film Festival. That film was also a response, this time to being directed to “be Blacker” in a long-running San Francisco musical, and after I protested the racist language, being fired the day before Thanksgiving.

There have been myriad distressing Bay Area theater experiences from being casually told by an artistic director that I was by far the best auditioner, but the role was for the mother in a family that they were casting White, to arguing with a director over how a Black woman in 1919 would “really” act (his line read was a stereotype of a Black character who he asserted “ran in circles with Paul Robeson,” and I countered with the truth that my characterization was based in large part upon my great aunt Mamie Bledsoe who, in fact, dated Paul Robeson; reviewers called my portrayal “sublime”). These experiences, though, were twenty years ago, and having avoided stage for a while because of the trauma of it all, as I consider a return, I wonder what has changed.

At the recent 2024 Theatre Bay Area Annual Conference “Roots Intertwined,” Keynote Speaker Ted Russell spoke of twenty years ago as the best time to plant a tree of change. “The second best time is now.”

In the now: the (FREE) 10th anniversary Getting Played Symposium, Saturday, October 19 from 2-3:30pm at the Berkeley Public Library Community Room where panelists and public will be in dialogue about whether online spaces are advancing equity in the local theater community.

More than twenty years ago: my 2001 letter to the editor of Theatre Bay Area Magazine (née Callboard), reprinted below.

Tell me. What do you observe has changed? What remains the same? Please bring your answers to the Getting Played conversation. I’m sure more folks than just me really want to know.

This letter was also presented at the 2024 TBA Annual Conference, during the session Who’s Playing You? A Sneak Peek of the Getting Played Symposium

Photo by Cheshire Isaacs

Letter to the Editor, Theatre Bay Area Magazine (2001)

I was a bit befuddled to read Belinda Taylor’s Cynicism Threatens Diversity in Theatre [August 2001]. I am glad that Theatre Bay Area is addressing the issue of diversity with panels and other discussions, but I had hoped for a stronger stance against the bigotry that permeates this business.

It is this bigotry that maintains the lack of diversity in theatre, not cynicism and not failures to reach out to performers of color. It is the inability to imagine a multiracial family or romance, an African American who’s not a sidekick, a sexy Asian-American male lead, a cast with talent undefined by color. Coupled with these is the inability to discuss bigotry without defensiveness or personal judgment. We must understand that it is human to adopt the dysfunction of the society in which we are raised. We must also understand how serious are the wrongs that we commit.

Bay Area experiences include (just to keep it out of the abstract): auditioning for a Black character and being given a side that says only, “Shake that ass, girlfriend. That’s right, shake it. Shake it!”; auditioning for a Black character who, while the most educated, is still the only character in the script who speaks broken English; taking a casting director’s workshop and seeing only White faces in the promotional materials of his past successes; being directed as a Black person to be aggressive in a scene that should showcase a spectrum of emotion; being directed as a Latina to be seductive under similar circumstances; and witnessing at this year’s Theatre Bay Area General Auditions two Actors audition similar Shakespearean pieces, both perform similarly well, and hear two casting directors proclaim the Black Actor’s performance to be “over the top” while the White Actor’s performance was “just what [they were] looking for”.

If directors complain that performers of color do not appear at their casting calls, perhaps they should re-examine their reputations. They should also re-examine the roles for which they expect these performers to line up. If the leads are reserved for Whites, at some point, those performers of color who no longer wish to keep playing supporting characters will drop out. That is, of course, if these performers even have the luxury of knowing what it is like to land supporting roles. It may seem cynical, but it is neither realistic nor compassionate to expect these performers to attend countless auditions “just to hone auditioning skills”. What skills are honed by having an audition rejected because your race is “wrong”?

I think somewhere we’ve forgotten that racism is painful. It is devastating. It is a lie to pretend that somehow it is not so serious and that anyone who takes it seriously enough to avoid its pain is retreating into victimhood. Racism decides who lives and who dies, who can pay their bills and who can’t, who can live their dreams, and who struggles until the very end while others live more free. An audition may not be your life, but it can be your whole life resonating in one place at one time, a reminder of how far we haven’t come and how far you are unlikely to go.

If failed diversity isn’t the result of bigotry and instead only the result of unjustified Actor cynicism and unfocused outreach to performers of color, then quite frankly, all of the attention is unwarranted. Actors should not expect to get roles without auditioning for them and without proactively developing opportunities for themselves. Unfortunately, the truth is that even if a person of color blows away every audition in this town, local theatre will still not be diverse.

Panelist Quentin Easter [Lorraine Hansberry Theatre] said, “Genuine diversity begins with the personal.” True, true, but I disagree that to disintegrate racism we should “[b]egin with small steps” in a “lifelong process, a continuing conversation”. Humans have been failing to eradicate racism in this country since its beginning. If we don’t make change now, it will never come. For some in this business, it means finally judging talent by skill alone. For others, it means casting people of color in roles not previously imagined. For many, it requires proactive casting against the stereotypes (including those of gender; a future conversation, I hope). We can no longer hide behind the bigotry of audiences and what they expect … or what we expect them to expect.

This business is the only one permitted to discriminate openly without legal consequence, asking – among other things – that employees be particular races. Most of the time is it unnecessary. At what time will it be undone?