Anti-Racist Teaching Resources
- https://howlround.com/anti-racist-theatre
- A selection of content that calls out systemic racism in theatre and points toward anti-racist practices.
- https://howlround.com/beyond-decolonizing-syllabus
- Beyond “Decolonizing” the Syllabus: Finding a Path to Anti-Racist, Actively Inclusive Theatre Education- Ten Ways to Make Progress toward Active Inclusion, Talks about changing language, white privilege and fear of “getting it wrong”
- https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/race-in-the-classroom/
- Helpful practices and healthy race relationship development in classrooms.
- https://minnesotaplaylist.com/magazine/article/2020/phrases-we-should-work-to-eliminate-in-the-rehearsal-room
- Phrases to work to eliminate in the classroom/rehearsal room
- https://www.americantheatre.org/tag/diversity/
- American Theatre Publication shares stories of diversity and tackling systems of oppression in theatre
- https://www.playbill.com/article/5-steps-toward-making-theatre-more-diverse
- Playbill article on inclusion in theatre
Theatre For Young Audiences
- https://www.tyausa.org/arao-guide/
- This guide provides information on how to create an anti-racist and anti-oppressive future within Theatre for Young Audiences. It also has a glossary of terms to help you understand everything surrounding anti-racism.
- http://www.childrenstheatercompany.org/social-justice-musicals
- CTC’s Social Justice Musicals for Young Audiences
- https://howlround.com/core-theatre-young-audiences-voicing-identity-intersectionality-and-empathy
- At the Core of Theatre for Young Audiences is Voicing Identity, Intersectionality, and Empathy- intersectionality in TYA, pieces and programs working with BIPOC, queer theatre makers
Theatre History
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hrNaae60biRBsRTgX3oGPuZ7qMliQrBNgPYdJO40c64/htmlview#
- A growing list of plays, musicals, and acting method readings by BIPOC playwrights, composers, and theatremakers to “swap” in place of material typically used from the American theatre canon; based on similar themes and/or adaptations. A resource for theatre educators.
- https://youtube.com/watch?v=KARJkQz0sMA
- Video essay on american musical theatre’s deep rooted tradition of systemic racism
- https://www.blackplaysarchive.org.uk
- A documentation of the first professional production of every play by black British, African and Caribbean writers in the UK.
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HwAHAwU83bW_jSzxbMrqWyyuAYmsOWtqK-7HxKA9yek/mobilebasic?fbclid=IwAR3u2Fp7e_JuAvGHnqjdjlivBxtfqqUIf11W_RKu4hpQXRwSj6-YXdxO1mM#id.b12d9qm89kyv
- ALTERNATIVE CANON TO 1945 Non-Western plays, plays by Black, Indigenous, people of color, by women and by queer writers from before 1945.
BIPOC Playwrights
- https://tdps.berkeley.edu/playwrights
- Break down of BIPOC playwrights
- https://cfa.lmu.edu/programs/theatrearts/program/theatreartsdei/bipocplays/
- List of BIPOC plays and creatives
Play Recommendations/Recommended Readings
A Play Titled After the Collective Noun for Female-Identifying 20-Somethings Living in NYC in the 2010s by Haleh Roshan
- Shirin is working on a book about post-Occupy Wall Street grassroots movements and trying not to succumb to anxiety attacks. CJ is a public defender navigating NYC’s fucked up judicial system, while trying to make time for a meaningful personal life. Elizabeth needs to finish college and figure out what to do next. Oh, also, there’s a mysterious bug infestation in the kitchen. Hashtag millennials, amirite? Putting an urgent spin on stories about “girls” in any medium, COLLECTIVE NOUN is a love letter to an unsung history of collective action and a battle cry for radically reenvisioning what it means to fight for change.
A Soldier’s Play by Charles Fuller
- 1944. A black Sergeant is murdered on a Louisiana Army base, and one tenacious investigator must race against his white leadership to unravel the crime before they unravel him.
BFE by Julia Cho
- Cute blondes are disappearing from her strip mall-covered suburban town, but fourteen-year-old Panny is more concerned with surviving adolescence. Raised by an unbalanced mother who thinks the perfect birthday gift is plastic surgery, and a shy uncle who spends most of his time painting miniatures, Panny is afraid she’s hopelessly different. Thanks to a fortuitous misdial, she strikes up a phone friendship that seems to be the connection she’s been longing for. However, she soon finds that out in BFE, a.k.a. “the middle of nowhere,” anything can happen—and usually does.
Behind the Sheet by Charly Evo Simpson
- In 1840s Alabama, Dr. George Barry is on the verge of a miraculous cure: treatment for fistulas, a common but painful complication of childbirth. To achieve his medical breakthrough, Dr. Barry performs experimental surgeries on a group of enslaved women afflicted with the condition. Based on the true story of Dr. J. Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology,” BEHIND THE SHEET remembers the forgotten women who made his achievement possible, and the pain they endured in the process.
BLKS by Aziza Barnes
- When shit goes down, your girls show up. Waking up to a shocking and personal health scare, Octavia and her best friends, June and Imani, go on a crusade to find intimacy and joy in a world that could give a fuck less about them or their feelings. This 24-hour blitz explores what it is to be a queer blk woman in 2015 New York, how we survive and save ourselves from ourselves.
Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar
- Amir Kapoor is a successful Pakistani-American lawyer who is rapidly moving up the corporate ladder while distancing himself from his cultural roots. Emily, his wife, is white; she’s an artist, and her work is influenced by Islamic imagery. When the couple hosts a dinner party, what starts out as a friendly conversation escalates into something far more damaging.
Eclipsed by Danai Gurira
- Their lives set on a nightmarish detour by civil war, the captive wives of a Liberian rebel officer form a hardscrabble sisterhood. With the arrival of a new girl who can read—and the return of an old one who can kill—their possibilities are quickly transformed. Drawing on reserves of wit and compassion, these defiant survivors ask: When the fog of battle lifts, could a different destiny emerge? ECLIPSED offers a chilling, humanizing and surprisingly funny portrait of transformation and renewal. With wit, compassion, and defiance, this gripping play unearths the wreckage of war and celebrates the women who navigate and survive the most hostile of circumstances.
Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue by Quiara Alegria Hudes
- Tracing the legacy of war through three generations of a Puerto Rican family, the play focuses on nineteen-year-old Elliot, a recently anointed hometown hero who returns from Iraq with a leg injury and a difficult question: Will he go back to war a second time? While on leave, Elliot learns the stories of his father and grandfather who served in Korea and Vietnam before him.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1at6mbBT9HJv2JZbjOgh4oXWKxw0FiuyB/view?usp=sharing
Free Free Free Free by Haleh Roshan
- FREE FREE FREE FREE is based on the true story of the Diggers, an anarchist theater collective formed out of the San Francisco Mime Troupe; the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and Students for a Democratic Society; and the rise of Asian American solidarity. Each group fights against capital and exploitation, fights for liberation, and envisions an America and a world beyond constant war, immeasurable poverty, and global hunger. But how the #$%! do we, they, we get from here to there? A Brechtian exploration of 1960s Bay Area anti-capitalists and their efforts at igniting a new American revolution, this is a play in perpetual struggle session with itself—but like, in a nice way!
Good Grief by Ngozi Anyanwu
- GOOD GRIEF follows Nkechi, or N—a med-school dropout, a first-generation Nigerian, a would-be goddess—as she navigates first loves and losses, and tries to find answers in her parents, the boy next door, and the stars.
In The Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks
- In this modern day riff on The Scarlet Letter, Hester La Negrita, a homeless mother of five, lives with her kids on the tough streets of the inner city. Her eldest child is teaching her how to read and write, but the letter “A” is, so far, the only letter she knows. Her five kids are named Jabber, Bully, Trouble, Beauty and Baby, and the characters are played by adult actors who double as five other people in Hester’s life: her ex-boyfriend, her social worker, her doctor, her best friend and her minister. While Hester’s kids fill her life with joy—lovingly comical moments amid the harsh world of poverty—the adults with whom she comes into contact only hold her back. Nothing can stop the play’s tragic end.
Jar The Floor by Cheryl L. West
- A quartet of black women spanning four generations makes up this heartwarming dramatic comedy. The four, plus the white woman friend of the youngest, come together to celebrate the matriarch’s ninetieth birthday. It’s a wild party, one that is a lovable lunatic glance at the exhilarating challenge of growing old amidst the exasperating trials of growing up.
Land O’fire by Luis Santeiro
- In 1831, Captain James Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle, the ship that took Charles Darwin to South America, became obsessed with what he saw as a philanthropic mission. He took aboard three young Indians, from a primitive tribe in Tierra del Fuego, and transported them to England to be Christianized. At first, every charitable organization refused to help Fitzroy with what they considered a group of cannibals. Then King William IV became intrigued and had them presented at court. Suddenly everyone wanted to meet Fitzroy’s “Fuegians.” But after barely more than a year, just when the Indians were starting to fancy themselves English ladies and gentlemen, they were abruptly returned to their native land, with trunks full of English finery—to disastrous consequences. Told from the point of view of the Indians, LAND O’FIRE is an insightful and often humorous examination of life interfered with and forever changed by association with a “superior” culture.
M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang
- Bored with his routine posting in Beijing, and awkward with women, Rene Gallimard, a French diplomat, is easy prey for the subtle, delicate charms of Song Liling, a Chinese opera star who personifies Gallimard’s fantasy vision of submissive, exotic oriental sexuality. He begins an affair with “her” that lasts for twenty years, during which time he passes along diplomatic secrets, an act that, eventually, brings on his downfall and imprisonment. Interspersed with scenes between the two lovers are others with Gallimard’s wife and colleagues that underscore the irony of Gallimard’s delusion and its curious parallel to the events of Puccini’s famous opera Madame Butterfly. Combining realism and ritual with vivid theatricality, the play reaches its astonishing climax when Song Liling, before our very eyes, strips off his female attire and assumes his true masculinity—a revelation that the deluded Gallimard can neither credit nor accept and which drives him finally—and fatally—deep within the fantasy with which, over the years, he has held the truth at bay.
Mlima’s Tale by Lynn Nottage
- Mlima is a magnificent elephant trapped by the underground international ivory market. As he follows a trail littered by a history of greed, Mlima takes us on a journey through memory, fear, tradition, and the penumbra between want and need.
Office Hour by Julia Cho
- Gina was warned that one of her students would be a problem. Eighteen years old and strikingly odd, Dennis writes violently obscene work clearly intended to unsettle those around him. Determined to know whether he’s a real threat, Gina compels Dennis to attend her office hours. But as the clock ticks down, Gina realizes that “good” versus “bad” is nothing more than a convenient illusion, and that the isolated young student in her office has learned one thing above all else: For the powerless, the ability to terrify others is powerful indeed.
Orange Julius by Basil Kreimendahl
- Nut grew up the youngest child of Julius, a Vietnam vet, in 1980s and ’90s working-class America. As Julius suffers the toxic effects of Agent Orange, Nut worries their time together may run out before they can embrace something essential about their relationship. Paging through forgotten photo albums and acting out old war movies about brothers-in-arms, Nut leaps through time and memory, tracing the complex intimacy between father and child when the child is transgender, fighting for a mutual recognition before it’s too late.
Ruined by Lynn Nottage
- From Lynn Nottage, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of such plays as Fabulation and Intimate Apparel, comes this haunting, probing work about the resilience of the human spirit during times of war. Set in a small mining town in Democratic Republic of Congo, this powerful play follows Mama Nadi, a shrewd businesswoman in a land torn apart by civil war. But is she protecting or profiting by the women she shelters? How far will she go to survive? Can a price be placed on a human life?
School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play by Jocelyn Bioh
- Paulina, the reigning queen bee at Ghana’s most exclusive boarding school, has her sights set on the Miss Global Universe pageant. But the arrival of Ericka, a new student with undeniable talent and beauty, captures the attention of the pageant recruiter—and Paulina’s hive-minded friends. This buoyant and biting comedy explores the universal similarities (and glaring differences) facing teenage girls across the globe.
Scissoring by Christina Quintana
- When Abigail Bauer takes a job as a teacher at a conservative Catholic school, she is forced to step back into the closet against the wishes of her long-term girlfriend. As she struggles to reconcile her professional ambitions, personal relationships, religious beliefs, and internalized shame, Abigail receives guidance from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Eleanor’s devoted friend and lover, Lorena Hickok. Through it all, Abigail must find the courage to be unabashedly herself.
Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury
Anon(ymous) by Naomi Iizuka
- Separated from his mother, a young refugee called Anon journeys through the United States, encountering a wide variety of people -- some kind, some dangerous and cruel -- as he searches for his family. From a sinister one-eyed butcher to beguiling barflies to a sweatshop, Anon must navigate through a chaotic, ever-changing landscape in this entrancing adaptation of Homer's Odyssey.
- Access it here: https://outragerous.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/anonymous.pdf
Pipeline, by Dominique Morisseau's
- Pipeline takes a deep look into the American educational system for underprivileged students. Nya is an inner-city high school teacher whose son, Omari, is educated at a private boarding school. ... Nya wants to save her son, but first she must confront her own choices as a parent.
Charities to Donate to
- https://thefundforcollegeauditions.org/?fbclid=IwAR1tMvdIaRJk5dstgPqwvM8JSZPQrv9_mENkakeWyDbY2HG3vjvFnnHfc9U
The Fund for College Auditions is a New York City-based 501(c)(3) non-profit that offers financial support and college guidance to acting and musical theatre students with limited resources who want to audition for post-high school training programs, focusing on but not limited to those who identify with groups that are historically and currently underrepresented in theatre, film, and television. These groups include students who self-identify as any of the following: BIPOC, trans, nonbinary, disabled, neurodiverse, and weight diverse.
- http://projectbroadway.org
- is a 501c3 nonprofit, dedicated to fostering participation in enriching theater arts educational experiences for students who may not otherwise have access to education in the arts. Project Broadway offers scholarships for children to participate in intensive theater training programs and enriching workshops focusing on self-confidence and exploration of the theater arts.
- https://www.schooltheatre.org/programs/jumpstarttheatre
- Jumpstart Theatre- creates sustainable theatre arts programs in underserved middle schools where there were none. Participant schools are chosen based on a rigorous application process and receive materials, budget, and training support to produce their first full-scale musical production. The support continues for three straight years until the program becomes sustainable.
Petitions
- https://www.change.org/p/the-new-york-times-put-bipoc-critics-in-new-york-times-s-theater-culture-staff
- Petition to put BIPOC Critics in New York Times’s Theater/Culture Staff
Additional Resources
- https://zapiartists.carrd.co
- @zapiartist on instagram. a hub for gen z, asian/pacific islander artists.