Black Plays Matter

Programming reflects live theater’s cultural reckoning.

/ BY SHERRY STERN /

IT’S NO COINCIDENCE that a confluence of plays with unique perspectives on being Black in America are hitting some of Los Angeles’ largest theaters in June and July.

The abundance of Black playwrights this season reflects the cultural reckoning in live theater that began three years ago when the brutal murder of George Floyd shook up America.

Aligning with the country’s Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, theater artists mobilized in a variety of ways to protest racial injustice on Broadway and beyond and by relentlessly demanding change.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Katori Hall was among 300 Black, Indigenous and people-of-color signees of one of the more scorching protests, an open letter called “We See You White American Theater.”

“We have watched you exploit us, shame us, diminish us, and exclude us. We see you,” the artists pointedly wrote. Though the industry could have easily concurred publicly with the sentiments and privately gone about business as usual, Hall says, theaters reacted, many as if the ideas were their own.

“The ‘We See You’ campaign happened with a huge list of demands. Many theaters across the country use it as a bible, even though they don’t want to admit it,” Hall says with a laugh. “I’ve been having conversations with people on the executive side of theater who have been able to admit it.”

That’s no better illustrated than by the falling dominoes of theater groups’ artistic directors, white and mostly male, who opted to leave their jobs in the wake of the national conversation.

The list includes Michael Ritchie, who retired after 17 years of running L.A.’s major theater organization, Center Theatre Group. Snehal Desai steps in, the first person of color to lead CTG, which operates

/CONTINUED ON PAGE 26