Hey, UofT campus theatre community—it’s me, James! I was part of you for a couple years, but I have since graduated and moved home. But don’t worry, I’ve been keeping my eye on you, because I think you’re real special. I’ve got something to share with you, but first, a little history…
Back in 2018, Sai Macikunas and I were talking a fair bit about the whiteness of campus theatre. It was a complicated conversation involving the sharing of hot goss, different options for how to deal with the bureaucracy of the societies, colleges, and the Drama Coalition as a whole, and how to create sustainable change. Our conversation led to three things: first (and last, chronologically), the founding of Hotake Theatre (renamed Ember Island Players Theatre in 2019) by Sai and some other Asian and Pacific Islander members of the campus theatre community. Hotake Theatre was a new campus theatre company under the Victoria University Students Administrative Council (VUSAC) with a mandate to “Produce and facilitate the development of theatrical and musical works led by artists who identify with the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora” (from the Ember Island Players Theatre Facebook page as of September 9, 2020). Second (and second, chronologically), on April 3, 2018, Sai published a piece in The Strand entitled “Misconceptions of a neutral identity and blind casting in campus theatre,” an article where he challenged “genderblind” and “raceblind” casting as diminishing the experiences of people of colour, and called upon the writers, performers, and directors of the campus theatre community to “do better” in multiple ways. The timing of this article was important to Sai: it was then “pitch season,” the time when prospective directors write up proposals for shows and submit them to the theatre companies. In the article, Sai expressed hope that directors would “consider more authors and be mindful of them.” He also cited statistics on the diversity of writers represented in the Victoria College Drama Society’s (VCDS) recent seasons:
“Out of 17 shows over three years, 11 were written by cis white men. In fact, the entire 2016-2017 VCDS mainstage season was written by white cis men. The only show in the season written by someone who wasn’t a cis white man was the student-written UofT drama festival production, A Perfect Bowl of Phở.”
These stats were the third thing (and first, chronologically) that resulted from my conversation with Sai. We dug through the archives of Facebook events to determine the racial and gender diversity history of UofT campus theatre, compiling it into a spreadsheet with calculations that gave us answers to questions like “What percentage of this season was written by white cis men?” Sai, being a Vic student heavily entrenched in the Vic community, focused his efforts (and writing) on VCDS. But in that summer of 2018, I was a recent graduate of University College, finding my way in the world—wandering, unattached from any notions of college loyalty. What was I to do, uncommitted as I was?
Well, of course I was going to go all in.
Over the next few months, I continued the work that Sai and I had started. Whereas our initial spreadsheet only covered the VCDS seasons since we had been at UofT (15-16, 16-17, 17-18), I eventually managed to compile data from every extracurricular theatrical performance (including the Black Students’ Association’s productions, WINDS, the UTSC Drama Society, and Hart House Players, to name a few) for the period of 2012 to 2019, as well as incomplete data stretching all the way back to 2001 (with Blue Stage Productions’ show Indiscretions?). In a quest for speedy accumulation of information, the spreadsheet’s quality went down the drain, so earlier this year I set out to update and revitalise the data I had collected over the years.
Here are two graphs, showing the percentage of white writers and directors in each season of each campus theatre company:
I looked at the four main campus theatre companies (the St. Michael’s College Troubadours (SMCT), formerly known as St. Genesius’s Drama Society; the Trinity College Dramatic Society (TCDS); the UC Follies; and the Victoria College Drama Society (VCDS)), as well as the short-lived Woodsworth Innis New Drama Society (formerly known as WolfPAC) and the UofT Drama Festival. The depth of data that I could find varied from company to company: for SGDS/SMCT, I have data for every season from 2013-14 to 2020-21; for TCDS, UCF, and the Drama Festival I have data from as far back as the 2012-13 season; and for VCDS I have data back to the 2009-10 season (as for WolfPAC/WINDS, data only exists for the three seasons between 2014 and 2017). I collected data on writers, directors, and stage managers for each show, identifying six distinct categories: white men, white women, white non-binary people, BIPOC men, BIPOC women, and BIPOC non-binary people. I have a mostly complete picture, at least for writers and directors, for the aforementioned spans of time. I will not be discussing the diversity of stage managers because I simply do not have enough good data to engage with—very few stage managers were identified in online promotion campaigns before about 2015, and even for the later years the data is sketchy.
What follows are some notes on how these percentages were calculated. If an individual is represented in the same role on multiple productions in a season, they are counted for each time they are represented. For instance, William Shakespeare counts for 20 percent of the writers of the UC Follies’ eleven-show 2012-13 season, since he wrote three of that season’s shows and twelve other writers wrote the remaining eight. Furthermore, shows that were cancelled are included in each season’s count. The main reason for the inclusion of cancelled shows is that they show what a given company’s goal for the season was. Excluding the shows cancelled in the past school year due to the pandemic would diminish the effort put into the rehearsal of those productions, while excluding shows cancelled due to behind-the-scenes issues, illness, or concerns about racially appropriate casting would misrepresent the companies’ intentions for a given season. Intention was top-of-mind for Sai while writing his 2018 piece in The Strand, which he concluded by saying “If you say you care about diverse theatre and want to support diverse stories and believe in diverse artists, act like it.”
It is also important to note what defines a show as being “in a company’s season.” Since my research was done primarily through Facebook, I went with season announcement posts when I could. As such, the SMC Funnies are included as a “show” in the Troubadours’ 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons, with each listed sketch writer counted as a “writer” for the purposes of calculating the above—however, the Sketch Follies are not included in any of the UC Follies’ seasons. The Follies’ 2019 event entitled Honeymoon; an art spree is recorded but not counted, since the sources I found for it do not list roles that are easily transferable to the writer/director roles under investigation.
My data for some of the earlier years has gaps, either because the person involved in the production was not listed anywhere that I could find across Facebook or the wider internet, or because I was not able to identify the person with confidence. In the data above, 16 musical directors, seven non-musical directors, and two translators are not accounted for. Because it is clear that these people existed, they are included in their seasons’ counts of total writers/directors. However, they do not contribute to any demographic group. As such, it must be understood that the data above, while mostly complete, is approximate. What this means functionally is that the data presented here shows the “minimum possible whiteness” for a given season and may well underrepresent the actual racial demographics of the community.
But even in this underrepresentation, whiteness dominates. In all but three instances, no individual company had a population of season writers that was less than 60 percent white. The three exceptional seasons are VCDS’s 2013-14 season, WINDS’s 2015-16 season, and the SMC Troubadours’ upcoming 2020-21 season. The first (VCDS 13-14) is due in part to the incompleteness of the data (two translators’ identities are unknown, and if they are both white, the percentage for that year jumps to 77.78 percent, which would still be the second-lowest percentage for the company). The second (WINDS 15-16) is helped by the BSA/ASCU show The Underground Railroad Project (which was written by six Black women), which was produced in association with the company. The third (SMCT 20-21) is helped in large part by the fact that the entire season is student-written. Student writers are less often white than non-student writers whose shows are selected for performance. This makes sense, since the non-student writers that most people know about usually had to achieve a certain amount of notability, either by being entered into the Western literary canon, the curriculum, or by being produced on Broadway—all venues that skew mighty white. On the other hand, student writers whose shows are selected for performance tend to be members of the community, which is demonstrably less white than the Western literary canon (to make an outrageous understatement). For instance, compare the lines in the previous figure representing the percentage of white writers in each company’s season to the line that represents the percentage of white writers in each year’s drama festival—which has long been a showcase of exclusively student-written work. The four festivals that took place between 2016 and 2019 hovered around the 50 percent margin of white writers, which few societies’ seasons had ever approached—let alone dropped below—before or since. Also consider the wider range shown on the graph illustrating the percentage of white directors in each company’s season. Twelve out of forty-five individual company seasons recorded have half (or less) of their total directors as white. Every company has at least one season of those recorded that makes this cut (though VCDS and TCDS’s 50 percent seasons are possibly a generous estimation due to gaps in the data), which demonstrates that the pool of people engaged enough to participate in the campus theatre community to the point of directing is not as white as the writers of the shows the community is putting on.
This article is meant to be a resource to help frame the conversations that must already be happening in hallowed Zoom calls across campus. I believe in you, UofT campus theatre community, as a rich environment for experimentation, constructive failure, and brilliant growth. I’ve been very excited to read all of your season announcements; from a new iteration of the Funnies, to a digital play-workshopping festival, to more writing by Shreya Jha and Emily Powers, to Dave Molloy it is all so exciting to me, an irrelevant Facebook voyeur. I was heartened to read TCDS’s post on June 15, 2020 where they made plans to review their history and constitution in order to better amplify BIPOC voices, as well as VCDS’s post on August 15, 2020 in which they acknowledged their history of anti-Blackness and outlined further steps, including mandating equity training. UofT Improv has also put forth a statement with established actions on how they plan to create equity amongst the community, and actively work towards anti-racism. But it’s the school year now, and I don’t want you to forget about what you said last summer.
Sai’s first article back in April 2018 was aimed at influencing the pitches presented for the following school year. My goal is to allow you to start this campus theatre season with clear eyes and an understanding of where you have been as a community. Take these stats, talk about them in your Zoom meetings, and start making plans for how to get to where you want to go. I can’t wait to see you there.
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