Theatre as Case Study?

If you're someone who is interested in workplace discrimination, equal employment opportunity, bias and affirmative action issues (as I happen to be right now) theatre makes for an interesting counter-factual case study. Why? Because there aren't class-action lawsuits against theaters fort discrimination.

I'm not suggesting there should be, but it's interesting to think about it in this context. In many other industries, there have been big ole class action lawsuits, it's one of the main ways that employment discrimination laws get enforced. But not theatre.  To more Conservative thinkers, claims employment discrimination is overblown and we are an overly litigious society.  The idea put forth is that what discrimination does exist is the cause of a few bad actors and the more mundane stuff can be solved by giving "everyone a fair shot" (by which they mean eliminating affirmative action), punishing the few people who are truly bad and have negative intent and working the other stuff out on a more peer-to-peer level.

Well, here we have the American Theatre (not the magazine, obviously, the theatre system) which is not only staffed by well-meaning liberals (the exact kind of people who should be trusted to voluntarily enforce equal opportunity rules) but doesn't have to deal with those pernitious, poisonous lawsuits, why not study it to see how that whole diversity and equality thing is working out?

I would guess that the end result would be a rather good example of how intentions don't really matter when it comes to discrimination. Or, to put it another way, that even though our theaters are largely staffed with well meaning liberals, there's still entrenched, institutionalized discrimination, discrimination of effect rather than cause.  I might be wrong about that, that's just my guess of what such a study would show, but I have a feeling ultimately the evidence would point to the fact that we need more than good intentions to create equality and diversity.

Comments

[Tom Loughlin]

Hello Isaac,

Amidst all this talk about discrimination and sexism in American theatre on so many levels, I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts about the relative lack of female theatre critics and bloggers. I went through your blogroll this morning, and my unscientific poll revealed that 29 of the bloggers listed are male, 12 female (one blog is a male/female partnership, but even though the male seems to write more I gave it to the female). And apparently all the blogger/critics who write or have written for the NYC press are male (Cote, Jacobs, RWK, Teachout, Isherwood, etc.). Since the internet is open to all, why is this particular phenomenon happening? I'd be interested in your take on this matter. TIA. -twl

[Steven Terrance]

Because Boys are smarter