Greater Boston-Area Theaters to Discuss Board-Level Diversity and Inclusion

On Sunday, December 3, 2017, board members, Artistic Directors, and Managing Directors of Actors' Shakespeare Project, Bridge Repertory Company, Central Square Theater, Israeli Stage Company, Lyric Stage Company of Boston, New Repertory Theatre, and Sleeping Weazel will convene to discuss racial diversity and inclusion on the board level of non-profit theaters in the Greater Boston area.

To date, the theaters have all been doing multi-racial casting, and have offered plays by playwrights of color, and engaged directors of color, but it seems clear that to attract more audiences of color, more needs to be done. To this end, an April 2017 workshop identified some of the work that still needs to be done.

Building on that effort, the Theater Board Leaders Group (TBLG) will host Bill Rauch, Artistic Director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) and founder of Cornerstone Theater in LA, to explore key elements, processes, and actions OSF has taken to embed diversity and inclusion in its core values with an emphasis on what OSF has achieved, and how, since undertaking this initiative.

In their continuing effort to reach out to and engage more audiences of color, the goals of this meeting will be to establish a commitment by theater boards to develop a vision, set of goals, and policies aimed at making their boards more racially inclusive; to identify individual, structural, and institutional barriers to diversity and inclusion; to create a dialogue between boards and actors, directors, and playwrights of color that are part of their artistic season; to continue to meet collectively to share accomplishments, act as a sounding board for each other, problem solve, and continue to educate themselves about inclusion and belonging at the institutional, structural, and personal levels; and to identify additional next steps to creating a culture of inclusion and belonging at the board level and throughout their organizations.

During the December meeting, TBLG will also discuss the spring 2018 conversation with Seema Sueko, Deputy Artistic Director of Arena Stage in Washington, DC, and a national leader in theater/community engagement. The spring 2018 meeting will explore her model of community engagement, and review what has been accomplished between December 2017 and spring 2018, problem solve, and begin to develop a continuing set of actions for the 2018-2019 season.

About the THEATER BOARD LEADERS GROUP:

Organized by Joan Lancourt in 2013, a group of theater board chairs from Actors' Shakespeare Project, Lyric Stage Company of Boston, Company One, New Repertory Theatre, Charlestown Working Theater, and Speakeasy Stage Company began meeting regularly to talk about a range of shared challenges and to explore board best practices. Toward the end of 2015, this group sponsored a first-ever convening of board members from all six theaters to discuss the shift in the racial demographics of Boston, from a majority white to a majority people of color city.

In April 2017, a sub set of the original board leaders group, with the addition of board members and artistic directors from several small theaters including Israeli Stage, Bridge Repertory Theater, and Sleeping Weazel, sponsored a second convening of approximately 45 board members to begin to grapple with what they would need to do to create board cultures that would enable the boards to attract and retain prospective board members of color.

The underlying premise was that having a more racially inclusive board would be an important step toward developing greater diversity in the theaters' audiences, and there was a clear sense that while much of the work to address this issue needed to take place in each board room, an intentional, focused collective initiative by a coalition of boards, rather than a scatter of unrelated, separate efforts, would have a significantly greater impact on the entire theater community. It also seemed clear that addressing these issues as a theater community, rather than individually, could be more successful.

Bill Rauch became Oregon Shakespeare Festival's fifth artistic director in 2007, after several seasons at the Festival as a guest director. In a total of 15 seasons at OSF, he has directed six world premieres, plays by Shakespeare, among many others. Bill has directed several OSF plays at other theatres including All the Way at the American Repertory Theater (for which he won two Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) awards for Best Director). All the Way then moved to the Neil Simon Theatre in New York, where it won the Tony Award for Best Play and also earned Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations for directing. Bill co-founded Cornerstone Theater Company, where he directed more than 40 productions and served as its artistic director from 1986 to 2006. Bill has served as an associate artist at Yale Repertory Theatre and South Coast Repertory and as a board member for Theatre Communications Group (TCG), and was Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at University of California, Irvine. He was named a 2015 Visiting Fellow at the Ford Foundation, received the Zelda Fichandler Award in 2012, and won TCG's Visionary Leadership Award in 2010 and the Margo Jones Award in 2009. Other honors include a United States Artists Prudential Fellow (2008); Los Angeles Weekly, Garland, Connecticut Critics Circle, Drama-Logue and Helen Hayes awards for direction; Emmy and Ovation nominations and an inaugural "Leadership for a Changing World" award.

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