The Revolution Comes to Juilliard | City Journal
Tne president of a regional theater describes the present moment. This president is self-consciously bean-counting, trying to hit racial quotas with plays and actors, even though the community the theater serves is overwhelmingly white. The theater s young employees get all het up over any diversity shortcoming. Why did you use a white this or a white that? they complain. The president asked the theater s financial chief if he could name one cisgender white male director the company had hired over the last three years. There were none. On Broadway there have been no straight white guys running things for years, the president observes. Gay white guys will be the next target.
This theater veteran knows 40 to 50 theater professionals who have left the profession or are about to do so, so toxic has the environment become. Any alternative perspective or criticism becomes: You do not respect us. If a voice coach observes that a student s voice is not coming from his core, the student will respond: That is because I don t feel comfortable in class with you.
An arts consultant reports the unspoken fear of theater leaders: they will put on quota-filling plays, and no one will come. I have talked to long time audience members who have no interest in seeing much of this new work, whose main purpose is to indict white America, the consultant says.
The Black Lives Matter movement in the arts is only nominally about inclusion. In fact, it is about exclusion and the power that has motivated every revolutionary mob: the power of negation, the power to tear things down. This purportedly inclusive movement will result in a world of constricted imaginative possibility and stunted human growth.
A leader in the arts world, told of Juilliard s travails, observes: This is a crucial time to stand up and call out what is an overly emotional and irrational attack on the best of what humanity has to offer.
He would not allow me to reveal his name or affiliation.
I guess there’s always youtube, for now.