Casting Audiences: How Theatre Passe Muraille’s ‘Black Out Nights’ Challenge Conventional Approaches to Audience

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of Black Out Nights, evenings of a theatrical performance for Black-identified audiences only, as employed by Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. Drawing on interviews with Passe Muraille’s former Marketing Coordinator Fatuma Adar and current Artistic Director Marjorie Chan, this article explores the various effects and benefits of Black Out Nights, which were first conceived by American playwright Jeremy O. Harris, for Black artists and audiences. I argue that Black Out Nights, along with Theatre Passe Muraille’s other approaches to audiences, help to reveal and to challenge larger practices of ‘casting’ audiences that are employed by mainstream theatres. These casting practices, which operate through theatres’ websites, marketing, and theatre spaces, may be unconsciously exercised but help to reinforce white supremacy and other forms of discrimination and exclusion in theatre spaces through the audiences they make feel welcome and exclude.