Teaching the Young Director to Cast Inclusively: Best Practices

Abstract

Teaching the Young Director to Cast Inclusively:Best Practices Jaclynn Jutting (bio) Casting is difficult. In my career as a professional director, I confess that I do not share the exhilaration and expressed enthusiasm that most people profess for auditions. Casting is a process that forces me to consider the audience's reading of bodies—faces, waistlines, hairlines, and wrinkles—inviting a narrative that has always made me uncomfortable. It has also made me vigilant of our ethical responsibility as directors. In February 2019, I sat watching a senior director's mainstage capstone performance of Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Visit. The director had assisted me twice, both at the private liberal arts university where I taught and also at a professional regional theatre. As the entire cast lined up for the final funeral procession to say goodbye to Ill's departing coffin, I took in the considerable artistic achievement of this director's work. In the footlight's yellow glow, illuminating the white smeared faces of German expressionism, I realized that all twenty-five faces onstage were white. None were students of color. I looked around me. The audience reflected the diversity of our campus, but the cast onstage did not. By the time the house lights came up I knew that while my student director had succeeded artistically in many ways, I had failed. In the weeks following this performance I considered how, as the head of a Directing BFA program and junior member of a department, to address implicit bias in our young directors and theatre programs—particularly those that are less diverse. I offer you the lessons learned, both my failures and success, as I piloted a new approach to build inclusion into teaching pedagogy to actively teach the #MeToo generation to cast plays that reflect the audience that we are. From 2014 to 2019 I was an assistant professor and director of a Directing, BFA program at Belmont University, a private, Christian liberal arts university in Nashville, Tennessee. According to its website, the university teaches 8,400 students from thirty-six countries. The student body is largely white (78.8 percent) and female (63 percent), with African American (5 percent), Latinx (4.4 percent), and Asian (3 percent) populations (Adams and Coudiet). The theatre department was less diverse. During our 2015–16 season, we had three students of color (4 percent) out of approximately seventy-five majors. The faculty was evenly split in gender, but overwhelmingly white. Only one of our nine full-time faculty and staff was a person of color. With adjunct faculty included, only two of twenty-two staff and faculty were people of color (9 percent). As a white, antiracist teaching artist committed to diversity, for my second-year mainstage production I proposed directing Lynn Nottage's Las Meninas. The production offered thirteen roles, two for African American actors. To my knowledge, Las Meninas was only the second play produced by a playwright of color in the theatre department's history; the choice reflected my colleagues' commitment to increased diversity, which echoed my own. We were of the opinion that if you build it, they will come. It worked. Three years later, in the fall of 2018, our department had grown significantly. We had 109 majors, with nine students of color (8 percent) in the department, representing the African American (5.5 percent), Latinx (2 percent), and Asian (1 percent) communities (Gatrell). I had been teaching and advocating for equitable representation onstage and highlighting implicit bias in directing classes for years. Addressing and identifying industry "best practices" had begun in the directing curriculum in the fall of 2017. That summer, while visiting friends in my [End Page 187] artistic hometown of Chicago, the topic shifted to the Chicago Theatre Standards. My directing colleagues filled me in on the standards, drafted and piloted by twenty participating theatres that year (#NotInOurHouse). I was already familiar with the Not In Our House theatre movement, as its founder, Lori Myers, and I had been in the same theatre company for years. But the resulting standards, created from the movement, was news to me. When I later reviewed them I was satisfied to see recommended guidelines for...