“Can I make a joke about you eating dogs?”
Why yes, she wanted me to say, and be happy about it too.
In 2016, I was one of the eight acting interns at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, an acclaimed Shakespeare festival in Northern California. I would be understudying Hamlet in Hamlet (as an Asian woman!), performing in Midsummer, and surrounded by a rigorous and healthy training environment.
I was excited.
While some of those things did happen, I and the other interns of color were consistently berated by racism and sexism, gaslit, ignored, and eventually, told to quit. The majority of our white peers, including people I considered my dear friends, did not speak up or support us. It remains the most demeaning theatrical experience of my life.
In response to this treatment, Mayadevi Ross, Gianna DiGregorio Rivera, Clint Blakely and I composed a nineteen-page letter to the festival. (Read it here). We wrote down week by week accounts of the oppression we faced — that’s how much there was — and the ways, including links to articles and structured conversations, in which we tried to engage in fruitful dialogue.
We were forced to be the secretaries of our own oppression.
Why?
Because when racist events happen, instead of believing you, white people ask for proof.
**
One month later, Rick Wright, whom we had never met, emailed back. There was no apology, only nebulous statements like, “We will consider the examples you’ve highlighted.” He concluded his message with, “In consideration of the events….I hope each of you got something valuable and positive out of your experiences.” The director of the intern show, who had been one of the most blatant abusers and donned yellowface in his free time, was rehired. Every year, the artistic director writes “Happy Birthday” on my Facebook page as if that action is somehow a worthy response to the injustices we faced and our unpaid emotional and academic labor.
**
When I re-read our letter, I am astonished.
How did we do it? How did the four of us gather every night after twelve hours of rehearsal to record, explain, and synthesize the oppression we were subjected to?
We must have been very angry.
We must have been so sad.
We must have felt unbearably trapped.
**
The letter stands on its own. I encourage you to read it.
What it doesn’t say is that in the fall of 2016, I tried to publish it. But when I asked my (white) mentors for advice, they said: “Do you want to be an actor or an activist?” and without thinking that I could be both or that I was already both, that art was activated, that I was activated, I said: “actor.”
It was true. I wanted to be a professional actor so badly. I wanted it so much I felt I had to give up part of my humanity for it.
**
I know Santa Cruz Shakespeare is not Broadway. “All regional theaters are like this,” I am told repeatedly, and from other experiences, that is not untrue.
But to say that people who make regional theater — who live in regions in America that are not major metropolitan areas, who give many young people their first jobs — are not responsible for the art they make and the way they treat other people, is to contribute to the larger force of white supremacy.
And then there’s the question of speaking up. People find it hard to speak up (and difficult to understand why you would) when the stakes are too high (Hollywood) and when the stakes are too low (regional theater).
The people from that summer who did not speak up have now been on Broadway and lead their own TV series. They have been rewarded by white supremacy. That is the narrative we sustain by not holding every action, including those in regional theaters, accountable. If you don’t speak up when racism is happening in real time, when you have something at stake, you have learned nothing.
Franklin Leonard says, “Politics runs downstream of culture.”
How do we want our culture?
**
I am indebted to Black Lives Matter. I owe much of my timing to the difficult and inspiring work that is happening and specifically to Griffin Matthews and We See You, White American Theater.
I will always be grateful to the three artist-activists who wrote this letter with me. Thank you to:
Mayadevi, for teaching me to state ALL the races of a person who is mixed race. If you say “I’m half-Asian” that assumes the other half is White which upholds — you guessed it — white supremacy; for always asking “Who’s laughing?”
Gianna, for infusing everything with grace, strength, and spirit; for activating change.
Clint, for having the decency and courage to grapple with your whiteness.
Thank you for the chance to grow together,
even when it was hard.
