On June 3, Chicago theater artists flooded my social media with #openyourlobby; a call for theaters around the nation to open their doors to #blacklivesmatter protesters. As the producing artistic director at UrbanTheater Company, a Black and Mexican Chicago native, and mother, this call exposed the truth about our theater community: the privilege of deciding to close our doors and separate ourselves from our neighbors is nonexistent.
And yet we are constantly on the precipice of exclusion because of the coming and going of artists seeking to enhance their career, resulting in the gentrification of Chicago theater. Because UrbanTheater has not been given the same value by the institutions that are committed to Eurocentric ideology, our contributions to the ecology of theater are overlooked. It is a cycle of value that is perpetuated through academia, the press, and the regional theaters themselves that make BIPOC artists reject the learning or support of BIPOC theaters, in lieu of investing in the regional ecosystem.
As an artistic leader, the following has never been clearer to me: our artists need to come home and BIPOC theaters deserve to be funded in order for us to adequately do so. We deserve to heal and we deserve to sustain ourselves while serving our communities. We deserve to have our voices lifted in every publication. We deserve to have whatever resources are needed to tell our stories. We deserve to have capacity to implement it all. We deserve to exist. Being in solidarity with that radical thought is nice, but being an accomplice and implementing that ideology is the most anti-racist thing the American theater can do. v
