"But I don't know any Black actors"

The author of this piece has chosen to remain anonymous.

Recently I was casting a reading of a new piece I’m involved in. 

I set about coming up with options. This was a closed, somewhat casual endeavor so it was “ask only” – we weren’t having auditions. I came up with lots of wonderful talent.

And then I suddenly realized that every name I’d come up with was white.

Well, that’s not ok with me. Unless there’s a reason to cast something with only one ethnicity of actor (and I mean a legitimate reason, not the, excuse my language, b.s. we often hear about “but it takes place in upper-class Europe in the 1800s…” etc.) I want to have a diverse cast. I think representation is important and it matters to me, in all its’ many facets. Of course, every marginalized group isn’t going to be represented in every piece, but we need to do everything we can to bring as much representation as we can into the pieces we work on. 

So if this is something that’s important to me, why on earth was I only coming up with white actors? 

Of course, there were lots of great performers I could think of if I were casting a Broadway show and could put offers out to “names,” but it was deeply concerning to me that, when looking at performers I knew in my own life, friends, colleagues, people I could call up to come to the first read of a new piece, everyone was white.

I was angry with myself. How on earth was I really coming up with the answer I hated hearing from others… “but I don’t know any non-white actors who are right for this role.” Seriously? I’ve worked on Broadway. I graduated from an ivy league theater school. 

And as I started to hunt more and more feverously through the depths of my mental actor Rolodex something hit me like a ton of bricks.

See, all the actors that were coming to mind were folks I’d met somewhere in my educational or professional career. People I found myself working with who I really liked and thought were very talented. We’d been in the trenches together and we kept those relationships going.

And I suddenly realized that in my entire professional career I had never been cast in a show with a Black performer.

Let’s go further back.

In my class at drama school, there was a grand total of one Black student, and two students of middle eastern descent (forgive the generic description, I don’t know the specific country they were from.) 

I only graduated a few years ago.

Just before the pandemic, I was on the production team for a show where we were adamant we had to have non-white actors. The casting director brought in a grand total of one Black actor (who, age wise, was completely wrong for any of the roles.) When confronted about it the CD said “Well, it’s hard to find Black actors. I did my best.”

And it made me think long and hard about the depths of white privilege I had only just now become aware of. 

The theater world is a small community. Often shows have been cast long before a Broadway casting notice goes up. That show had significant development – likely years of readings, including small, casual readings where the team asks their friends, who they then end up falling in love with in the role. Those friends are the people the production team went to school with, were cast in shows with…

Yes, there are a lot of people in this industry who are racist. Frequently there is no care or attention paid to getting a diverse cast. 

But that’s not the whole story. The whole story is much more insidious. 

If I had practically no non-white fellow students…if there hasn’t been a non-white person in a show I’ve been cast in, there will not be non-white performers in my Rolodex when I need to cast the first table read. And if there are no non-white people involved in the development of a piece, how are they going to have the opportunity to get cast when those table reads turn into commercial productions – where half the roles are already cast by the people who had a leg up getting into those initial developmental stages?

“There just aren’t any non-white actors” is a horrific, untrue statement. But when that’s what you’ve experienced your entire educational and professional career, it can feel true. And that’s a huge problem. One that is generational. If I don’t know non-white actors because of who I’ve encountered in my career it’s likely I will end up with all-white casts – which means those performers won’t have worked with non-white actors and the cycle continues on and on.

It's not just that non-white actors aren’t getting cast or being called into the room, it’s not just that educational departments need to step up their game and accept a more diverse body of students so that non-white actors have access to the same education or that nonwhite artists and artistic material need to be studied in those educational programs – though all of that is true and incredibly important.

What no one’s talking about is that non-white actors are being shut out of vital networking opportunities – opportunities that are more complex than whether or not they got an audition. When that happens, we all lose.