I Was Called a Racist for Promoting Actors of Color at My Own Theatre Company

Pamela Joy, Emilie Bonsant and Saima Huq / Always Love Lucy Theatre

• Saima Huq

In 2014, I started my theatre company Always Love Lucy to promote actors of color in leading roles. We started with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, with the Loman family as South Asians. 

After the successful 15-show run, I had to chase down $10,000 that the theatre owner had kept from my ticket sales. When I finally got all of it, my personal training client (who had been the executive producer of Grease in the 1970s) stuck out his hand, shook mine, and congratulated me for "succeeding in the sleaziest business in New York -- theatre."

I thought of that recently after my 2017 production of Hello to Rose: One Act Plays by Tennessee Williams. I had expanded my definition of diversity to include actors over age 40, particularly women in storylines where they neither talk about men nor mentor younger women.

During this production, the director I hired, who had been on my previous three productions, routinely accused me of being against white women, or being prejudiced against them for the color of their hair, despite my casting blonde white women in this and all my other plays as well.

After I had vetoed his 35-year-old, big-chested, overweight choice to play a 13-year-old who was eating from a garbage pail after her parents abandoned her, he informed me -- not asked --- that he was bringing on his own Assistant Director Melissa, and she needed to be paid. He did this not in private, but in front of other cast and crew so I had to either argue in front of them and look like the production had shaky leadership, or let it go.

During the entire rehearsal and run, Melissa was rude and unprofessional to me, the producer whom she expected to pay her, even pretending to be unable to hear me when I spoke in front of the cast. When I was fed up with her and stood up for myself, she went into the hallway while her benefactor backed me up into a wall in a physically threatening manner, yelled that he "guaranteed [Melissa] doesn't have a problem with you" and that I had a thing against white women. 

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Editor’s Note: I also had the chance to speak with Ms. Huq who mentioned the following.

“The situation inspired me to write Julisa Ceasar, a short play on an all-female PTA in 1991. I needed another short play So I wrote King Lahiri to go with it.

King Lahiri is now being turned in to a feature film with over 20 featured parts for BIPOC actors in it.”