Last night I made the error of reading the May 1 edition of The Southerner. I was profoundly disturbed by Ms. Stanford's editorial. While I agree that division exists in the Grady community, I deeply resent the implication that the Drama Club has exacerbated this problem through the selection of plays for production.
This is the third time this year that I felt the editorial staff of the paper misrepresented the facts about our productions. On the same page, the paper finally noticed that we produced an assembly program, A Tribute to Black Women. The editorial noted that "a considerable number of Grady's white population, primarily School of Communications students, skipped the assembly.'
As one who was intimately involved with the production, and one who stood in the rear by necessity of assisting with the lights and supervising my own class, I can tell you with certainty that at least an equal number of African American, non-magnet students skipped the performance or behaved disrespectfully during the performance. I was dismayed and insulted by both the skipping and the disrespect, just as I was during the fall preview of The Night of January 16th, when students skipped and behaved inappropriately.
In the March 15 issue, Keesha Coleman quoted Garnesha Crawford as saying "Grady's drama club ha[s] not done a production that showcased black females." These published comments, when allowed to stand without correction, become true for many readers of the paper who rarely or never attend Drama Club productions. At our spring production of "Flyin' West," one parent told me she had read Ms. Coleman's article and noted how ,,meaningful" she found Ms. Crawford's reason for selecting the production. I was shocked to realize that readers of the paper could easily succumb to the false perception that we have not produced plays by or about Black women. For this reason, I find it imperative to state the truth.
The reality is that during the past four years, we have produced four productions by African-American women playwrights: Mixed Babies, by Ona Faida; Magenta Shift, by Carol Mack; Watermelon Rinds, by Regina Taylor; and Flyin' West, by Pearl Cleage. We did two plays by African American men: Zooman and the Sign by Charles Fuller and Blues for Mister Charlie, by James Baldwin. Both featured strong roles for AfricanAmerican women. Three productions, Folktales, A Tribute to Langston Hughes, and A tribute to Black Women , were produced in conjunction with our African-American Infusion program and also featured large numbers of African-American actresses. Moreover, every play I have ever produced and directed at Grady High School has featured AfricanAmerican student actors in leading roles.
When selecting plays for production at Grady, I must weigh a number of considerations: I feel compelled to select plays of genuine literary merit with themes that will be relevant and challenging to the Grady community, and roles that will challenge and develop Grady students. While I cannot force students to audition for plays, I attempt to select plays which entice a variety of students to participate. I even attempt to time productions so that students can be involved in athletic activities as well as plays. Over the years, we have done a pretty good job at diversity. We have selected a variety of genres (comedies, satires, tragedies, serious dramas); historical periods (classics as well as modern plays and most periods in between); and numerous production styles (an original company developed-play, scripted plays, a musical, a music revue, an opera, and several productions representing a compilation of poetry, folktales, dances, and excerpts from other plays). We have produced plays by young and old, male and female, Northerners and Southerners, playwrights from urban, suburban, and rural backgrounds, playwrights from various religious backgrounds, including Christians, Jews, a Moslem, an atheist and a Shinto Buddhist, and playwrights from a number of ethnic backgrounds including Russian, South African, Irish, French, Japanese, English, as well as Europeans and African-Americans.
In both cases of productions with predominantly African -American casts mentioned by Ms. Stanford, and in every other situation when we produced a play with predominantly one ethnicity, we produced another accompanying play or plays with a mixed cast(s) rehearsing simultaneously (and generally performing on the same evenings) in order to avoid the very division she implies. Both plays, Watermelon Rinds and Flyin' West were selected by student directors after long and careful consideration. Both student directors, Jilvonnie Littlejohn and Garnesha Crawford, agonized about the choice. We discussed the difficulty of finding good plays with mixed casts, and weighed the very real desire to include students of different backgrounds along with their desire to select plays that spoke to them. In the end, each selected a play she found most personally meaningful.
There is a heated debate going on today in the world of academic and professional theater, August Wilson, author of such moving dramas as Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Two Trains Running, challenged the recent trend of producing classic plays with mixed casts. This trend, called colorblind casting, is a practice I have always employed. Wilson argued that African-American actors should not direct or audition for roles not written for and by African Americans. He believes that casting an African-American actor, say Denzel Washington in a Shakespearean comedy or a John Grisham suspense drama creates an unauthentic performance. I have not decided how I feel about his charges, but I have thought long and hard about the issue, and I have always sought to make sure that we included a significant number of plays by and about African Americans to challenge the significant population of AfricanAmerican students who make up the student body at Grady.
I am puzzled when I recal I that the only two productions that Ms. Stanford has worked on during her high school career were of predominantly African-American casts, and I guess that one third of the cast and crew of Quilters who are African-Americans don't count. (Maybe the fact that Ms. Stanford did not attend the production led her to this hasty generalization.) I am dismayed that A Tribute to Black Women passed unnoticed for three months; it seemed to several of us involved in the production that The Southerner was "skipping out" by ignoring the production. I sincerely believe that all I of the misrepresentations I noted have gone farther to divide and to create discord than the Drama Club possibly could I hope that in the future the paper will report on and review productions in a more timely fashion, and that the editors will attempt to represent the program accurately I challenge Ms. Stanford to find a play by an African American or anyone, for that matter, which includes roles for European Latin, Native or Asian as well as African Americans (or better yet she could write it). I would really like to produce such a play.