Previously, we thought listing out the things that we were already doing would feel performative, and so we have hesitated to be explicit about the work we are doing. We have heard the calls for organizations to speak out, however, and we recognize now that silence is a form of violence.
It is vital that our community knows what we do, and why we do it, and how we plan to grow and improve. See below what we are already doing in the pursuit of access and equity in our organization, and some preliminary steps for how we plan to expand these efforts: We run all our auditions as group auditions / audition workshops, and do not require preparation for the majority of our auditions. This is to ensure that monologue preparation does not present a barrier to artists hoping to get involved with us, and in keeping with our goal to cast creators of many different disciplines into our shows. (The only exceptions are a memorization task for Dice auditions, and bringing in a song of the auditioner's choice for musicals) We have operated under a commitment to continue the audition process until we had seen enough “not-white-cis-men” to cast our entire show, to ensure that we were not becoming complacent in our casting processes and to hold ourselves accountable. Now, we are going to get more specific, and set a new requirement for ourselves to continue our audition process until we have seen enough performers of color to cast the entire show. We commit to diversifying our audition pool by making direct invitations to artists of color whose work we admire. Now, we will commit to see more work featuring artists of color and/or produced by companies that champion artists of color, to further expand our pool. We commit to working with the schedules of our artists, and acknowledge that we do not pay them enough to expect them to turn down work / opportunities that would prevent them from attending rehearsal. We have been continually working towards raising the stipends for all our artists, and have made that our primary goal and priority for our fifth season. We run all of our shows and events on a sliding scale, and offer pay-what-you-can tickets to every event, to ensure that there is never a financial barrier for our audiences. |
We are continually striving to be actively anti-racist as an organization, and to prioritize equity and access. We invite you, our community, to give us feedback on how we’re doing and where we can improve, and we will continue to be as transparent as we can as we learn and grow.
If you do have feedback or anything else you want to let us know, you can send it to us via any of these methods:
Contact us by email at [email protected]
Via our anonymous form: Click Here
If you do have feedback or anything else you want to let us know, you can send it to us via any of these methods:
Contact us by email at [email protected]
Via our anonymous form: Click Here