WP Theater

WeSeeYouWhiteAmericanTheater

Response and Action Statement as of 6/21/22

For definitions of certain terminology used, please reference the glossary at the end of this statement. 

ABOUT WP THEATER:
Founded in 1978, WP Theater originally opened its doors to address the conspicuous underrepresentation of women artists working in the American Theater. However, Feminist organizations, including ours, have historically existed to represent white, cis-gender women. Although we are working to change this, WP remains a predominantly white and cisgender institution and we recognize our complicity in the systemic racism built both into our organization and the larger American Theater. While WP Theater has supported many BIPOC theatermakers throughout our history, the staff, leadership, board, and majority of artists who have created work at WP, as well as the majority of artists selected for WP’s Lab have been white. Our work supporting Women+ theater artists must be directly connected to our work to combat white supremacy and anti-Blackness, and to support BIPOC artists and welcome BIPOC audiences and communities into our spaces and stages. 

OUR PROCESS:

Since receiving the WeSeeYouWAT Demands in the summer of 2020, WP’s staff has been focusing considerable effort to compare these demands with our practices and to assess where we need – and will endeavor – to make change. WP invited Farah Bala at FARSIGHT to help us structure an intentional and safe process, centering the needs of those with the least power (based on position or personal identity). After our initial six months of discussions, WP added our Commitment to Change to our website to detail the ways in which we intended to engage in this work, provide resources, and honor the Indigenous lands we inhabit. Now, we are sharing this more robust response to the Demands and our proposed pathway forward.  

Many of these changes are detailed throughout this document and will continue to evolve as we work to make WP a nurturing space for Women+ artists – prioritizing artists who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color – to create, explore their voices, take chances, and be joyfully adventurous. 

OUR ACTIONS:
Although none of the work in any department stands alone, our departments have prioritized the following specific changes and actions; to focus on now and in the immediate future. 

Artistic 

Nurturing of Artists

• WP Theater will:
  • Continue to invest in the development of our artistic community, in particular our Lab members and alums, by connecting them to WP’s networks and resources to support artists’ stated individual professional and artistic goals.
  • Continue to deepen our partnership with viBe Theatre Experience by co-designing a program for young artists of color who are exploring their creative voices in theater through playwriting and design through connections with professional artists in WP’s community.
  • Adjust our 2022-2024 WP Lab structure, including our invitation and application processes for Lab artist selection, to create a more equitable process and allow incoming Lab members to co-create Lab offerings to meet the evolving needs and visions of artists.
  • Continue to offer artists our Caregiver Fund, a micro grant for all artists working with us in-person who have child care or elder care needs. 
  • Invest in the building and nurturing of relationships with Native artists and creating authentic and long-term relationships with Native communities with the goal of using WP’s resources to support their work and visions.
  • Commission an artist to help honor the enslaved peoples of the African diaspora who worked and lived on much of the land we inhabit, and the predominantly Black communities that were displaced to further advance the interests of white people in power.

Access in Curation and Artistic Planning

• WP Theater will:
  • Ensure that each season supports at least 50% BIPOC artists in lead creative roles.
  • Find ways to support development work of all Lab disciplines, including producers.
  • Make our Mainstage more racially equitable by investing in our Lab artists, seeking funding for commissions for Lab writers and exploring how commission funding can support Lab producers and directors.
  • Formulate options for fundraising that allow WP to produce without a partner or co-produce with an institution regardless of the partners’ size.  This would allow WP more agency to initiate projects, particularly BIPOC projects, and support smaller institutions, particularly BITOC, who have been historically underfunded and excluded from funding sources.
  • Subsidize costs to rent our space. WP is launching the Space Program, to provide subsidized space to artists and projects. To be eligible, projects and creative teams must be values aligned with WP’s gender and racial equity commitments, and be able to demonstrate that theater rental costs have been a barrier to production.

 Production Staffing and Casting

• WP Theater will:
  • Ensure that design teams are at least 50% BIPOC over the course of every theatrical season.
  • Hire BIPOC directors for projects that aren’t specific to culture and race.
  • Hire a BIPOC casting director or provide additional funding for a BIPOC associate casting director to work alongside any white casting directors.

 Expand Our Invitation to Our Shows

• WP Theater will:
  • Deepen our investment in WP’s community VIP program, which invites leaders in our various partner communities and organizations to our VIP events, free of charge.
  • Expand our practice of holding a free community performance for each production. We will work with the creative team of each production to curate the organizations and communities to be invited to this performance and beyond.
  • Create a staff position to expand, define and articulate how WP can engage with our communities and audiences in a rigorous and meaningful way. We have the goal of creating this staff position by FY25.

 Artistic Notes and Feedback:

• WP Theater will:
  • Acknowledge power dynamics in notes sessions with creative teams. To that end, there will be no one-on-one feedback sessions between white leadership and BIPOC artist(s), unless specifically requested by the artist.
  • Provide feedback from within a framework that is most useful to the artist(s). That framework will be defined by the artist(s).

 General Management

• WP Theater will:
  • Compensate all work done by artists that the institution asks them to take on, whether a reading, a social media takeover, appearance at a donor talkback, or elsewhere.
  • Donate 1% of WP’s share of Box Office Revenue (up to $1,000 per show) to community programs or not-for-profit organizations – determined by the lead artists of each production – and related to the subject matter addressed in the work.
  • Maintain budget allocations for cultural consultants, audience development consultants and provide expense budgets for Equity Diversity and Inclusion work and add expense lines for part-time and/or shared with other organizations EDI officers to all future annual budgets.  We hope to grow these budget lines over time and add to them as needed.
  • Rebuild our canceled internship program as paid temporary, entry-level positions accessible to all.
  • Support BIPOC affinity groups for staff and artists. To achieve this, we will add information to our artist handbook.

 Development

• WP Theater will:
  • Continue to commit to equitable sharing of any grants with our co-producers that have applied for and received for any BIPOC projects and/or a BIPOC partnership. 
  • Continue to spend funding received for a project exclusively on THAT project. 
  • Commit to making equitable partnerships with BIPOC theater companies; including specifically finding ways of collaborating that uplift the work of those companies for mutual benefit, and prioritize the uplift of the BIPOC company.
  • Continue our multiyear shared economic partnership with viBe Theater Experience, and work with leaders at viBe to connect them with foundations that may support their work; both together with and independent of WP.
  • Compensate WP Lab adjudication panelists to encourage diversity, access, and racial equity.
  • WP staff shall inquire into the racial and ethnic makeup of any external panel and white-identifying staff will decline invitations where the panel is majority white, or shall ask the panel to appoint a non-white-identifying staff member.
• At the start of FY23, we will:
  • Share all board bios with affiliations on wptheater.org. 
  • Collaborate with peer theaters to approach funders and grant makers to have Equity, Diversity and Inclusion conversations around their grant making, push for elimination of budget size from grant consideration, push for more program officers of color, encourage the providing of financial support for an audit if required, encourage funders to make evaluation metrics transparent, and to provide more General Operating Support across the board.

Marketing and Press

• WP Theater will:
  • Allocate a substantial portion of each production’s marketing budget to be used for the sole purpose of developing and retaining our BIPOC audience. We will include initiatives targeted towards these audiences in every budgeted campaign we implement.
  • Review and update our industry targeted papering list to ensure it contains BIPOC representation, specifically Black and Indigenous organizations and leaders.
  • Greatly improve and build out the lists of domains for BIPOC-centered news media and radio, etc., and advertise to their audiences for programmatic digital advertising campaigns.
  • Pay a stipend to artists who actively lead and participate in any promotional campaign on social media.
  • Give program credit to BIPOC marketing consultants and organizations.
  • Always include the name of BIPOC critics in pull quotes.

 Production and Facilities

• WP Theater will:
  • Eliminate all 10 out of 12 hour work days during technical rehearsals.
  • Create paid entry-level training positions for production positions.
  • Ensure production staff hired are at least 50% BIPOC over the course of every theatrical season.
  • Commit to having our vendor base be primarily Women+ and BIPOC owned businesses.
  • Build a new pipeline for emerging production theater professionals by partnering with local schools. Our goal is to develop this initiative, in partnership with other institutions and existing programs by FY24. 

 Administrative Staff

• WP Theater has:
  • Instituted new hiring practices, including publicly posting for every administrative position. These postings include a discrete salary range and job description. We have also augmented our database of places where new jobs are posted to include resources outside of the most heavily trafficked performing arts listings.
  • Instituted a 2 Day/year Personal Day policy for all permanent employees. This paid leave does not require advance notice nor disclosure of the nature of the leave. 
  • Expanded our Parental Leave for full-time permanent employees to make it available for all parents regardless of gender-identity or primary/non-primary caregiving status. 
  • Expanded paid time off for our part-time employees. Part-time permanent employees are now paid for week-long office closures 
  • Instituted a policy that allows Temporary full-time administrative employees to accrue vacation time.
  • Committed to disrupting “show-must-go-on” culture in regards to safety and wellbeing of the artists. We will work with, not against, artists to keep their best interests in mind when addressing any physical or emotional needs.

 Leadership and Board

• WP Theater is working to:
  • Create a handover document for easier succession. Succession planning has been discussed with the board and a succession planning sub-committee has been formed. WP intends to have the handover document completed by the end of the FY23 Season. Included in the plan is that executive level hires will be made publicly and equitably and, when used, we will diversify our search firms requiring that at least one leader of the search be a BIPOC person. Educational background and experience will no longer feature in job postings and all finalist pools for executive hires must be at least 50% non-white identifying.  
  • Engage a more racially diverse board. We created a gap analysis to show us where we must seek better representation of all kinds and have conducted a self-identity survey of the board to confirm how the members of our board self-identify. In addition, we have added language to our Board Specifications to address WP’s antiracism priorities and to specify that any board member may be removed for racist behavior.
  • Make changes to board structures that allow artist and junior board members to serve as officers, on the Executive Committee, and in leadership positions. WP has added three new artist board seats who have full voting rights but no giving requirements. 
  • Maintain budget lines that reflect our commitments to cultural consultants, and other measures to support BIPOC artists’ needs, as well as training and other commitments made in this response to the WSYWAT demands document. WP staff and leadership have shared our commitment to this work with the board, and the finance committee, so that they understand the way that our values are an active part of our budgeting process.

 Staff and Board Training

Beginning in FY22 and going forward, WP has committed $15,000 of our annual budget to provide antiracism, anti-oppression, individual and social identity, allyship, intervention, de-escalation, white fragility and other training for our staff, artists and board. We are also actively investigating the best ways to train our seasonal/temporary workers and artists.

 2020-2021 Trainings

• Allyship Training through the Alliance Theatre attended by WP Staff and Board

• Living Land Acknowledgement Workshop with the Lenape Center attended by WP Staff and Board
• Identity Workshop with Farsight attended by WP staff
• Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute Anti-Racism Webinar Series attended by Executive Leadership

 2022 Trainings

• Mandatory White Fragility training provided by BlackBee Entertainment for white-identifying WP staff and optionally for BIPOC-identifying staff.
• Hollaback’s “OBL Bystander Intervention in the Workplace” organized by the Off-Broadway League, now required for all AEA Members working with WP and strongly encouraged for all other workers at WP.

OUR COMMITMENT TO UNDERSTANDING AND DISMANTLING ANTI-BLACKNESS AND COLORISM:

Parallel to our focus on acknowledging and undoing the systemic racism and white supremacy in our practices, we are intent on deepening our understanding of anti-Blackness and colorism. WP recognizes that the WSYWAT Demands were born out of a movement protesting state-sanctioned violence towards Black people. We are examining our history and practices to see where we have historically perpetuated anti-Blackness and Colorism by centering and favoring lighter-skinned people and people of a similar skin experience. We acknowledge that race and ethnicity are often conflated and are often connected, but that ethnicity isn’t an automatic indicator of race. We acknowledge that people from similar racial or ethnic backgrounds are not a monolith, but have unique and individual experiences. We, as an institution, are committed to educating ourselves through training and dialogue with our community about how we can combat anti-Blackness and Colorism in our workplace while also prioritizing intersectionality. 

OUR COMMITMENT TO TRANSPARENCY:

Beginning in July 2022, WP will publish an annual report that will include an assessment of our progress on these commitments, as well as updates and new goals and targets, as our conversation with our community continues. To that end, we welcome feedback about these commitments, including reflections on our actions, growth opportunities, and any lack of transparency. We hope you will email us your thoughts and suggestions at info@wptheater.org.

A MOMENT OF GRATITUDE:

We are grateful to the artists who put their time and energy into showing PWI institutions a way to shift forward towards achieving a more equitable American theater. 

GLOSSARY:

• BIPOC – An acronym for “Black, Indigenous and People of Color.”  We recognize that BIPOC is not a universally accepted term, and that our language will  evolve along with our understanding of our role as a PWI working with BIPOC artists.  
• BITOC – An acronym for “Black, Indigenous Theaters of Color.” These are identity-focused institutions whose missions are to support BIPOC artists.
• Colorism – A prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group, or in our case, the favoring of BIPOC artists with a lighter skin tone.
• PWI – An acronym for “Predominantly White Institution.”  The majority of WP’s staff and the entirety of WP’s current and historic leadership are white-identifying, and thus we count ourselves as a PWI.
• Women+ – When we say Women+ we mean: cis women, trans, non-binary, or gender-nonconforming people and all gender identities which have been systematically oppressed throughout history in the theater and beyond.  
• WSYWAT Demands – The “We See You, White American Theater” demands document published in June 2020 by a coalition of over 300 BIPOC theatermakers across the United States.

Our January 2021 Statement:

We are heartsick and angry over the continued senseless murder of Black people and ongoing systemic racism in policing in this country. This senseless loss of life in Black communities has been compounded by the disproportionate devastation of COVID-19 and economic injustice. We are grieving with our Black artists, colleagues and communities here and across the country. Black lives matter. 

Black folx, we are with you, you matter, your lives matter.

WP Theater is reckoning with the way that this institution has failed to support BIPOC Women+ artists, and perpetuated white supremacist structures on our stages, in our office, in our board, community and the culture at large. We are listening, we are working for change, and we are taking action against injustice in our communities, and naming the places where inequity and bias exists within our own organization. 

We have been complacent too long. Our silence has resulted in oppression and the perpetuation of white supremacist culture. We can no longer be complicit: change begins here. This list is just a beginning, as we, with full hearts, commit to taking steps towards change: 

WP’s INITIAL COMMITMENTS TO CHANGE AND ACTION:

• WP commits to making work for racial justice an institutional daily practice. 
• WP is a feminist institution, and we recognize that feminist organizations have historically been predominantly white spaces. We commit to ensuring that our institutional gender focus is not a shield for oppression or the silencing of BIPOC Women+ and their stories.
• WP commits to working with adding more BIPOC to the Board by the end of the ‘20-‘21 season.
• WP commits to providing ongoing anti-racist trainings to our staff and board, and to use those tools and language as a central part of how we work.
• WP commits to making anti-racist resources available to our staff, board, community, and the public as well as resources specifically for BIPOC+.
• WP commits to equity and transparency in our hiring practices.  We commit to transparency about salary in job listings, we will do outreach to ensure that there is robust representation of BIPOC Women+ in the process and that we will work to ensure that our staff reflects our community.
• WP commits to deepening our work and engagement with our BIPOC Women+ institutional partners and our community-building work. 
• WP commits to engaging more directly in political action in our community and to looking deeply at how wealth is distributed in our district.
•  WP commits to continuing and expanding our work to make our spaces safe for all, and ensuring that our zero tolerance policies on discrimination, harassment, intimidation and oppression are clear, and shared wherever we make our work.
• WP commits to prioritizing vendors who have anti-racism and anti-oppression policies and practice, and that we will focus on BIPOC Women+ owned businesses when seeking out new vendors, and in our community partnership card program.

Any statement is inadequate to hold all the ways that we have failed, and that theater as a whole has failed to take action against white supremacy and oppression on our stages and beyond.  WP commits to being held accountable for our failures, and to the commitments we make here.  We also commit to this document as a working document that will grow and expand as we learn and grow, in collaboration and conversation with our community.

For anti-racism resources and more information, please click here.
Last updated June 6, 2020