Broadway Is Brimming With Black Playwrights. But for How Long?
The New York Times
Theater seems to be responding to demands for diversity. Artists are both delighted and worried about the precarious moment in which the gates have opened.
Broadway’s prepandemic theater season featured two plays by Black writers, and one of them had been kicking around since 1981. The previous season, there was one such play, and the season before that, zero.
This season, if all goes as planned, there will be at least seven.
The sudden abundance, after decades of scarcity, is a response to criticism the theater industry, like so many others, has confronted since the widespread protests over police brutality that followed last year’s killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Facing scrutiny over what kinds of stories are told onstage, and who makes decisions offstage, Broadway’s gatekeepers have opened their doors to more Black writers, at least for the moment.
