Vegas theater couldn't be whiter if it were squeezed out of a Pepsodent tube.
And so ...
"We're starting with gospel plays to ignite this series because a lot of the minority community goes to church," says Sheilagh M. Polk, president of In House Production, which, good to her word, is staging the gospel play Crazy Love, starring Broadway vet Melba Moore and ex-Temptation Ollie Woodson, next month at Cashman Theater. "Depending on how it goes, we'd like to expand out to include all sorts of minority theater."
We're not talking Hamlet in Mandarin Chinese or a Hispanic Fiddler on the Roof or a hip-hop Oklahoma! Just a little color in the pale cheeks of Vegas theater.
Look outside ourselves and the inspiration is there: Broadway celebrates a revived Raisin in the Sun with Tony-winning Cosby matriarch Phylicia Rashad playing to an expanded fan base courtesy of co-star Sean "P. Diddy" Combs; the works of August Wilson—including Fences, The Piano Lesson, Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom—significantly enlarge the theatrical vocabulary with brilliant explorations of the black experience in America; Hispanic drama explodes into the consciousness of the white stage crowd with Pulitzer-winner Anna in the Tropics by Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz; and M. Butterfly Tony-winner David Henry Hwang collects kudos for a contemporized restaging of Flower Drum Song.
"I was born and raised in Las Vegas, and I'm an actress myself, having started with the Rainbow Company when I was 8—and even then, you could count on one hand the number of African-American, Asian and Hispanic shows there were here," says Polk, whose company staged T.J. Hemphill's gospel drama Gotta Find Me An Angel last February at Cashman. Suffering from lackluster promotion, it was poorly attended. "Las Vegas is still a very segregated town, and the outreach has not been done in terms of the arts. I don't even think most of the minority community realizes that it's here in town."
With gospel-circuit performers in lead roles and eight local actors in the cast, Crazy Love will cost approximately $120,000 to mount for three shows over two days, August 6-7, with tickets running $23-$30, Polk says. But recouping that investment—and encouraging further efforts—is a long shot, if past is prologue. Attempting to paint our stage scene any shade of off-white defines futility in Vegas.
When Jack Bell, an African-American, and Jack Nickolson launched Las Vegas Little Theatre in 1978, its casts and crews were fairly integrated, and the troupe even staged all-black productions, including Purlie Victorious, Split Second, A Soldier's Play, Ain't Misbehavin' and even A Raisin in the Sun, as well as casting some ethnic actors in other plays in roles that were not ethnic-specific.
"Over the first five years, those involved tried to attract the black community—not just actors, we wanted the audience as well," says LVLT board member/director Paul Thornton. "The black community was basically a no-show in the audience. Except for actors' families, it was a sea of white faces. Still, Jack set the policy that no less than one production per season was to be a 'black show,' and efforts continued to cast color-blind without debasing the integrity of the scripts. During our tenure at Spring Valley Library, an all-black company from Washington, D.C., was invited to present four performances of Home. They were extremely gifted and it was a stunning performance. Our black advisory board members reached out to the black community, calling radio stations and churches. All the performances were standing-room only, close to 800 people. Maybe 40 of them were from the African-American community.
"On the opposite side of the coin: Do a Jewish-oriented script and the Jewish community fills the place up," Thornton adds. "And many of them will continue to come, with quite a few purchasing season tickets."
White audiences here could also stand to shed the collective naivete and intellectual laziness that blur the distinctions of the kaleidoscopic Asian-American communities—Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Hawaiian, Vietnamese and Thai among them. Asian dramatists have valuable cultural truths to convey that don't begin with Flower Drum Song and end with Miss Saigon.
But would our sizable Hawaiian community turn out for Lee Cataluna's Folks You Meet in Longs, a series of seriocomic monologues set inside "Hawaii's preferred shopping destination," or Leilani Chan's E Nana I Ke Kumu (Look to the Source), which challenges the notion of Hawaii as little more than a leisurely land of paradise? Would Chinatown—which plays host to LVLT—flock to Joel Iwataki and Tim Dang's Beijing Spring, a musical celebration of the uprising at Tiananmen Square, or Curtis Chin's Son, which studies three generations of Asian-American men, or Prince Gomilvilas' The Theory of Everything, in which Thai, Filipino, Chinese and Japanese characters are forever changed after gathering atop a Las Vegas wedding chapel for a UFO watch?
Ditto for mostly untapped Hispanic expression on stage, such as Eduardo Machado's Once Removed (a Cuban family uprooted by the Castro revolution struggles to adapt to America), Luis Valdez's I Don't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges (an examination of minorities in movies, TV and plays) and Miguel Pinero's Short Eyes (a brutal depiction of the American prison system through largely minority eyes).
"Our talent pool of community performers is relatively small, but it seems to be even smaller in interested minorities," says Philip Shelburne, chief of P.S. Productions, who recently directed sold-out performances of Sweeney Todd at Community College of Southern Nevada.
"Perhaps we need to try a different format of show, maybe we don't provide the preferred vehicle for expression. Or maybe we need to find ethnic producers who have a vision and voice that can encourage talent development. I don't think we have a unique difficulty in Las Vegas, I think it's largely a problem of supportive numbers. Recently, Signature Productions tried to cast an all-ethnic Once On This Island, but weren't able to generate enough involvement to cast it true to ethnicity. It's extremely difficult to cast virtually any show anymore with any size or unique specifics because of a thinly spread talent pool and a lack of shared resources."
Will that always be the gospel truth?