Eric Monjoy, a sophomore history major and theatre minor, reread his lines one last time while he waited in the hallway to be called in for his chance to audition for “Somewhere: A primer for the end of days.”
He looked up and glanced around. He only saw one person of color there to audition.
When the cast was announced shortly after, Monjoy, who identifies as three quarters white, was surprised he got the part of Alexander.
“In the playwright’s notes, she did specify that she wanted the character of Alexander to be a person of color, but then I got to play him,” Monjoy said.
The one person of color he saw at the audition made it into the cast too in a different role, but had to drop out when he was accepted into a study abroad program, according to Monjoy.
With Cal Poly being the only predominantly white CSU, many departments struggle with diversity. The theatre and dance department has been working to promote diversity through a variety of initiatives.
“You have to make it a priority,” department chair Brian Healy said. “When it’s a priority, that’s when you see change.”
The theatre department has worked to make diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) a priority, because the faculty and staff believe it is important and it’s about more than just enrollment data.
“However you define it, diversity is essential to the theater because theater acts as a mirror to life,” theatre professor Hala Baki said.
According to Healy, about three quarters of the department’s student body identifies as white, compared to the 49.62% of Cal Poly’s undergraduate population that identifies as white.
“The limited diversity within the department affects students both in the classroom and in production,” Baki said.
In the classroom, “it indirectly limits the conversations that can be had about various theater topics,” and in production it limits which plays the department can put on, Baki said.
In 2021, the department’s fall production of “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” was canceled due to the lack of diverse representation in the cast.
This lack of representation continues to be a limiting factor when choosing what plays the department will put on.
“Our challenge as a department is to then select plays that embrace diversity, plurality, and inclusion while also catering to the real limitations that we face,” Baki said.
The plays for the year are chosen by faculty and staff the year before they hit the stage, according to Healy.
They meet before the beginning of fall quarter to submit 10 to 20 potential plays. After reading over all the plays and discussing them, the department chooses the plays for the year based on the selection procedures the department has created. In choosing the plays, the department considers resources including time, student opportunity and space.
Each year they try to choose a “classic” play from pre-modern history, a musical, and play by an underrepresented or new voice, according to Healy.
The department has been working on outreach with other groups on campus like the Gender Equity Center, the Latinx/e Center for Academic Success and Achievement, and the Black Academic Excellence Center to try to help bring more representation to the stage, Healy said.
The department has also been working with the College of Liberal Arts to bring playwrights from diverse backgrounds to campus to hold workshops for students.
Recently the theatre department, in collaboration with the English department, brought Egyptian playwright Yussef El Guindi to campus for a workshop that included a staged reading of his play “Our Enemies” and an academic panel discussing bias, representation and intersectionality in mainstream media, according to Baki.
“I believe we need to create more programming like this that looks beyond conventional production models and gives our department and the campus community the opportunity to truly embrace diversity and interdisciplinarity through theater,” Baki said.
The department wants to incorporate more of these staged readings, or rehearsed read-throughs of the play, into their programming through a second stage series, according to Healy. This second stage series would mean the department would put on more performances in addition to the mainstage productions.
“Hopefully our second stage series can create an opportunity where we can give voice to plays we can’t otherwise produce,” Healy said.
The theatre department is also working to foster diversity in the classroom by adding conversations around diversity into the curriculum and introducing a new class for spring quarter.
In this new class, Ancestral Theatre (TH 470), students will write an original play inspired by their ancestry and family history, according to the course description.
Conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion are also being integrated into more classes wherever possible and the department is rewriting their program learning outcomes to include DEI goals, according to Healy.
Through these efforts, Healy said the department is “doing a lot and not enough,” and that there is always more work to be done.
“[These are] enduring goals,” Healy said. “They’re goals that we never reach to a certain extent, because they are always changing.”