Jada Hunt

"The Colors of Theater in a Southern State" by Jada Hunt

Growing up doing theater, I always believed it to be my safe haven. I always believed it to be a place filled with different colors of the rainbow. If you needed to see diversity, it’d be theater. A place where girls, guys, and nonbinary folks would finally be able to truly become themselves by depicting the life of someone or something else. Then I went through experiences that showed me theater was not this glassy cage of innocence I thought it was. I believe in an equal and better opportunity for all. 

For a while, I started to believe I was untalented. Living in a southern state, I had always experienced racism but I wanted to believe it was not in the theater here. The pain of always making it to callbacks but never in the cast because they had an all white cast. The time I was put in the cast but they made all the Black people play monkeys. The time I had braids so they made me play a mop. Then I left that theater department to find safer ones where I’d be casted as a lead. Even then, fellow cast members asked me how I as a Black person deserved this role or they'd laugh at me because I was too dark for any of the makeup they supplied in costumes. The amount of trauma I experienced in an art form I knew I was destined for since I was eight years old is unbelievable. 

Theater needs to become the safe haven I believed it to be. To do this we need to make changes. The first thing we need to do is ensure plays and roles for people of color. Lin Manuel Miranda is one artist that has started doing thus. Through plays like Hamilton he has made it more accessible to people of color. Another thing I believe that would help change for the better is to stop having an assumed bias. For example, Regina George in Mean Girls the musical is a character that is not made by her racial identity unlike other roles, like Tiana in princess and the frog or characters in the color purple. I believe roles that do not depend on being from a certain culture or racial disparity should be open to all colors. We have this assumed bias that Regina needs to be this blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl which is just untrue. Finally, I believe directors should make an effort to educate their cast members and themselves on how to not be racist. It sounds simple but a lot of people have a subliminal bias they did not even know existed. If these rules are met, I believe it could be the start to a better place for people of all colors and ways of life.