Does Race Matter For A Theatre Director?

"Seated around a large table during the first week of rehearsal for "The Night Is a Child," director Sheldon Epps guides his actors' investigation of a scene between an American woman and the hotel owner she encounters in Brazil. He asks them about the differences between Boston and Brazil, the grayness versus the color, and the contrasts that these first scenes must embody.

With a cast led by JoBeth Williams, Charles Randolph-Wright's "The Night is a Child" opens Friday in its West Coast premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse, where Epps is artistic director. The play revolves around the experience of Williams' Bostonian, and that of her family, in the wake of a Columbine-style killing spree by one of her sons.

Key characters in this play are a white woman and her family. The director happens to be black, as does the playwright. Should it matter?

If the answer seems simple, recent dialogue in the theater community suggests otherwise. What Epps has created in this Pasadena rehearsal room is largely the exception. A theater that facilitates artists of any race or ethnicity working on plays about characters of any race or ethnicity is far from the norm.

In fact, since spring, when a revival of August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" opened on Broadway, the American theater has been engaged in a racially charged discussion of who should direct what. Should white artists direct plays that are black in authorship and subject? And by extension, should black -- and Latino, Asian, mixed-race and other -- directors be hired to stage plays written by white authors? Such are the questions being posed.

"I don't think there is a simple and satisfactory answer," says black playwright Lynn Nottage, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "Ruined." "This conversation is part of our cultural growing pains, and it's one of the many steps in the road to defining our creative and cultural identity."

The controversy was ignited when Tony-winning director Bartlett Sher was tapped to helm the Wilson revival. Wilson, who died in 2005, had insisted that only black directors stage his work. But his widow, Constanza Romero, approved the choice of Sher, who is white. This production marked the first time a Wilson play had been directed by a white director on Broadway. And black artists have voiced concern about the precedent.

"The conversation around 'Joe Turner' has been a catalyst," says Laura Penn, executive director of the Society of Directors and Choreographers, a union for theater artists. "Yes, there was conversation about it as an aesthetic choice, but the conversation among our members quickly moved to access and opportunity.""