That’s August Wilson over there on the left. Though he is gone, he is far from forgotten, particularly at the Black Playwrights Convening, which happened under the auspices of the American Voices New Play Institute in Washington, D.C., this past January. Arena Stage asked Isaac Butler to be the event’s Twitterer-in-chief, and he raised Cain and questions in relatively equal measure. Here, in the second of our three-part series on the convening, he answers a few questions about his time down South.

How did you get involved?
Out of the blue one day, this awesome woman named Amrita Mangus, who works at Arena, e-mailed me and said, “We’d love to have you come down and write about this convening we’re doing about diversity, and we want to pay you to do it.”  I had met David Dower—Arena’s associate artistic director, who runs the New Play program there—at the annual TCG conference, and we got along well, so I assume it came through him. Anyway, David has this great group of fellows and whatnot who are really motivated and hyper organized, and are true believers. Three of them got to organize convenings on subjects relevant to new-play development. The first was on diversity. I went there and blogged and Twittered, but I got so caught up in Twittering that I basically had no time to blog so my blog posts that I wrote for them were…subpar, I’d say. But my Twittering was awesome! I was all, like, posting provocative things people were saying and asking interesting questions and picking fights with people, and it made for a good Twitter feed. So this time, when they had me back, they decided to make me Twitter Bossman.

Did you do the required reading? What’s in it?
Well, August Wilson’s Ground on Which I Stand can be read for free here. It takes maybe 15 minutes to read, so I urge all of Time Out’s readers to just go read it. The other one, the Suzan-Lori [Parks] piece ["New Black Math"], is not freely available, unfortunately. They’re hard to summarize. But let me try.

GOWIS is where August Wilson declares in very clear terms his politics as a writer, person and artist, and places himself firmly in the tradition of black nationalism. It is a vehement call for breaking down the white power structure that controls the [League of Resident Theatres] system, delivered by someone who is that system’s prized artist, and whose star within that system only grew afterward. It’s an interesting piece, much of which I agree with, some of which is dated and all of which is a lot more complicated than people remember, simply because the whole thing got turned into whether or not “color-blind casting” was a good idea. (For the record, I support the encouragement of black artists and black playwrights and black theaters and black directors and integrated casting, which is to say that when a character’s race isn’t overtly salient, casting only white actors in those roles is downright morally abhorrent.)

I guess it could best be summed up by this chunk: “The truth is that often where there are aesthetic criteria of excellence, there are also sociological criteria that have traditionally excluded blacks. I say raise the standards and remove the sociological consideration of race as privilege, and we will meet you at the crossroads, in equal numbers, prepared to do the work of extending and developing the common ground of the American theater. We are capable of work of the highest order; we can answer to the high standards of world-class art. Anyone who doubts our capabilities at this late stage is being intellectually dishonest. We can meet on the common ground of theater as a field of work and endeavor. But we cannot meet on the common ground of experience.”

As for the S-LP piece, it’s a very playful, very passionate list of things that black plays are. It really must be read (or better yet, heard); it’s like a very long piece of performance poetry. The short version: Black plays can be anything. But in saying that in so many different ways, S-LP taps into real riches in that subject. (Example: “A black play is a leader but seldom an elected official,” or “A black play is a white play when the lights go out,” or “We gotta crack the heart wide open because when it healed up, it healed up wrong.”) I highly recommend people check it out. Maybe Arena can get her permission to publish it online as a PDF download or something.

What were the major frustrations?
Well, I’d say the major frustration is that theater is still really fucking racist. This should surprise exactly no one. We all know theater is slow-moving with regard to aesthetics, but it’s slow-moving with regard to other things, too. So there were a lot of anecdotes about that, about being mistreated by theaters in ways that were, frankly, shocking…but also, in the interests of anonymity, stuff I can’t really get into in terms of any specifics. So let me try to speak in a few categories. The biggest frustration is with the color slot, the one play a year by a writer of color, generally a black writer, generally during February, that represents the ceiling at most theaters of what they’ll do in terms of programming writers of color. This encourages an enormous amount of competition amongst black writers because, unlike white writers who are competing for one of four slots in a five-play season, black writers are competing for one slot. To their credit, there was no competitive bullshit during this convening.

So besides the color slot, there’s the “treating the writer like you’re doing them a favor” problem. This is a problem that white writers complain about, too, but it has a particular flavor when a white theater is doing it do a black playwright. Another one is just kind of general disrespect stuff, like artistic directors not coming to meet ‘n’ greets. And then there’s the extra labor demands, where marketing folk expect black playwrights to do the work of marketing their shows to black audiences. But the most interesting frustration articulated had to do with the failure of black theaters to develop into a viable alternative. One former artistic director of a black theater summed it up: She felt that if a play was premiered at her theater, she knew it would never be performed again because white theaters had no respect for black theaters, and other black theaters didn’t want to do work that was on each other’s stages. And then someone who has lived his entire adult life in black theater said that black theaters subsist on the rejected commissions and development opportunities of white theaters. So the ecosystem goes: White theater commissions black playwright, develops their play to death, rejects it, black theater does it, nothing else happens with it. I should say: These are other people saying this, and I do not know whether or not what they said is accurate, but no one at the convening voiced objections to that picture.

Were there proposals about what to do next?
There are a lot of next-step ideas that were generated. Here are a few: Create something modeled on Cave Canem, tap into new sources of funding (there are a lot of black celebrities who have foundations, for example), find ways to cultivate black directors, mentor young playwrights, creating more bridges between black theaters, getting involved with some of the 264 African American museums in the United States, making a short play series that travels, partnering with non-theater political organizations, creating an online home for advocating for black playwrights (something like this, perhaps), more self-producing and entrepreneurship, working with the organizations advocating for equality for female playwrights, publicly calling out people—particularly ADs—who are in the way, etc.

And who are the ten black playwrights we should already know?
Ten, eh? Is this like desert-island discs where we already assume the person knows August Wilson? I guess, if we’re talking about living black playwrights, I’d suggest checking out Tarell Alvin McCraney (so you can weigh in on the fights over him!), Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Katori Hall, Marcus Gardley, Danai Gurira, Tracey Scott Wilson, Lydia Diamond, J. Holtham…and, of course, Adrienne Kennedy and Amiri Baraka. That’ll give you a pretty wide swath of artists. One thing that often gets lost in these types of conversations is how stylistically rich and diverse black playwriting is. We have a tendency to talk about a specific playwright (let’s say Suzan-Lori Parks) as if all black playwriting is represented by this writer. But Suzan-Lori Parks and Lynn Nottage have very little in common, stylistically speaking. There’s a huge distance between, say,  Marcus Gardley’s magical realism and J. Holtham’s realistic dramedies about middle-class folks. Speaking of Gardley, he has a play created with Lear deBessonet at LCT-3 in June. People should definitely check that one out.