The Many Faces of Diversity in Theater : Conference: Top professionals of American stage meet at UC San Diego to probe cultural fusion, racism, sexism and progress toward equity.

Heads up, Dorothy. The Yellow Brick Road of stage and screen isn’t just yellow anymore. It’s got as many colors as a smog-free sunrise, and it’s twice as complex.

That’s the rainbow of culture that today’s theater professionals confront as they look for ways to combat decades of racism and meet the demands of the new polyglot reality.

They met to talk about ways to bring about change at a conference on “Cultural Diversity in the American Theatre: Moving Toward the 21st Century” held at UC San Diego Thursday through Sunday.

“Theater is about movement,” El Teatro Campesino founder Luis Valdez said in his keynote address. “Expect it to move in the 21st Century. It’s not just about cultural diversity, it’s about cultural fusion. And the idea of cultural fusion is frightening to people.”

In attendance for the four-day event was a veritable “who’s who” of the multicultural American stage, with additional keynote addresses from Joyce Justus, an assistant vice president with the University of California, and Lloyd Richards, dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre.

Among the moderators and panelists were several dozen of the foremost theater and dance artists, administrators and educators from around the country and Europe.

Anyone who came expecting a soporific meeting of the clan, however, found the gathering full of friendly contention and heated emotions. Participants discovered themselves echoing past civil rights debates in weighing the various pathways toward equity.

“I am a particularist, not an integrationist,” said playwright-theorist Paul Carter Harrison. “You learn to respect those outside your experience (and) other people’s differences.”

“I speak not of assimilation, but of respectful, useful cultural interaction,” Richards said. “Creating an American theater based on diversity will be hazardous, but our failure to do so will be devastating. The time must be spent, the effort must be made, and the theater is a venue.”

“I’m not here to destroy what you have,” said Preston J. Arrow-Weed, founder and director of the Inter-Tribal Theatre, after offering a lyrical story of creation to illustrate the plight of American Indians. “I’m only here to show you what I have learned.”

Recurring points of discussion included the managerial shortcomings of the recent multicultural festivals (San Francisco’s Festival 2000 and the Los Angeles Festival), as well as the “Miss Saigon” casting imbroglio.

“As artists of color, we have to stop accepting plantation roles,” said playwright Genny Lim. “We’ve got to start acting rather than reacting.”

“We fear each other’s views of things,” observed Benny Sato Ambush of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. The challenge, he said, is to avoid being “slotted, categorized and funded appropriately” and to change the “biases that are in institutions as well as alive and well in the minds of the American public.”

One of the most insidious of those biases, as several speakers in this conference focusing on theater “as practiced by African, Hispanic, Asian and Native American” artists noted, is that of the persistent discrimination against women.

“The thing that most inhibits the development of culturally specific plays is the specter of invisibility,” said writer and performance artist Pearl Cleage, artistic director of Just Us Theater Company in Atlanta. “We are rendered speechless by the prospect of not being understood by a culture that is sexist, racist, classist and homophobic on its best day.”

“The idea that we can talk about race without talking about sex is a mistake,” concurred Valdez. “That issue is so basic. In the 21st Century, as electronic as it will get, it will also get more womanly.”

A note of humor was added to the debate by James Magruder, literary manager of the La Jolla Playhouse.

During a panel on ritual and music in the theater, he suggested that those working for “the promotion of authenticity” might follow five pointers he had picked up over the course of the conference: “Don’t be afraid to state the obvious. Say only what you know. Don’t hide behind the authority of others. Show your seams. And keep the microphone in full view.”