Cast System : Difficulty of Filling Ethnic or Minority Roles Prompts Smaller Theaters to Shy Away From Diversity

Sandra Deer’s play “So Long on Lonely Street” calls for an African American woman to portray Annebel Lee, the longtime confidant of a dead Southern matriarch.

Director Sandy Silver recently held auditions for the production, to be performed at the Cabrillo Playhouse in San Clemente in April, and ran up against a familiar obstacle: finding a black actor to audition for the supporting role. At her behest, a columnist for the local paper even put out a call for qualified applicants.

Silver finally stumbled across an ideal Annebel, 70-year-old Clara Baker, while holding auditions for another of her directing projects, “The Solid Gold Cadillac” with Theatre Guild at Leisure World in Laguna Hills. “If it hadn’t been for that,” she said, “I don’t know what I would have done.”

Organizers of other community theater companies said they have faced similar challenges and have thus shied away from plays that require casting of racial and ethnic minorities. Given Orange County’s demographics--59.3% white, 26.8% Hispanic, 11.5% Asian and 1.8% black, according to 1995 data from Cal State Fullerton’s Center for Demographic Research--it’s simply less daunting, they said, to put on a popular (read: audience-drawing, moneymaking) Neil Simon or A.R. Gurney play.

Orange County isn’t the only place where meaty ethnic parts are scarce. Nor is it the only place where works by playwrights such as Simon and Gurney are regularly revived while those by Jeff Stetson, Charles Fuller and August Wilson (“Fences,” “The Piano Lesson”) are rare. But small theaters do appear stuck in a cycle that may be hard to break, observers said.

“It’s a round-robin effect,” said Silver, a veteran of South County productions who is directing Irvine Community Theatre’s current revival of Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” “Theaters do not pick shows that call for ethnic characters, so therefore the actors know those theaters don’t do those shows.”

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Most small theaters in Orange County pay nonunion actors a modest stipend, if anything, which makes drawing people from Los Angeles or other areas difficult--unless it’s for a tried-and-true musical such as the Fats Waller musical “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” or Lorraine Hansen’s classic family drama “A Raisin in the Sun.”

“When it’s ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ all the roles are good,” said Stefanie Williamson, an African American actress who lives in Fullerton and has performed in numerous Orange County productions. “It’s about a black family, but it could be any American family. When there’s something like that, there’s [an actor] turnout. But when it’s something where you’re the maid or the slave, who wants to drive 50 miles to play that kind of role?”

Though Latinos make up a quarter of the county’s population, Alternative Repertory Theatre’s Gary Christensen has had to cast several white actresses “who looked ethnic enough to pass” as Latinas for ART’s 1996 production of “Our Lady of the Tortilla,” Luis Santeiro’s comedy about a spinster who sees a vision of the Virgin Mary on a tortilla and becomes a celebrity.

“If a middle-aged Hispanic actress has gotten to a place where she’s successful, she’s now an Equity actress,” Christensen said, meaning the actress has her professional union card and can’t or won’t perform in unpaid productions.

ART, a 10-year-old theater company based in Santa Ana, could hardly be classified as conservative, having tackled plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter in previous seasons, as well as “Raisin.”

All the same, Christensen chooses his words carefully when talking about why the company hasn’t done more works by Asian, Latino or African American playwrights. Beneath the surface of the discussion lies the uncomfortable stereotype of Orange County as being segregated into whites-only enclaves.

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It’s a perception with which Adleane Hunter is very familiar.

“I was always getting the comment, ‘There’s not a black audience here,’ ” said Hunter, who grew up in Santa Ana and from 1983-92 ran the Orange County Black Actors Theatre. Enlisting “everyone from family friends to hairdressers” for help with productions that bounced from City Hall in Santa Ana to rented spaces at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa and the Anaheim Cultural Center, Hunter finally folded the company after nine years.

She has since moved to San Diego and founded Black Artists Network Development, which is co-producing “Blues for an Alabama Sky”--Pearl Cleage’s seriocomic look at the Harlem Renaissance--at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, starring Loretta DeVine (“Waiting to Exhale”).

Hunter abandoned Orange County after becoming jaded about local theaters opening up their seasons to ethnic playwrights; indeed, ignoring such works is better than going for “tokenism,” she said.

Yet such tokenism, Hunter said, is encouraged among the bigger regional theaters such as SCR and San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre because grant-givers “now have a criteria to diversify your program.”

Though Hunter credits SCR for its ongoing 13-year-old Hispanic Playwrights Project and sees some works by minority playwrights making it onto schedules elsewhere, she can’t help but be cynical about bottom-line motivations: Put an August Wilson play on your schedule and you’re more apt to attract federal dollars.

SCR Artistic Director David Emmes said the theater’s criteria in selecting plays is first and foremost the artistic merit. At the same time, Emmes said, “We are certainly looking to provide diverse plays for our audience.”

SCR is currently running a multiracial production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” but not with any eye toward grant money, Emmes said. “It was a way of reflecting the ‘Our Town’ of California today, a way of reinforcing in a contemporary way the essential truths of the play.”

Like Hunter, Williamson, 34, studied drama at Cal State Fullerton. She has stayed in the area for family reasons, not to further her professional career. Indeed, she’s been on many an audition where she was the only black person there, and these days she doesn’t find herself in demand unless there’s a play that calls for an African American part. Even then, she’s cautious--a recent request to play Mary Todd Lincoln’s servant in an Irvine play will mean more of the same typecasting she fears. She’s still undecided.

“A lot of theaters are cautious about doing a play like ‘Fences’ because they wonder if they’ll have an audience,” Williamson said. For now, that theory isn’t enough to significantly alter the course of hard-working people charged with keeping small theaters alive in Orange County.

Said Hunter: “It’s quite a dilemma for theaters to cater to all things for all people. The real issue is there needs to be theaters with a specific mission to address different ethnicities, different points of view.”

Saving that, however, the small Orange County theaters will continue to find themselves with a limited reach, sometimes unable to do even a reliable musical like Luis Valdez’s “Zoot Suit,” about a Mexican American accused of murder.

“Our artistic director has always wanted to do ‘Zoot Suit,’ ” said ART’s Christensen. “Grant [organizations] want to see that you’re serving the population that’s out there. Which means we should be trying to program for Asian and Hispanic populations. But when you know you’re going to have to bust your butt to cast, you have to ask yourself, is it worth it?”