To help redress this imbalance, my second year we opened with A Soldier’s Play, Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning murder mystery set in 1944 on a segregated Louisiana army base, directed by leading Black actress/director, Sheila Ramsey. Subsequent seasons included Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, as well as Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Fences. These plays, in turn, helped us to attract a more diverse student body.
This growing diversity enabled us to develop new dramas such as Harlem Renaissance: In Black and White, featuring Nicole Scherzinger, who is now starring on Broadway in Sunset Boulevard, as well as new plays reflecting the rich history of Dayton. These included 1903: The Wings of Dreams about Orville and Wilbur Wright and their close high school friend, leading African American poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, as well as 1913: The Great Dayton Flood which featured the story of W. G. Sloan, Black baseball player who saved over 350 people on a flat-bottomed boat during the devastating Dayton flood. 1913 played to over 10,000 from Dayton to the Kennedy Center, where it won major awards at the American College Theater Festival.
These productions helped our students and our audiences understand our country’s multi-faceted history.
Our department also fostered young Black filmmakers, such as Hannah Beachler, who won the 2019 Academy Award as production designer of “Black Panther”, as well as Selena Burks Rentschler, whose documentary “Saving Jackie” which won audience awards at the Sundance Film Festival, and has been screened throughout Ohio.
Diversity and inclusion are keystones of truly great theater, dance and motion pictures. They are also essential to well-rounded education. As Robert DeNiro said, “The arts are democratic, art is inclusive. It brings people together…Art looks for truth.”
This past March I was dismayed to learn I that Governor DeWine had signed Ohio Senate Bill 1 (SR1), which will restrict programs addressing the issue of DEI in higher education throughout Ohio. Ohio is not alone in this. Currently, more than 30 states have introduced bills banning or limiting DEI initiatives during their current legislative session.
The Ohio bill SR1 not only bans DEI initiatives, but by eliminating tenure and controlling curricula, it restricts what teachers teach, and may even limit the dramas departments such as Wright State put on the stage.
Ohio’s SR1 has been called the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, but it is anything but an “advance.” It is clearly a retreat from any progress that has been made to redress past inequities and underrepresentation of minority drama and film. Ohio’s SR1 is a throwback to a time when minorities were underrepresented in theatre and film, and what was taught in the classroom.
There is inestimable value in bringing wide-ranging and diverse plays into the classroom, onto the stage, and onto the screen. Discussions in the safe environment that a university affords reveal not only our differences but what we have in common.
It’s not too late to halt the damage that SR1 can do to Ohio’s public colleges and universities. There is a movement to repeal SR1 in this fall’s election. The referendum petition needs at least 250,000 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties before June 25. Stay informed.
W. Stuart McDowell is Chair Emeritus of the Department of Theatre, Dance & Motion Pictures at Wright State University.
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