Twelve
“I believe we could paint a better world if we learned how to see it from all perspectives, as many perspectives as we possibly could. Because diversity is strength. Difference is a teacher. Fear difference, you learn nothing.”
Racism, prejudice, misogyny, ableism and favoritism are core values at Circle in the Square Theater School. They have done little to amend their wrongs since my time studying there. Their curriculum hasn’t changed. The administration and faculty is still predominantly White. The statements they made since the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd are nothing but virtue signaling. They have not reached out to their BIPOC alumni. They have not sent out emails making a statement. They have not answered valid questions alumni posed on their social media. They have not opened their lobby to protestors. They have not provided any course of action on how they will change internally. If they won’t speak, we will.
I’m Latinx. To provide more context, I’m White-passing, but I moved to the United States when I was 21-years-old. So I have an accent. Before beginning my education at Circle in the Square Theater School, I attended another conservatory in New York City. This first institution was attended majorly by international students. Even though the faculty of the school wasn’t the most diverse, they still had BIPOC and immigrant instructors, including the teaching assistants. It was easy to feel heard. This was a complete contrast to my experience at Circle in the Square.
After graduating from that first conservatory, I decided to invest in more vocal and physical training. Circle in the Square’s seemed to have a compelling curriculum that fit my needs. It would quickly prove it was not. On the first day of orientation, the class size was around 35, 14 POCs in the room total, but only 4 people in the program had an accent. Immediately we stood out. Soon afterward, a second-year student’s first piece of advice to me was “You gotta get rid of the accent, or you’re out”.
It’s important to notice that my accent when arriving at Circle wasn’t thick. I may mispronounce words, my cadence is not the most American, and I make some grammatical mistakes, but I do not lack knowledge of English. I have multiple certifications that prove my fluency and my capacity of studying in this language. Yet somehow the faculty had judgements that if any bilingual person in the school was having issues with the work, it was due to their miscomprehension of English — that they didn’t have the sufficient knowledge to ‘act’ in a different language. They don’t understand how bilingual brains work, because the majority of the faculty do not speak a second language fluently.
In my first year, the teaching assistant of Voice once told me that she was jealous of my ‘complexion’ because it read as very Hispanic That same teacher once complained about not getting a job because they did a “diversity” hire. I witnessed our Voice teacher confusing two Black students from different classes all the time. I witnessed a guest speaker call my Asian classmate ‘Cookie’ because her first name was hard to pronounce. My Ghanaian classmate had to constantly correct people on how to pronounce her name, even if she had previously corrected them several times. Beth Falcone used police brutality to try and get a Black student emotional. BIPOC students weren’t supported in any of these instances.
Even the school curriculum was designed to fail BIPOC students. Our choices for Scene Study class were limited to 40 American playwrights, of which only 3 were Black. No Indigenous, Asian American, or Latinx playwrights. Speech class was also inadequately structured; it did little to support students whose native tongue is not English. I knew I had to focus on this class, and when I asked the teacher to help me determine the specific sounds I mispronounced, she told me that it would require a private consultation.
To top off the end of my first year, there were the evaluations. These evaluations would be read to you by the school principal. My Shakespeare teacher said, ‘She can do OK work in the classical, but the text usage feels shallow. She needs much speech work, language work to continue. Those issues: speech, language are things she must get preparation work’. I won’t even address the grammar used, but he wasn’t the only one to mention my language “issues”. It’s important to have good diction in theater, but that wasn’t the problem they were pointing out. They could understand me; they just couldn’t understand why I failed to sound American. I left that evaluation feeling like I was illiterate.
I asked whether I was moving on to the second year, to which the principal replied yes. In the summer, I awaited for the promised second-ear contract and start date. I didn’t find out until August 9th that year that they had sent out the contracts for the second year on July 5th and I ONLY found out about it through my classmates. I emailed the school telling them that I had not received a contract. The reply was that I had to update the principal. Update him on what? Apparently I had misunderstood my conversation, and over the summer I was supposed to have been taking extra speech classes and Shakespeare workshops. I had to prove I deserved to be in this final year. This happened to my other classmates that had an accent, too. My Asian classmate was the only one they told in the evaluations. She paid hundreds of dollars for Speech lessons. With more than a month behind on school work, how did Circle in the Square think we could succeed in our second year?
The promise of the second year is the final Theater Festival and Scene Showcase, a night where agents are invited to see the student’s work. They prep you for almost 5 months for these two minutes on stage. My private chat with my Scene Study teacher was reduced to not playing a White American. I was recommended the same playwright as usual, Stephen Adly Guirgis, as well as a play by Ariel Dorfman, the only Latinx playwright ever mentioned in the curriculum. However, my scene got consolidated a month before the showcase, and the faculty chose for me. I was made to play a White American woman. When trying to speak up for myself, saying that this story didn’t serve me, a teacher told me ‘It’s not about you playing an American. It has to do with you being White’. I gave up. I understood then that the faculty would never understand the complexity of my background.
I made cuts for the scene. In the play, the woman is in one of the first public interracial relationships. In the scene we were assigned, she says the n-word in the middle of an argument. I spoke to my Black scene partner and told him I didn’t want to say it and that the scene worked without the use of it. He agreed. Whitney Kaufman and my Scene Study teacher objected about me cutting out that word from the scene. I expressed that I felt highly uncomfortable with saying that word. It went as far as Whitney Kaufman trying to prove the potency of this word by reading the scene out loud in front of my classmates. The reason why they insisted on me using that word was to exploit my Black scene-partner’s trauma to this word. I objected and we performed the scene without me saying the word. However, the faculty frowned upon us. He still got a call from an agent that night.
Then came the Theater Festival, or “the projects,” as we like to call them. There are usually three projects: a Shakespeare play, a modern play, and a musical. Our Dance teacher, the head of the musical, told us that she would have two casts, so that everyone could have a strong role. She didn’t allow the women from the non-musical theater program to be in it or even audition for it, but she somehow managed to have more than six of our first-years involved, including two non-musical actors.
Our Scene Study teacher, who was charged with the modern play, took the longest to decide on his project. We were one of the most diverse classes in recent years at Circle in the Square, and of a graduating class of 30, there were only 5 men. The Chekhovian play he chose had a cast of 4 women and 8 men, and we had been working on it all year. Our Scene Study teacher would be inviting men alumni to act in the play and casting other first-years in small roles. My non-musical theater women classmates were left with one show. Our Shakespeare teacher gave the biggest roles to the White women in the program. He gave ONE monologue, in a three-hour long play, to my Asian classmate.
Hispanic is the biggest ethnic minority in America, making up 18.1% of the population. 41 million out of the 52 million Hispanic Americans speak Spanish at home. Yet on Broadway, we only take up 2.5% of the roles. On film, we take up 2.7% of the roles. And I bet not even 1% involves Latinxs with accents. Where are our stories? In New York City alone, Hispanics are 29.1% of the population. How is an institution situated in this city not prepared to receive this population? My family history is one of immigrants.How can I tell their story if it’s not through broken English and mispronunciations? I paid an institution to teach me how to be a better actor, not how to sound more American or how to hide my ethnicity to accommodate White people.
Our Scene Study teacher preached that we are all great actors — that the only things holding us back are fear, shame, and ignorance. I used to believe ignorance referred to our own, but the ignorance of others is even more inhibiting. Circle in the Square proved to me that it didn’t know what to do with me, and that would have been OK if they had admitted their ignorance. They could have educated themselves. Instead, they blamed it on me. They blamed me for not being the sassy sexy Latina stereotype. They blamed me for not sounding White. They blamed me for being both too White yet not White enough. For an institution that is meant to be a place of learning, the faculty was very resistant to doing so. Instead of them getting informed, listening to their students of color, they blamed us for being different.
— Anonymous