Playwrights Horizons' Commitments to Anti-Racism

Understanding the urgency and depth of change needed throughout our industry, Playwrights Horizons has created this public statement of commitments to anti-racism in our theater, created through rigorous conversations with the staff and board. These commitments are by no means an end-point; there is no end-point. The work in front of us is extensive, and it demands constant attention and dialogue as our theater deepens its critical work to move Playwrights Horizons and our industry toward a more just, inclusive, diverse, equitable, and anti-racist future.

We recognize that American theater is born of a country founded on white supremacy. Acknowledging that systemic racism and oppression are enmeshed in our nation’s history and culture, we understand that anti-racism is ongoing work. It must be woven through every program, practice, and space in our organization. In order to fully realize our mission, we must provide equitable support for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color within our entire theater community.

Though this statement focuses on anti-racism, we are also dedicated to applying equal care and commitment to uprooting and changing all systems of oppression, including those based on ethnicity, gender, ability, age, class, and religion.

Playwrights Horizons is both a theater and a theater school. While this document focuses on our theater’s work to produce and develop new plays, Playwrights Horizons Theater School is actively engaged in creating a statement of policies specific to its own operations, curriculum, and pedagogy.

This statement is arranged in three sections:

1. An Overview of our Objective, Vision, and Values.
2. A set of Goals, Commitments, and Strategies.
3. A structure for Accountability and Measuring Change to help us track our progress, identify areas where we have fallen short, and provide us a roadmap for the path forward.

This document concludes with a list of commitments for the calendar year 2021, but our work will be evolving; accordingly, each year we will publish a new statement of commitments for the coming year, which rearticulates our goals and measures our progress.

1. Overview

Objective

Established to develop and promote the playwright’s voice, Playwrights Horizons can fulfill our mission only when the entirety of our community is represented and supported, including the range of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. It is critical, therefore, that we develop a comprehensive plan to become a more equitable, inclusive, and anti-racist theater. We particularly acknowledge and are grateful for the emotional labor invested by our BIPOC staff in this process.

Our aim is to ensure that the BIPOC artists with whom we collaborate are supported, honored, and heard; to nourish these collaborations over time with equity, justice, and care; to honor cultural specificity in theater and in the process of making theater; to insist that the always growing canon of our work reflects that breadth of cultures that make up our nation; to acknowledge harmful practices and dismantle them.

We recognize that Playwrights Horizons has historically benefitted from systems that harm our BIPOC colleagues and friends; our objective is to undo these systems within our practices across the organization, creating a just and equitable future for the artists, staff, students, and audiences who fulfill and sustain our mission.

Vision

Playwrights Horizons envisions a world where living playwrights and their works are celebrated as essential to the culture. Driven by our belief in theater’s power to illuminate the complexities of the human experience, we advocate for writing that demonstrates both vitality and relevance by connecting playwrights with collaborators, audiences, financial support, and staff resources. We aspire to be a home for our country’s greatest theater-makers, and ultimately, through the craft and event of live theater, we seek to enrich and energize the diverse communities of New York City and beyond. As a leader in the landscape of new play development and production, we have an obligation and an opportunity to make this goal a reality.

In pursuit of this vision, we recognize the urgent need to strengthen our efforts to foster an inclusive, equitable, and anti-racist theater ecosystem that fully includes our BIPOC artists, staff, students, and audiences. Deep-seated, systemic issues have become embedded in the non-profit theater industry over time, and they demand pro-active correction. We acknowledge that we should have done more to include and promote the range of BIPOC voices that make our theater landscape so varied and vibrant.

Playwrights Horizons is not just a building, not just an institution, but a collective of humans, and until every member of our community — artists, audiences, students, and staff members, among others — feels safe and fully supported, our work is incomplete.

Values

To become the best possible version of ourselves, to make good on the promise of our name and status as a not-for-profit arts organization, and to acknowledge both our responsibility to our city and the privilege we stand to mobilize in service of social justice, we are committed to:

● Representing a diversity of intersecting identities, perspectives, and lived experiences in all of our work, onstage and off, including a range of BIPOC voices.
● Working conditions and practices that ensure equity in opportunity, advancement, access, compensation, and creative contributions, removing barriers that have prevented the full participation of BIPOC artists and practitioners.
● A creative environment built on inclusion, inviting and adapting to the contributions, knowledge, and expertise of BIPOC voices.

2. Goals, Commitments, and Strategies

Our aim is to better serve our community, our city, our country, our culture, and our mission. The goals listed below will be integrated into Playwrights Horizons’ strategic plan for our fiscal years 2021–2026. Following each articulated goal is a statement of Playwrights Horizons’ commitments and strategies for meeting them. The section which follows this one, “Accountability and Measuring Change,” details our focus for the calendar year 2021.

Diversity

Playwrights Horizons will ensure that BIPOC artists, practitioners, staff, audience, and board members are actively and thoughtfully included in our work both on and off the stage.

Acknowledging that white artists have disproportionately received opportunities throughout our industry, we commit that BIPOC artists will be equitably represented in all programming. This includes all members of the creative team and applies to productions as well as our New Works Lab, Soundstage, Almanac, Lighthouse, Perspectives on Playwriting programs, and to commissions.
We will redefine our script submission policies to serve the playwriting community more equitably, placing greater emphasis on proactive outreach to BIPOC communities.
We will create an Artistic Advisory Council that prioritizes inclusion of BIPOC artists, made up of theater-makers across disciplines, whose function is to work with artistic staff to reflect the character of our work back to us, and to keep us true to our stated artistic mission and values.
When we are able to re-open for live performance, we will expand our Guest Curator Program to include this rotating series of visiting artists in discussions of production programming.
We will improve the methods by which we collect staff and artist demographic data, and use it both to take stock of progress toward diversity and inclusivity, and to hold ourselves accountable to the goals and commitments in this public statement.
We will improve staff hiring procedures by crafting job descriptions with inclusive and equitable language, using hiring platforms that reach BIPOC and other underrepresented groups.
We will review succession policies and planning for staff and board leadership positions with a view toward achieving our goals of equity and inclusion.

Organizational Culture

Through our daily practices, Playwrights Horizons will challenge inherited notions of identity and history — acknowledging the ways we’ve perpetuated these notions — in the interest of dismantling harmful or exclusionary patterns or structures.

We will augment our mission statement to incorporate values of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
We will continue our practice of acknowledging indigenous communities with our land acknowledgement, and we will continue to build upon this practice to ensure this work retains meaning and purpose. We are grateful to The Lenape Center for their guidance.
We will ensure that staff and creative collaborators who share a cultural context with any project are centered in the creative and producing process.
When producing or developing stories centered on BIPOC experiences, we will ensure that casting and costuming processes honor the knowledge and expertise of BIPOC artists and practitioners.

Anti-Racism Practices

Through our continued EDI practices, and through anti-racism training for staff and board, Playwrights Horizons will remain engaged in the ongoing work of creating anti-racist policies and practices within our organization and across the not-for-profit theater sector more broadly.

Over the past two years, we have developed a Working Group comprised of board and staff members, from both uptown at our theater and downtown in our theater school, to examine and address EDI policies and initiatives. We will continue to expand and prioritize this work throughout all facets of the organization.
We will continue our work with an EDI Consultant, who will provide anti-racist training for staff and board members, to help us develop protocols for de-escalating any discriminatory situation that may happen within our institution, for conflict resolution, and to work with us to create an Anti-Racism Statement that communicates our commitments to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
Executive leadership will also engage in an outside anti-racism training workshop program.
Our Anti-Racism Statement will be communicated clearly and discussed with creative collaborators and production personnel.
Our Human Resources Manager will engage in an outside anti-racism training workshop program.
We will read and reaffirm our Anti-Racism Statement at first rehearsals, first technical rehearsals, and key annual events.

Working Conditions

Playwrights Horizons will create and uphold equitable and supportive working conditions for all theater practitioners.

We will eliminate “10 out of 12” technical rehearsals, the hardship of which we recognize presents a disproportionate impact on BIPOC theater practitioners.
We are working toward a more flexible rehearsal schedule, in discussion with artists, in the interest of professional and personal stability; and we are determining the impacts of adding rehearsal time in order to ensure adequate support to create great work.
We will continue to create affinity spaces for artists, staff, and board members. This work has already begun with four staff-led affinity groups launched in Fall 2020: the Global Majority Affinity Group, Jewish Affinity Group, People with Disabilities Affinity Group, and the White Learning Space.
Every full-time employee will have a job description; and we will review work schedules to avoid burnout, and to encourage a healthy work/life balance.
Our marketing materials will accurately reflect, neither exaggerating nor under-representing, the diversity of our work onstage and in play development.
We will ensure consent and clarity of use when sharing artists’ images and stories.
We will set clear expectations about event attendance and involvement for staff and artists.
We will conduct a periodic 360 degree review process for our Artistic Director, Managing Director, General Manager, and Board Leadership; and we will formalize our annual staff review process.

Compensation

Playwrights Horizons will compensate all artists and employees equitably.

We will compensate artists for participation in fundraising activities and special events, except for contractually agreed upon events for playwrights and directors.
Consistent with our current practice, executive staff will not make more than ten times the salary of the lowest paid full-time staff members, with incoming executive leadership earning a salary that is equitable within both the organization and the industry at large.
We will continue to invest in professional development opportunities for full-time staff.
We will continue to increase compensation to participants in our Fellowship Program, working toward New York City’s minimum wage requirements.
We will continue to contribute to playwrights’ health insurance; to compensate playwrights for pre-production and rehearsal weeks; and to offer financial literacy workshops and financial planning consultations free of charge to artists and staff.

Transparency

Playwrights Horizons will open new lines of communication with artists, audiences, and staff members, making our policies and practices more transparent, and creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment.

We will clearly articulate that inclusivity is a core value of our theater, promoting an atmosphere that is welcoming to BIPOC communities, embracing all audience customs, practices and responses.
We will publicly communicate our anti-racist values and commitments, and hold ourselves accountable to them through an annual report that summarizes our progress and identifies areas where we need to work harder.
We will hold an annual public Town Hall which addresses present and future EDI objectives and commitments.
We will include salary expectations, and benefits information, in postings for open positions.
We will clearly outline our equitable standards, practices, and beliefs, placing these clearly on our website for donors to see.

Accessibility

In our marketing practices and artistic policies, Playwrights Horizons will remove barriers of access to our work, onstage and off.

Through our strategic planning process, we will create new affordable ticketing initiatives and prominently advertise them, including to BIPOC communities.
We will seek out new ways to reach audiences outside our home on 42nd Street, both through our digital programming and by considering a mobile/touring production model.
We will work to forge new partnerships with BIPOC-led community organizations, and BIPOC-led arts organizations.
We will employ marketing professionals with the cultural fluencies to engage a wider range of communities, directing marketing efforts towards BIPOC communities for all productions — not just productions created by BIPOC artists.
We will provide complimentary tickets to members of the Lenape nation.
We will continue to invite BIPOC critics and journalists to all press performances.
We will re-examine who’s invited to readings, openings, and other exclusive events, with the intent of making these programs and events more inclusive.
We acknowledge that we have work to do to ensure that audiences feel safe and welcomed when attending our theater. Therefore, when we are able to reopen, we will reconceive our front-of-house experience to create a warmer environment for audiences, particularly those from BIPOC communities.
We will continue to redesign our website to improve accessibility and inclusivity.

Financial Practices

Playwrights Horizons’ fundraising efforts and the allocation of our resources will reflect our commitment to equity, racial justice, and social justice.

In our fundraising efforts, we will seek out organizations and individuals who demonstrate anti-racist practices.
We will continue to expand our definition of contributions beyond purely economic and financial gifts to space, time, skills, services, and other in-kind and pro-bono donations.
Our development materials will accurately reflect, neither exaggerating nor under-representing, the racial diversity of our work onstage and off, and in our donor programs.
We will work to expand our pool of donors by deepening our engagement with and investing our time and outreach efforts in BIPOC communities.
We will work to ensure that our business partners share a commitment to anti-racist practices.
We commit to identifying and giving BIPOC-owned businesses and vendors full and equitable opportunities to work with us.

3. Accountability and Measuring Change

Playwrights Horizons commits to ongoing evaluation to measure our success in meeting our goals and tracking our progress. We will commit to achieving specific goals each year, while also identifying goals that will be achieved over a longer span of time. Over the course of each calendar year, we will measure our progress, and we will use quantifiable data as a tool for tracking and being accountable to our evolution as we move forward.

By December 31, 2021, we will achieve at least the following:

Augment our mission statement to incorporate values of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
Improve the methods by which we collect staff and artist demographic data.
Work with an EDI consultant on anti-racist training for staff and board members.
Work with an EDI consultant to create an Anti-Racism Statement.
Continue our practice of acknowledging indigenous land, and build upon this practice.
Create an Artistic Advisory Council.
Redefine our script submissions policies to be more proactive, equitable, and inclusive.
Center creative collaborators who share a play’s cultural context.
Adopt casting and costuming processes that honor cultural specificity for works centered on BIPOC experiences.
Continue to contribute to playwrights’ health insurance, and to compensate playwrights for pre-production and rehearsal weeks.
Reaffirm our anti-racist values at first rehearsals, first technical rehearsals, and key events.
Eliminate “10 out of 12” technical rehearsals.
Direct marketing efforts towards BIPOC communities for all productions — not just productions created by BIPOC artists.
Create marketing materials that accurately reflect the racial diversity of our work.
Ensure that consent is granted in the sharing of all images and stories.
Reconceive our front-of-house experience to create a more welcoming environment for audiences.
Compensate artists for participation in fundraising activities and special events, except for contractually agreed upon events for playwrights and directors.
Ensure that development materials accurately reflect the racial diversity of our work onstage and off, and in our donor programs.
Craft postings for open positions with inclusive and equitable language, including salary and benefit expectations; and use hiring platforms that will reach BIPOC and members of other underrepresented groups.
Hold a public Town Hall to address our progress toward the above commitments and to outline future objectives.

We will report publicly on our progress annually, beginning in June 2022. We commit to honesty and openness with the public about our progress, as well as our obstacles to success, throughout this process.