The Other Half of the Transaction: the Mechanisms that Protect White Male Leadership in the American Theatre

Megwyn Sanders-Andrews
5 days ago
6 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

In 2023, four years after the New York Times had declared that the gates had been flung open for diverse leaders at regional theatres, and the same year American Theatre Magazine profiled a cohort of leaders of color navigating upheaval at theatres across the U.S., I was hired, as a white woman, at a regional theatre, in a leadership position, in Milwaukee, Wis. None of those individuals, profiled by the NYT and American Theatre Magazine, remain with their respective theatres. Nor do I.

I was hired with the understanding that my position was a key component of the organization's broader equity, diversity, and inclusion work, and that the EDI credentials I brought were vital to the mission, vision, and values of the organization. The theatre contracted with a hiring firm that specialized in inclusive recruitment to ensure EDI was at the heart of the hiring process.

When I was hired, I was unfamiliar with the term "glass cliff." It’s a term related to “glass ceiling” in which women leaders and leaders of color are promoted to leadership positions during times of institutional turmoil and instability so that they are, essentially, set up to fail and are also, subsequently, blamed for any institutional failures.

Although I have stood on that same cliff, the harshest costs related to the glass cliff fall on women of color, as evidenced by the recent example of Hana Sharif at Arena Stage. Other writers have created excellent narratives explicating the mechanics that set leaders of color, particularly women leaders of color, up to fail: Nataki Garrett Myers and Al Heartley, writing in the wake of Sharif's resignation; and Teresa Coleman Wash, on the funding and trust gap facing women of color who lead.

What I want to explore is the other half of the transaction. How, in the post-#MeToo era, do white straight male Artistic Directors continue to be set up, bafflingly, to succeed while capable women leaders are set up to fail? How is the success of the white, straight, male Artistic Director continually produced? And, perhaps more importantly, by what mechanisms is it protected?

The mechanisms of institutional protection constructed around straight white men in the theatre are neither mysterious nor discrete. I want to name five of them:

The first mechanism is trust. A 2016 study commissioned by the American Conservatory Theater and conducted by the Wellesley Centers for Women found that the scarcity of women in theatre leadership was never a question of merit; rather, it was a question of trust. Board search committees were willing to trust a man to run a theatre with a larger budget than any he had ever managed, while extending no such trust to women. Even having founded a theatre registered as an asset only on a man's resume. The full report names the stereotype hiding behind every gender- and race-neutral job description: the leader a board can picture is white and male.

The trust mechanism compounds over time, again, separate from merit. A 2022 Building Movement Project survey found that 93 percent of white nonprofit leaders with white predecessors said their boards trusted them, against 77 percent of leaders of color in the same position. A board that has extended trust keeps extending it, because to stop would be to admit that the original trust was a mistake. A board that never extended trust does not find it difficult to withdraw what was never given in the first place.

The second mechanism is capital. When a white Artistic Director wants to grow, boards borrow. At Arena Stage, the mortgage on the Mead Center, the building project driven by Molly Smith across her twenty-five-year tenure, stood at just under sixty million dollars when Hana Sharif inherited it, alongside years of what the theatre's own leadership called "planned deficits." Gordon Edelstein at Long Wharf exemplifies the same pattern; Long Wharf had not been in the black for years before Jacob Padrón arrived. Deficits accumulated under a white leader are read as ambition, as vision, as the necessary cost of greatness, while the same deficits, inherited, are read as evidence of the incompetence of whoever comes next.

The third and most devastating mechanism is accountability performed as reputation management as exemplified by Gregory Boyd at Alley Theatre and Gordon Edelstein at Long Wharf. Gordon Edelstein harassed and assaulted women across his sixteen years at Long Wharf. When the New York Times investigation was published in January 2018, the board placed him on leave that same day and fired him the day after. A subsequent culture audit found that his "dominating personality gave him cover" while employees did not feel empowered to complain. Despite the #MeToo movement, the institution did not act to protect the staff, to take a moral and ethical stand, or simply to do the right thing. The board protected Edelstein until they were forced to fire him because the public found out about his behavior. This is the system working as designed: the institution protects the man until the cost of protecting him exceeds the cost of the story.

The fourth mechanism is the exit itself. When white men leave these positions, the press release announces that they are pursuing other creative and artistic opportunities, and they recirculate, through freelance directing, through consulting, through the short lists of the same search firms that placed them the first time. Women are more likely to leave institutions, or leave the institutional field altogether: Stephanie Ybarra left for philanthropy, Nataki Garrett for independent work, and, in the generation before them, theatremakers like Lauren E. Turner left to found their own companies because the existing ones were, in Turner's words, killing them. This, and not any one man's improbable promotion, is what failing up looks like at the field level: a circuit that keeps men in circulation and removes women from it.

The fifth mechanism is the donor mirror. Teresa Coleman Wash has documented how funder trust, media platform, and board selection all flow toward the white male leader. As she writes, implicit bias is "layered and complex," and the Artistic Director position is, in substantial part, a donor-comfort position. Boards hire the person they believe their major donors will be most likely to give to.

And under it all is this: the behaviors themselves are not what is judged; the body performing them is. A man who slams doors, and throws things is difficult but brilliant, exacting, passionate about the work. A woman who advocates for her own vision with a fraction of that force is unmanageable. At Arena Stage, senior staff reached for the word "uppity" to describe the first woman of color ever to lead the theatre; in Ashland, a stranger called Nataki Garrett a "Black bitch" while she unloaded groceries from her car. Garrett names the double standard plainly: had she been white and male, the turnover on her watch would have been lauded as a sign of decisive leadership. Rage performs as vision in one body and serves as justification for removal in another.

This is not a theoretical question or a question for regional theatres on the coasts. Recently, a white, straight, male Artistic Director in Milwaukee was accused of sexual harassment, identity-based harm, physical intimidation, gaslighting, bullying, and coercive control. Turnover at his organization is extremely high. He slams doors and throws things.

When these behaviors were brought to the board, they did not terminate his employment. The board’s solution was to hire a consultant to improve the communication between staff and leadership.

To return, then, to the questions with which I began. The success of the white, straight, male Artistic Director, including the one I reference above, is produced by trust extended before it is earned and continued through a sort of sunk cost equation, capitalized by boards who read his ambition as vision, insulated by accountability structures that activate only upon public exposure, renewed by exits that recirculate him through the field, and reflected back to him by donors and boards who see themselves in his identity. The women who inherit these institutions inherit his debt, his staff, his subscriber base, and his board, with none of his credit, and the field then reads the collapse of that arrangement as evidence about her rather than evidence about him. And so the cycle continues.

We cannot reckon with the lack of leadership opportunities and lack of pipeline for women, both white women and women leaders of color, until we also reckon with the leadership and governance structures that protect white male leaders and, by extension, are dangerous, literally dangerous, to women if they do manage to arrive there, and with whether or not they will be believed if and when they do.

And we do have to reckon with this issue. Because if we don't, all we're going to get is a consultant hired to talk about communication.

The Other Half of the Transaction: the Mechanisms that Protect White Male Leadership in the American Theatre

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