Kwofe Coleman’s selection as the head of the Muny is a big deal, but the more meaningful changes in the performing arts institutions in St. Louis still need to come.
Venerable institutions like The Muny, The Fox, and Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis have for the past couple of decades been adding more Black faces to their performances: Shakespeare in the Park, as announced last week, has a nearly all-Black cast for this year’s production of King Lear.
The audiences for these types of productions, though, still tend to be largely white. At places like The Muny and Shakespeare in the Park, that’s not a question of the productions being financially or geographically inaccessible — they frequently offer free tickets and are located right in the middle of Forest Park. So, it must be an issue of content and relevant experiences that do not feel compelling or welcoming to many African Americans.
In an interview with The American, Kwofe Coleman volunteered that he was interested in how The Muny can use its 100-plus years of influence and considerable resources to engage with and participate in the culture of the broader region to an even greater extent than it currently does. Then, The Muny could be seen as more welcoming, along with bringing in more people like Coleman. He even started his work with the organization as a 16-year-old from Bellefontaine Neighbors, ushering at the outdoor theatre as a summer job.
The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis hired its first Black woman artistic director, Hana S. Sharif, in June 2019, and she subsequently hired Adena Varner as its director of learning and community engagement last fall. Other area cultural institutions, as they come back to life after a year’s hiatus, should be asking: How can we use our resources to connect better with the broader community? These job appointments, while encouraging, will become even more impactful once these major cultural institutions find ways to attract more Black people into their audiences, not just their casts and administrations.
As Coleman put it in a recent interview with St. Louis Public Radio, “With theater like ours, our job is to make sure, to the absolute extent that we can, that our audience looks like our community,” he said. “If we are a theater for this city, for this county, for this region, we have to make sure our audience appears that way. And if it doesn’t, we have to ask ourselves why not.” While any type of live entertainment was limited last summer, this vaccinated summer things might be different. And it would serve St. Louis well to think of ways to make the content of that entertainment different — and something everyone in this city can see themselves in — too.
Coleman’s historic appointment is commendable, and importantly, The Muny’s board has indicated its enthusiastic and unequivocal support for his appointment. We hope this is only the beginning of a reimagining of the future for enhanced community outreach for The Muny and our region’s other highly-valued cultural institutions.
