ITHACA, N.Y. – Four Ithaca High School students sit in their friend’s living room on a frigid mid-January afternoon. Prachi Ruina, 16, Maddi Carroll, 17, Ari Cummings, 16, and Eamon Nunn-Makepeace, 14, have all just come from school, where the environment is nearly as chilly as the air forming icicles outside.
Their gathering has come after a flurry of meetings with administration, public letters and an outcry from high school students voicing their concern for the lack of diversity and representation in the Ithaca City School District’s theater productions.
Thursday evening, it was publicly announced that the spring play, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is canceled and there won’t be any other play in its stead.
The students say that the choice to cancel the show is politics over kids and an effort to pit students against each other as opposed to addressing the issues they’ve raised with administrators.
Casting & the role of Esmeralda
Carroll, a senior at IHS, explains the context of the recent unrest amongst students. In September, it was announced that this year’s school play – traditionally chosen by adults and administrators at the school – was going to be The Hunchback of Notre Dame. As news got out about the production, Carroll said there was a mix of emotions as auditions approached.
“A lot of people were very excited and also upset – there’s only one female lead, so all the senior girls were freaking out because it was going to be a bloodbath for that role,” Carroll said. “But as for the role itself, I know a lot of the girls of color were very excited because finally, a woman of color would get to be the starring role.”
The lead Carroll referred to is the role of Esmeralda, an oppressed French-Roma ‘gypsy’ woman living in Paris, who later seeks sanctuary with Quasimodo, a disabled man who works in a bell tower of a Parisian cathedral.
Prachi Ruina, a junior, said she was among many of the girls eager to audition for the role.
“I was so excited when they announced the show,” Ruina said, as Carroll chimes in with agreement. “I just thought ‘finally, there’s going to be a girl of color up there on the stage’.”
Auditions for the play, which was scheduled to hit the stage in April, began in November. Between 40-50 students showed up for auditions, and about 10 people were cut to make up the cast of 35 people. As callbacks were listed, disappointment arose – Carroll was one of two girls of color among callbacks for the role of Esmeralda. Ruina was cast in the ensemble.
Public letters & reactions
“I really thought they would cast a woman of color and so when I saw there were more white girls over anyone else, I really thought that was strange,” Carroll said.
Ruina said disappointment took over when the callback list was released. With the help of Annabella Mead-VanCort, she decided to write a public letter, titled ‘God help the outcasts’, which was released on Jan. 8, to voice her concern with her own experiences with colorblind casting in ICSD theater productions. It wasn’t something she could push under the rug, again, she said.
“I am a 16-year-old junior at Ithaca High School and I am Indian,” she wrote. “As an adopted Indian girl I often feel an outcast myself, never quite knowing where I fit in. Esmeralda’s oppression as a “gypsy” brown woman allows her to have empathy for the oppression of others. I relate to that as well. I wrote an audition monologue about my experience as a Brown girl. I felt it was very much in line with the character.”
Ruina went on in her letter to note that while she had experienced her own disappointment in not receiving a callback, she said she faced additional dismay when no leading roles were assigned to students of color, and instead, Esmeralda went to, ‘a very talented but miscast 11th grade, blonde haired, hazel-eyed girl, a white young woman’.
Ruina said she dropped out of the play after the cast list was finalized.
“I didn’t want to be a part of something like that, where the whole thing was just whitewashed,” Ruina said. “When you put a white girl as a role that was written for a person of color, (POC) are just going to think ‘If I can’t even get the roles that were written for me, what roles can I get?’”
Carroll was the next student to drop out of the production, along with Cummings, a junior at IHS.
Cummings, who was cast as Clopin – the king of gypsies – said he dropped out of the play after feeling uncomfortable taking the part when his peers published the letters.
“As a white male who grew up as a member of a white family, I had never really experienced this before,” Cummings said. “When I read Prachi’s letter I got very emotional because I realized I was that person who was hurting someone but didn’t even know about it because the system of ICSD, in a way, actually failed us.”
Cummings said in the end, it came down to taking part in something he loved or doing the right thing.
The students said nearly 10 cast members have since dropped out of the production.
A historically discriminatory program, students say
Students say this misrepresentation of students of color in the ICSD theater program dates much farther back than just this year.
Ruina laid out several occasions dating back to her time in middle school where she can recall feeling left behind in school plays that were underrepresented by students of color. She is not the only one – Nunn-Makepeace and Carroll both had similar stories to share.
While Ruina recalled several instances, she noted one instance in particular during her 8th-grade year at Dewitt Middle School.
It was announced that Aladdin was on the docket for the school’s big spring production. It was her final year of middle school, and Ruina was convinced, with her talent and likeness to the character, she had a good chance of being cast as the female lead, Jasmine.
“Then, just the absolute opposite happened – I was cast as a narrator, and Jasmine went to a white girl, and that squashed my hope for getting any parts,” Ruina said. “When I was growing up, I was really into princesses, but I only had Jasmine and Esmeralda to look up to. For brown girls, that’s who you can resonate with, and when I saw it was given to a white girl, I was so disappointed.”
Cummings, who grew up and went to school with Ruina, was cast as Aladdin. When he was curious as to why his friend didn’t receive the role, the administration told Cummings that Ruina did not receive the role because she was cast as a lead the year before in the production of ‘13’.
Ruina, however, said that the theater department did not alternate who got lead roles for each play. Many white students were cast as leads on multiple occasions, she said.
Carroll said she has faced several uncomfortable situations participating in theater, one of which was also during her 8th-grade year when she was cast as the fairy godmother in Cinderella.
“Once we started rehearsals I was constantly told to act like Queen Latifah, to act ‘sassy’, to mimic a black stereotype,” Carroll said during a Board of Education meeting on Jan 23. “I am nothing like Queen Latifah – I’m not a black stereotype.”
Nunn-Makepeace traced back to his experience in the production of The Lion King during his 7th-grade year at Boynton Middle School. He was cast as the leader of the hyenas, a diabolical role which was paired with dark lighting and scary music scores.
“All the evil roles, like the hyenas, Scar – they were all kids of color, all of us. Simba, Mufasa, and Zazu – they were all cast as white kids,” Nunn-Makepeace said. “Just the concept of colorblind casting is not okay. It’s ignoring the problems – you can’t do that. If you say you don’t see color, it’s obvious you’re ignoring the struggle other people are going through.”
Final steps & demands
Throughout the students’ gatherings, they have decided that a list of demands was in order to see the changes to theater program that they wanted – they formed a group, naming it Students United.
Following Ruina’s letter, a second was published titled ‘Conscious Casting.’ Twenty seven students signed in agreement that the production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame was causing significant problems in regards to representation.
“At best, this is cultural appropriation. At worst, it is whitewashing, a racist casting practice which has its roots in minstrelsy,” the letter stated. “It also reinforces the damaging narrative that only white power structures can save oppressed people, rather than people of color having the fortitude to do so themselves.”
In the following month, the students met with faculty and administration, spoke publicly at GIAC’s annual MLK breakfast, and spoke before the Board of Education at a meeting on Jan 23. Their goal was to express their concerns with the show, the casting, and the director, Robert Winans.
While some students took issue with Winan’s himself, others see the ICSD theater system flawed as a whole.
“I know parents have gone to talk to (Winans), and it just goes in one ear and out the other,” Nunn-Makepeace said. “He doesn’t really get it, he doesn’t understand, and he won’t let himself understand.”
Student United announced Thursday evening that the continuation of the play has been canceled.
They wrote in an online statement, “Not doing this show is yet another underhanded political tactic the ICSD is using to pit student against student and make our movement a failure. ICSD, you will not divide us. Since the board meeting the number of students who have joined our movement have exceeded our expectations. We are stronger than ever.”
A new list of demands accompanied the announcement, including a new show and director, Joey Steinhagen.
The release from Students United expressed their optimism that a ‘spectacular’ new show could be produced with limited time. Read their full list of demands here.
David Brown, the director of Fine and Performing Arts at IHS, said there are also several initiatives in place to help battle some of the issues that students have brought to light.
“We are creating a team to look at, study and create systems to increase participation from our underrepresented students,” Brown said in an email. “We will be looking at barriers and ways to reach out to our communities to be part of our co-curricular programs.”
Brown said this will be co-chaired by Samantha Little, Athletic Director at IHS. Brown said they have also discussed adding a musical to the line-up, offering more spots to students throughout the year.
“It was a very scary thing to do, and I’m still sort of in shock that it actually happened,” Ruina said, about writing the letters. “But, I’m grateful that I actually did speak out about it, because it is bringing people together and it is bringing awareness to the situation and the fact that things are very messed up.”
Featured image: left to right, Nunn-Makepeace, Ruina, Carroll and Cummings.
An earlier version of this story misplaced French-Roma with French-Romanian.