San Diego Union Tribune (CA) (09/01/20) Kragen, Pam

San Diego's live theater community has formed the Theatre Alliance, whose official kickoff under the aegis of the San Diego Performing Arts League was held in a Zoom board meeting on Aug. 31. The alliance counts 44 member theaters, with the goal of providing shared resources to help theaters reopen, as well as address tough challenges highlighted in the aftermath of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements. The group's inaugural public events will be a slate of online roundtable discussions dealing frankly with diversity, inclusion, and sexual intimacy and misconduct. "All of us were [attending virtual meetings] every week and there came a point where we got into BLM and the COVID part of it became dwarfed and something much more important took its place," said Roustabouts Theatre co-founder Phil Johnson. Last month members voted to join the Performing Arts League as an official program, which will allow them to make use of the League's marketing, education, networking, ticket sales, and Theatre Week programs. "This has a lot to do with the issues theater is seeing nationwide about how to bring diversity on stage," said Theatre Alliance Ambassador Kandace Crystal. "But we wanted to take it a step further to say that leadership here was committed to hearing out the community in accountability and affecting change in the future." Johnson believes the pandemic was critical to the Theatre Alliance's formation by spurring outreach, while BLM also played an essential role as "a long-overdue reckoning for the theater community at large."

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