CREAT Rating System

The Backstory

On February 10, 2020, Out of Hand Theater produced the Atlanta Theater Dinner, a night of facilitated conversations about racial equity in our theater community launched by a short play. The play, based primarily on letters from BIPOC theater makers, also included statistics about the number of plays by playwrights of color produced in 2019 by professional and semi-professional theaters in Atlanta. Out of 187 productions, only 22 were by BIPOC playwrights. That’s 12% (if you round up…). 20 of those were Black playwrights, one was Latinx and one was Asian. There were no Indigenous playwrights produced in 2019. That statistic ended up in the New York Times. To continue the work of raising awareness of the gross inequities that exist within our community and our industry, the Design Team responsible for the Atlanta Theater Dinner started the Coalition for Racial Equity in Atlanta Theater.

CREAT’s mission is to foster a theatre community that is representative of our region at all levels of engagement from inception to reception. This is done through a two-pronged approach by a) Holding predominantly white institutions accountable for their historic white supremacy through a publicly-available rating system, and b) Providing grants to support the work of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color artists and arts organizations.

The Rating System

What gets measured, gets improved. The phrase has become cliché, but for good reason. We believe that a public acknowledgement of where we are and a commitment to improve is the first step to greater equity in our arts community.

The rating system will give each participating arts organization a publicly available numerical grade on a 1 to 100 scale based on four categories: Programming, Open-Ended W-2 Staff (Artistic Directors, Marketing, Development, etc), Limited-Term Staff, (Directors, Designers, Actors, Stage Managers, Over-hires, etc), and Board Members. Points are be awarded based on percentages of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian artists, employees, and volunteers in each category. Additional weight is given in various categories based on factors like the space a play is produced in (main or second stage) and how much artistic decision-making power each position holds.

Theatre that opt into the program fill out a worksheet with their season data, and CREAT processes the data, shares it first with the theatre, and then posts it online along with a narrative to give context to the score.

This is simply a tool for transparency, accountability, and growth.

Who’s it for?

While originally developed for the Atlanta theatre community, the same metrics can be easily tweaked to be useful to non-theater arts organizations, funders, and arts training programs including institutions of higher learning. We also have had interest from partners in other cities, and we hope to scale to theater markets across the country.

What’s next?

The core members of CREAT- Cynthia Barker, J.L. Reed, Diany Rodriguez, and Lee Osorio- are currently taking meetings, refining the rating system, and looking for funders and partners. Our goal is to offer the system free of charge to theatres, but in order to make that happen we need outside funding. We recognize that in order to successfully launch this idea we need a strong I.T./ software development team as well as a data processing consultant. We also recognize the need for capital to pay the team for their time as well as partners for their work.  If you would like to make a donation to support the work you can do so HERE.

We also hope to expand the rating system to include audience demographics, pay equity, a qualitative survey for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian-American, Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian staff working in theatres, and anti-racist training and policies implemented.