Director Rachel Chavkin, who won her first Tony Award on Sunday night for Hadestown, used her acceptance speech to call for greater diversity and representation on Broadway.
“There are so many women who are ready to go,” Chavkin, the only woman directing a musical on Broadway, said on stage while accepting her award. “There are so many artists of color who are ready to go. And we need to see that racial diversity and gender diversity reflected in our critical establishment too.”
She continued, “This is not a pipeline issue. It is a failure of imagination by a field whose job is to imagine the way the world could be. So let’s do it.”
Backstage, Chavkin elaborated: “Our field is filled with progressive people, and yet our field is not exemplary of living its politics, first and foremost who is telling these stories and what stories need to be told. There has to be a lot of attention paid to our own backyard.”