What Can an EDI Consultant Do for a Play?

AmericanTheatre.org
When SpeakEasy Stage Company puts on plays featuring cross-cultural currents and racial conflicts, Kira Troilo’s consulting work proves crucial.

BY JACQUINN SINCLAIR

Artist and entrepreneur Kira Troilo leads with empathy and heart.

She has employed both attributes in her work with Boston’s SpeakEasy Stage Company, which recently staged three plays with intricate narratives centering on characters of color: Sanaz Toossi‘s English, Hansol Jung‘s Wild Goose Dreams, and Jackie Sibblies Drury‘s Fairview. These productions—with themes of division, racism, identity, and more—respectively took audiences to a classroom in Iran, to the bustling city of Seoul, and into the home of a suburban Black family readying for a birthday party.

Showgoers at these productions may not have realized how much work went into trying to get them right, but directors and actors from the shows say the behind-the-scenes work of Kira Troilo, an equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) consultant and the founder of Art & Soul Consulting, was particularly helpful in handling the cross-cultural issues raised by these plays with sensitivity and care.

The need for EDI in the theatre (and arguably any space where people work together) isn’t new. Still, when the emergence of COVID-19 shuttered theatres, and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) artists banded together to pen the We See You, White American Theater (WSYWAT) statement seeking to “build anti-racist theatre systems” amid civil unrest after the death of George Floyd, it sparked an urgent need for real change across the field.