Lawsuit over 'Lion King' ASL interpreters is new low for Broadway

by Chris Peterson, OnStage Blog Founder

It was reported yesterday that a former ASL interpreter for Broadway’s ‘The Lion King’ is suing the non-profit Theatre Development Fund (TDF) over racial discrimination after he was told it was “no longer appropriate to have white interpreters represent black characters for ASL Broadway shows.”

Keith Wann, who is white, has been an ASL interpreter for Broadway shows for the past decade. In March, he started work on ‘The Lion King.’

But according to the lawsuit and emails obtained by The New York Post, he and another interpreter were asked to leave the show, citing “the current social climate.”

“With great embarrassment and apologies, I’m asking you both to please back out of interpreting the show for us on Sunday, April 24,” TDF’s director of its accessibility programs, Lisa Carling, wrote. “I don’t see any other way out of this. It seems like the best solution.”

The decision to get rid of Wann and the other interpreter came from Shelly Guy, the director of ASL for “The Lion King,”

“The majority of the characters in the Lion King are black actors, and the content takes place in Africa,” Guy wrote Carling on April 1.

“Keith Wann, though an amazing ASL performer, is not a black person and therefore should not be representing Lion King,” she declared.

The next day, Wann was out and lost the $1,000 it would have paid to interpret the performance.

“To me, just seeing that discrimination, it doesn’t matter if I’m white or black,” said Wann. “This is blatant, and I would just hope that other people who have also experienced this would step forward.”

So here’s my take on all of this, Keith Wann is right; this is discrimination. And with the emails obtained, it’s a pretty clear-cut case that he should win. Now, does Shelly Guy have a point? Yes. Should Black interpreters have the opportunity to work at ‘The Lion King’? Definitely. Especially if those interpreters are marginalized within the accessibility program community.

But where I draw the line is how Guy handled it. I’m not familiar with the contract process, but if she didn’t want Wann to interpret the show, she could have waited till his job was done or his contract ran out. Then there would be no need for explicit directions to boot him out because if his skin color.

As a Korean-American, I am 100% behind in providing more opportunities for BIPOC and other marginalized communities in the professional theatre industry. What I am not for is theatre officials and leaders making dumb decisions in the name of progress when actually it could damage progress. That’s what Shelly Guy has apparently done. There are dozens of ways to handle the situation that would have let Wann do his job and then bring in Black interpreters, but Guy seems to have chosen the completely wrong way.

I hope Wann wins his lawsuit, and I hope this serves as a warning to other theatre officials about how to handle these issues in the future.