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“As much as I do not like saying this, the fifteen women in this play are Quebecois women and the play is set in Montreal in 1965,” wrote Treloar, according to the Victoria News. “A black woman would not be a neighbour or a sister in this play, however I would love to meet you and hear you read …”

The question is whether the discrimination is permissible

The question is whether the discrimination is permissible — whether it was within Treloar’s purview as a director to choose what she thought would be historically accurate casting. Surely, it’s a reasonable artistic choice. Can you imagine, for example, a production of A Raisin in the Sun — a 1959 play about a poor black family’s experiences on Chicago’s south side — with a white actor playing the matriarch? It would be a very different play, and it would be unfair to insist on the transformation for the sake of inclusion. But no one wants to admit out loud that they would use racial prejudice in a casting decision.

Well, no one except Treloar perhaps, whose biggest mistake was perhaps her honesty with McKenna about her artistic casting preferences. Treloar might just as easily have declined to cast McKenna due to bogus quibbles about McKenna’s acting abilities, which would have been more insulting and patronizing, yet less likely to land the theatre in front of a tribunal. But because Treloar was transparent about her vision of what women in 1960s Quebec would look like, the theatre is not only before a tribunal, but has already been told by tribunal member Beverly Froese that the theatre’s $1,500 settlement offer to McKenna (yes, the theatre tried to settle) was not high enough.