A New Jersey musician filed a lawsuit on Monday against a prominent Off Broadway theater, alleging that a discount offered to people of color to attend a recent performance of a play was racially discriminatory.
The lawsuit, filed against Playwrights Horizons, a highly regarded Off Broadway theater in Midtown Manhattan, was facilitated by Edward Blum, a nationally known lawyer who for years has challenged affirmative action and other race-based policies in higher education and beyond.
Blum leads an organization, American Alliance for Equal Rights, that has filed 21 lawsuits in the last two years, including one last year that successfully challenged an internship for Latinos at the Smithsonian Institution.
The new lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, centers on a discount that Playwrights Horizons offered in November. Patrons who identified as people of color could purchase reduced-price tickets to attend a “BIPOC night” performance of “Practice,” Nazareth Hassan’s new play about theatermaking.
According to the lawsuit, Playwrights Horizons promoted the discount with the language “For this BIPOC Night performance, we welcome folks who are Black, Indigenous or People of Color to use code BIPOCNIGHT to unlock discount seats.”
The plaintiff, Kevin Lynch, who is white and described in the lawsuit as a “composer, producer and music director,” bought two tickets to “Practice” for $90 each. Other patrons, using the BIPOC night discount code, paid $39 a ticket, according to the lawsuit.
The suit, a class-action complaint, alleges that the discount was discriminatory, and asks the court to bar the practice and to award unspecified damages. It was filed by Consovoy McCarthy, a conservative law firm in Arlington, Va., whose lawyers successfully argued a Supreme Court case in 2023 overturning race-based policies in college admissions.
In a statement in response to the litigation, Playwrights Horizons said, “This is a meritless lawsuit, and Playwrights Horizons intends to defend itself in court.”
Theaters often invite groups of people with shared characteristics — alumni of a particular school, patrons below a certain age — to attend shows on a specific night, and sometimes those tickets are offered at a discount.
In recent years, a number of theaters have tried to diversify their audiences by inviting people of color to attend on designated nights, an effort that appears to date to at least 2019, when the Broadway production of “Slave Play” held a “Black Out” performance.
The events, which are often not discounted, have occasionally prompted controversy, not only in the United States but also in Britain and Canada.
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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