Back in May, near the end of the opening week at the Shaw Festival, I was suddenly struck by how overwhelmingly white the festival's acting company is.

Ironically enough, this hit me while I was at the festival's production of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, which is set in the deep South in the year 1900 and deals explicitly with issues of race and racism. Watching actors Lisa Codrington and Richard Stewart as the servants Addie and Cal, I realised the only other actor of colour I had seen all week (outside of the musical) had been playing a maid.

What a time warp. I thought: How would this make me feel if I was a young, non-white actor coming to the Shaw Festival for the first time? Pretty alienated, I imagine.

And so, in my review of The Little Foxes, I noted (though only parenthetically) that: "For better or for worse, colour-blind casting has yet to reach Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont."

Fair comment I thought, but it provoked a defensive email from the Shaw's artistic director, Jackie Maxwell, in response. She insisted that I had come up with a "very inaccurate head count" (because I ignored the musical, Wonderful Town) and concluded: "I would be happy to talk further to you about this - first waiting, of course, until you have come up with some accurate figures... and maybe 'til you have seen a few more shows too - that might help."

Well, I've seen the rest of the 2008 season now and - what can I say - I'm still not about to nominate the festival for any diversity awards. The contrast with Canada's other big repertory company is striking. Over at the Stratford Festival, there are actors of colour playing Juliet, Helen of Troy, Christopher Sly, Cleopatra (in a play by Bernard Shaw, no less) and rebellious Fuente Ovejunians, to name just a few. There isn't a big fuss made about it, either. Maybe it's because Shakespeare's characters were originally all played by male actors, but non-traditional casting is just the way Stratford roles. (Apologies.)

Meanwhile, at Shaw - outside of the musicals, which I omit only because colour-blind casting is pretty much the norm in that genre nowadays - the few non-Caucasian actors I spotted were tackling such challenging roles as "the help", party guest #2 and secretary #3. No lead roles in the straight plays went to actors who weren't the colour of Bernard Shaw's beard.

I'm not the only person who has noticed this. But while I only mentioned it en passant before, some members of the theatre community have started to take the issue out of parentheses recently. In response to what he sees as a lack of diversity at the Shaw Festival, Andrew Moodie, the Chalmers-winning playwright, has started a campaign called Share the Stage. It includes a Facebook group (which now has over of 600 members) and a website on which he has posted an open letter to Maxwell.

In the letter, Moodie claims that he had a mandate-friendly play of his rejected from the festival five years enough because its characters didn't match the racial make-up of the existing Shaw company. "It was made clear to me that they play would never get produced at Shaw because the cast had too many people of colour," Moodie writes.

Since then, Moodie has continued to observe that the festival isn't representing Canadian society as we know it. "If you have read any of his work, you would know that George Bernard Shaw was a staunch critic of discrimination," he writes in his letter, which he has urged people to forward to Maxwell. "I honestly believe that if Shaw were alive today, he, too, would embrace our diversity as a strength and not a weakness." (Well, Shaw was a Stalinist and helped whitewash the Ukrainian Holodomor... but that's an argument for another time. Moodie's point is well taken.)

After receiving a flurry of emails, Maxwell penned a response to Moodie outlining the changes that the festival has made since his play was rejected. "I would point out that each of the last five years has seen an increase in the number of actors of colour in our company," she writes, "and that we are already well into a process of collaboration with a theatre company in Toronto to seek out and translate mandate pieces from China, Japan and the Phillipines."

She continues: "You may look at this and say 'Small steps too late', I say 'Steps nevertheless and better late than never'."

But Maxwell hasn't stopped at a defensive letter this time: She plans to meet Moodie tomorrow to talk further on the subject. That's great news.

Even better, the discussion is spreading beyond those two to the rest of the theatre community. Two actors at the Shaw Festival - Ali Momen and Thom Allison - have even openly responded to the Share the Stage campaign on their blogs.

One thing that's important to keep in mind is that the issue is not just about actors, but about diversity behind the scenes as well. I was well and truly surprised to learn recently (in an article by Montreal-based critic Pat Donnelly) that Ron O. J. Parson, who is directing Joanna McClelland Glass's new play Palmer Park at Stratford, is the first black director to work there. [UPDATE: No wonder I was surprised; it's not the case. <a href="http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/i_dsears.cfm">Djanet Sears</a> was the first black director to work at Stratford.]

But then, even here, the Shaw lags behind. "To my knowledge and limited research, there have been no black directors at the Shaw to date," writes the festival's publicist.

The lack of non-white directors at the Shaw is not easily explained, but the lack of colour-blind casting could be passed off as an artistic decision. Most of the plays in Shaw's repertoire are populated by white characters, after all, and a naturalism-inclined director (are there any other kind in English Canada?) might argue that they should therefore be played by white actors.

I don't really buy that - and not only because it stinks of a lack of imagination. There are many reasons why I strongly believe in the practice of colour-blind casting for classic plays, but my top one is quite selfish: I love old English-language plays and want them to survive. Translating Chinese plays from Shaw's era is a fine idea, but I believe that the playwrights who already fall in the Shaw Festival's mandate - Shaw and his contemporaries like Terence Rattigan, JB Priestley, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Anton Chekhov, Oscar Wilde, etc, etc - can reach, touch, provoke and inspire artists and audiences of all backgrounds. I believe they are more than just "dead white men" and that their plays still have tremendous life in them.

But when we only see white Undershafts and white Inspector Gooles and white Lady Bracknells and white Olgas, Mashas and Irinas, these plays can, alas, seem out of step with our time and place. Or irrelevant. Or exclusionary.

Maxwell is well aware that the Shaw Festival's mandate can be alienating, of course. Women voices were lacking when she took over as artistic director in 2003, but they're not anymore. Maxwell's proud to have resurrected plays by little-known women playwrights and to have hired more women directors.

It's rather incredible, in fact, how fast she has achieved near gender parity at the Shaw Festival. Now that she's in the hot seat, I hope she'll prove to be equally quick at sharing the Shaw stage with Canadians of all colours. It is, after all, the only way the Shaw Festival and the playwrights it is dedicated to will continue to survive...