CMU School of Drama


Friday, November 27, 2015

Kent State Coda: No Black MLK Ever Reached Their “Mountaintop”

Howard Sherman: Even if one gives credence to Oatman’s intellectual basis for attempting to split the role, it evaporated along with the unnamed black actor, regardless of Branch’s talent. At that point, the already unjustifiable production should have been irrevocably abandoned, since the entire conceptual underpinning had come undone. What Oatman did was not a half-measure, as Hall was apparently led to believe, as we were all led to believe, but indeed the complete erasure of a black body as she had feared.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

While I agree that on paper, Oatmans original idea of double casting the role as both a white man and a black man could be interesting to explore the idea of the power of words coming from different colored mouths, with the supposed "absence" of a black actor to even PLAY the double cast role, and the written objections of the playwright, putting on the show was a bone headed move. There is no amount of reasoning that can be made for the continuation of a production of a show about Martin Luther King Jr. starring a white guy that can be made other than the fact that: this guy seems like an idiot. And with his comment about how artists sometimes get too "touchy" about "this stuff" (re: having a white gut play one of the most influential African Americans, ever) is another empty headed defense from the critisism of the playwright, the media, and the world of theatre. If Oatman really wanted to do a show starring a white guy - who I don't doubt is good, probably - there are about 400,000 other ones he could have chosen. There are even ones about race he could have chosen. But he made the conscious decision to either do this show or continue this show in an OBVIOUSLY bad direction. And as for the actor playing MLK, I feel bad for him. Whenever he moves into the professional world of theatre, this mistake is going to follow him. I don't know why he decided to go along with this production, but man, that is not going to be fun to deal with in a few years.