Stage | theguardian.com: There’s an intriguing moment in Antony and Cleopatra when we catch Shakespeare chafing against the casting practices of his day. Writing a play that features one of the greatest beauties in history – but knowing that she must be played on stage by a young male – the dramatist has this drag-Cleopatra lament the possibility of audiences after her death seeing “some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness”. Similar onion-layers of meaning must have occurred in contemporary productions of Twelfth Night, in which, in the subterfuge scenes, the actor playing Olivia would have been a male pretending to be a female pretending to be a male.
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While I agree it's important to be wary about changing the rules of the world when cross-dressing/casting any roles, Lawson's argument gets into some problematic territory. Because we live in a world of more fluid sexualities and gender expression on a spectrum rather than a binary, we ought to reconsider how we present our largely hetero-normative theatrical cannon. Yes, a production that does not decide to change the pronouns for all women playing men's roles might be confusing at first...but then again, shouldn't individuals have the right to choose their own pronouns? (Then again, I would have to make a case for such a production being modernized. This acceptance of non-binary gender expression would not be as welcome in Shakespeare's time, or even as recently as the early 20th century, and therefore the production ought to reflect the time and place in which such gender expressions could be welcome and normalized in the world.) As for changing the psychologies of the characters by changing the casting, doesn't the gender-spectrum model also defy this view, given that a biological woman can think like a man? I didn't miss the Freudian implications in Propera's and Miranda's relationship in Taymor's Tempest (and in fact such implications make me a little uncomfortable reading the original text), but instead I see how a father's fear of letting go of their child is the same as a mother's fear.
Lawson drives his point home later by claiming that such gender changes would be met with much more apprehension in more contemporary texts. It may be more obvious for us to see how contemporary playwrights write with gender-specific psychologies in mind, since we are more familiar with their modern expressions of gender. But isn't the fact that gender identity is constantly changing and being reconstructed by society even more a testament to the fact that we should challenge these standards in casting?
This all comes together for me thinking about the BFA Thesis production of Oleanna two years ago, which cast two women and made the conflict between the teacher and student over race and altered the conflict based in gender. Some people took issue with the fact that the teacher had a husband offstage (originally, the male teacher has a wife), so that the teacher's sexuality did not become a threat to a female student, who files a harassment charge. Though the evidence may not have been explicit, how do we know that the female teacher was not a bisexual or lesbian woman still in the closet? And did her sexuality even matter in that situation, if rape and harassment are more about power than about sexual desire?
I think these are the very questions theater ought to be exploring as we redefine gender and sexuality as a society.
This reminds me very much of how everyone that saw the senior thesis show Oleanna two years ago was still talking about it even a month after the show closed. That production promoted a huge amount of discussion about how gender roles effect questionable situations, and how people's reactions would have differed if the casting was the traditional male teacher and female student, or vice versa, or if both characters were male.
I wouldn't go so far to say that equal opportunity "should never be applied to theatrical casting", because it can most certainly be applied, but there's only so much changing you can do to a script before it A) becomes a different show, or B) stays the same but loses the integrity of its message because it was not cast the way it was written to be cast. Shakespeare is especially difficult because not only do you have to consider how characters played by the opposite gender have to justify how their characters would think, feel, and act, but you also have to make accommodations in the writing to keep the iambic pentameter. How much rewriting can you do until you're creating a knock-off version of your original show in order to prove your point? Or, as another example, how would a director go about changing the script when he or she decides to produce an all-white production of The Color Purple? For some plays, yes, gender-crossing is extremely doable and can be done so to prove a point, like Oleanna. But for other shows, it would almost be an injustice to the playwright to simply do away with how they wrote their characters.
I think this article would've been much more effective had it only discussed, for example, women trying to embody men playing male parts OR productions like the all-female Julius Caesar. I understand how and why there are instances where changing the gender of certain characters does not work; the essential, fundamental plot is being altered. But I don't quite understand why male parts being filled by women embodying men is such an issue. The author states, "Equal opportunities is properly a legal requirement in the workplace, but it should never be applied to theatrical casting". But when I look to productions like Peter Pan, many women have been successful in the role of Peter, even iconic. So while some instances require remaining faithful to the original character gender, I think if an actor is suited to a part - regardless of their gender - they should play on.
I understand wanting to respect a writers original intentions, but part of what makes a play great is it's ability to grow and change while still retaining its poignancy and message. In fact, with some perhaps pieces that are more static in terms of gender roles, switching the gender might even make a play hit even deeper than it might have been when it was written, now unconstricted by such strict gender norms. My point is that men and women can both occupy the same relationships because men and women are not strictly one thing or another. There can be controlling women and emotional men and men who want to get married and women who are self destructively existentialist. All of these character traits that we automatically assign to specific genders are as fluid as gender itself. Since all of the great plays with complicated characters have been written for men, why not utilize a great play for the purpose of breaking assumptions?
I may have been reading this article with a bias, but the author seemed to only have a problem with gender-crossed casting when it was a woman playing a man's role, as he said he was looking forward to David Suchet's Lady Bracknell but that "Equal opportunities is properly a legal requirement in the workplace, but it should never be applied to theatrical casting". This seems a like a double standard.
The author doesn't seem to be saying that the tradition of all-male casting is problematic, but that changing traditionally male roles to female ones is the problem, and then he goes so far as to pretend it's about the difficulty of changing the iambic pentameter or the changing the dynamics of roles. You know, because so many female gendered names and pronouns differ so greatly from their male counterparts, and all females take on a certain personality type that doesn't match the male Shakespeare character.
My irritation boils down to the way this author takes his personal, rather outdated and pretty sexist beliefs and tries to give them academic and artistic legitimacy because "pronouns!" and "sexual tension!!!". If you really think directors and theatre companies are choosing to switch character genders simply because "Shakespeare is boring" and there aren't enough female roles, why not take your considerable literary prowess and write some all female plays to "Even the playing field".
The article does make a good point about some gender-based predispositions affecting the way the characters relate to one another. It's difficult to portray the relationship of a father and daughter in the cross-gendered relationship of a mother and son, though perhaps with the appropriate actors it could work. I once watched a performance of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest where the genders of the inmates an Nurse Ratched had been reversed. I didn't feel that particular adaptation worked in the play's advantage because the domineering presence of a male Nurse Ratched took away from the power of the inmate characters themselves; there was no real struggle between Ratched and McMurphy. So I understand how sometimes the reversal of gender can mess with the structure of the play itself. However, Lawson gets into another argument that I don't find very compelling. I think Shakespeare's plays generously allow for the switching of genders. A male actor can assume femininity; a female actor can assume masculinity. It's an insult to the craft of actors to say that they cannot bypass their gender to understand and reproduce (to an audience) a series of personality traits and objectives.
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