2AMt » Blog Archive: Nearly 4 years ago, as a fresh face on New York’s scene, I attended the inaugural Asian American Performer’s Action Coalition (AAPAC) meeting held at Fordham University. A multicultural caucus of over five hundred Asians and non-Asians alike we were gathered to discuss the severe lack in quantity and quality of stage roles available to actors and performers of Asian descent.
3 comments:
It’s 2015; Two-Thousand and Fifteen and we still can get a handle on this racism thing! Still! And why? Because our parents have taught us to ignore it. But that’s another issue relating more to the world as a whole than to theater itself. In theater though, we should be even father past the cheap tricks of racial comedy. He said it perfectly, “using an entire country or culture as a backdrop for white people to make jokes about white people, is in itself a problematic erasure of a race of people.” It seems that play writes and play houses have decided that it’s okay to invalidate the cultural concerns of non-whites as long as it makes a buck and a laugh. The only other time it’s okay, is if in the end it make the white people feel guilty for paying that buck and having that laugh. In both respects the minority culture is still the one that suffers, whether or not the audience feels guilty at the end of the day, we still had to have the intimate parts of our social basis put out there to be judged. This needs to stop; we can’t call art progressive, if we still allow it to have basis in ideals of the past.
This woman is a saint, and I completely agree with what she has to say. I remember having a conversation with a couple friends about casting actors, and happened to bring up the peculiar point of why there aren't very many Asian actors auditioning for the School of Drama today. Someone commented upon a fact they had read in a magazine that prickled my anger and sounded way too insensitive to even be real: that Asian women and men, supposedly unlike white men and women, could not play all the roles that while people could because they simply couldn't be seen as 'marketable' for the variety of parts available. Over the summer my brother and I saw a Japanese theatre adaptation of Kafka by the Shore by Haruki Murakami. All of the players were Japanese men and women, and they played a variety of fleshed out, complex, sexual, funny, heart-breaking characters that were as interesting, if not more, than the characters usually played by white people on the Broadway stage. There's no reason we need to stereotype Asian actors into racist roles. Nor should we continue to plaster yellow-face all over the stage like in the Mikado. In seventh grade, I played part of the ensemble in my school's production. Even then it seemed to me that this wasn't appropriate. We need to excise the things that pigeon-hole Asia in the eyes of the American public, and replace it with actors and plays that appropriately display the Asian or Asian-American experience.
We have so many pieces in our canon that are just not acceptable any more. They were written in a time and place where making a culture into a caricature was acceptable. It’s not anymore, it’s just not. I’m not saying that we should burn these manuscripts and texts, but I think as a progressive sector of society, the theatre community should take charge and make sure these texts are presented in a way that isn’t racist, if that’s even possible. I often believe that the entertainment industry is at the forefront of societal change and this article makes me feel like we are failing. Rogers and Hammerstein were the pinnacle of musical theatre in the 1950s and 1960s, but their shows have a lot, A LOT, of race issues. Why do high schools still put on South Pacific? Let’s not even talk about the casting of Miss Saigon in the late 1980s. Haven’t we learned our lesson? It doesn’t appear so, which is ridiculous.
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