AMERICAN THEATRE: Last week, Clarion University in Pennsylvania was forced to cancel its planned production of Lloyd Suh’s Jesus in India. The reason: casting. Three of the characters were written as Indians, and the predominantly white school had cast two white actors and one mixed-race actor in the roles.
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Its taken me a minute to compose my thoughts on this topic. Many times when faced with the decision directors use one of tw justifications: that art should be blind, its the story not the people telling the story that matters or its time we moved pass the constrains of race. Both of these meaningless justifications anger me beyond words. I am even more incensed when a Director of color decides to use this justifications, as they should feel the same way I do at the though of further dilution of the essence of a character. To put this in context, in Design for the Stage right ow we are working on a project where we ready a play The White Snake, that is based in Chinese folklore. We were told that we could ignore the Chinese roots of this play for the purposes of this project if we wanted to. That directly violates the intent of the the play, the designs of the author in rooting the play in Chinese story, and the right of the culture to hold on to the fruits of histories labors. This is the first time I have heard the term "white tear" but I think it is an appropriate phrase for the use of baseless complaints to white wash yet another facet of expression for "minorities".
This is the second article regarding the incident at Clarion University which I have commented on. I appreciate that the author of this article emphasized the importance of the “right of the playwright.” A playwright has the final say. If you are changing something, you are editing their work, and while different interpretations of a work are OK, changing the meaning behind a work can be violating the playwright’s intentions. You can interpret plays but you can’t fundamentally alter them.
This article also brings up the fact that Clarion hadn’t even gotten proper permissions for their performance, which is really concerning. Also concerning was the lack of communication in both the case of Clarion and Kent State University. If a character is written as a certain race, a director cannot just swap someone else in and think that’s OK. If a director is producing a work in a way that changes or contradicts the words that the playwright has written, it is the responsibility of the director/producer to contact the playwright and make sure this is OK. There’s also a level of common sense involved. Many would think it’s obvious that MLK Jr. shouldn’t be portrayed by a white actor, unless that is the point of the part as it was written by the playwright (or rarely, an intentional choice that has been OK’d by the writer). In my experience, I was designing for a show that had a line about a certain character having blonde hair. This was very crucial to the character because she was an Iraqi-American. One of the actresses playing this part was Black, so she didn’t have blonde hair. Our director was in considerable communication with the playwright throughout our process to check that his casting was OK, and to get permission to omit/edit the blonde hair line. Luckily, the playwright was super easy-going and was willing to allow us to adjust things as necessary to achieve the best possible production. This was mainly because our director had been in communication with her from the start of our process, so this working relationship was extremely productive. This is just one example of how helpful it can be for a director to be in contact with the playwright, and how necessary it is in cases of making edits to the script.
This is particularly heavy stuff. One point that I was drawn to in this article is the idea that teachers should make clear that actors shouldn't be able to play any kind of race, and that it isn't desirable in modern society for actors to be able to play any race. In high school, I know that certainly wasn't what our performance majors were being taught. Many teachers that come from different generations have very different ideas about acting and race, and that idea is being continually spread today. Even here at CMU the idea that acting is colorblind is still being promoted, as we saw last year in The Wiz, which certainly came from a place of agreement with many of the professors at the university who believed that audiences "shouldn't see color". That idea is an absolute fallacy of course, because people of color are literally being killed for having more melanin in their skin, daily. The world sees color, so our industry should too.
This is 2015. If you're going to mount a production without obtaining rights, the playwright and the licensing company is going to find out. Nevertheless, you're mounting a production without permission to change fundamental aspects of the production. I just want to shake these administrators and ask them what the fresh heck they were thinking. What is even more infuriating is that white people are getting angry about the cancellation of the show "that they worked so hard on." I am not a theater elitist by any means, but you don't get to do the show if you don't get the rights. That's like, the first rule of producing a show. Considering that diversity in entertainment industries is at an all time low, it doesn't make sense on a racial level to have white actors (of which there many) to play African American roles. The author is spot on: it's downright racist. There is a way to race-bend productions, as long as you preserve the morals of the show, but when the morals of the show deal with Martin Luther King, it is absolutely not appropriate in any way to cast someone that isn't black.
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