Whitewashing, or race-bending, is not referring to an old-school method of painting your garden fence. It is when directors cast white actors as characters of color.
Most recently, Chicago’s Porchlight Music Theater cast a white actor in the lead of the new Lin-Manuel Miranda musical “In the Heights.” This production is getting noticed because of Miranda’s fame and the success of “Hamilton,” but this is not the first time whitewashing has happened.
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Racial exclusion in theatre seems to come up on the green page every single week, multiple times over, which is hardly surprising, but still a massive issue. The Tom Sawyer analogy is far too true for the situation, in fact. The thought of whitewashing In The Heights, a production that is so specifically meant to shed light on the issues of dominican folks in Washington heights, a neighborhood that is predominantly Hispanic American. The claim that there aren't enough actors of color for small theatres to cast true to script or true to life is a load of malarkey, as if you're willing to be inclusive and send out open casting calls, even if you don't find the most trained actor, you can find someone that embodies the playwright's intention. I agree more than anything that the seasons theatres should do is open up their seasons to include productions that are indicitive of all life in America, not just the plight of the straight white male. As time goes on, more and more people immigrate in, more mixed-race couples have children, and more young people are born into a world where the media they see isn't indicitive of their actual life they live, which isn't quite fair to anyone.
We are moving into a time where shows are being written specifically for for people who aren't white, like Hamilton, or In The Heights, and that is great, it really is, but are we really going to wait until there are just as many shows written for black people and Latino people and Asian people before we start giving them equal stake in what already exists? This is not to say that people like Lin-Manuel Miranda should stop writing the kinds of shows that he is, he alone is single-handedly diversifying our art form daily but we have to stop wait for LMM's to come along every 100 years, stop being assholes and just quit the white washing. I know it hurts the ego of the guy my grandpa's age up in some casting office to hire an up and coming black actress instead of Laura Osnes for the nth time (I love Laura but it's getting out of hand) but we gotta get over it. OR we could stop hiring the racist people in the first place. I appreciate that we are having this conversation and creating a generation more aware of these issues and ready to fix them but the whole concept of white washing just blows my mind because I do not understand how anyone could ever think it was a good, or moral, way to run a business or show.
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