How Theatre Can Save Your Soul

Read all about it here.

Comments

[Scott]

Liked the article. One of the most interesting quotes to me was this one:

"By limiting actors of color to only race-specified parts, we limit our vision of what people of color are capable of, thus we make a world where, ultimately, what matters most about an African American is that she is black."

Since we as a nation are still, it would seem to me, profoundly ambivalent about race, this argument seems a little ahead of itself. If a black man was cast as Hamlet (let's say), regardless of how talented and universal the performer and performance, the performance would to some degree still be about a black man as Hamlet. Race is still the elephant in the room in America, and anything that steps outside the usual proscribed boundaries of who goes where will call attention to it. It has too much gravity, as it were, to be ignored.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to get to the point that color-blind casting is a reality, but we're not there yet, and to pretend that we are will cause issues that may not necessarily serve the play (unless one wants to deal with the issue of race in one's play, in which case, you know, go for it). Color blind casting often comes across to me as stunt-casting, and those that try to ignore the issue often seem to me to be trying to pretend that we're beyond that. I don't think we are.

Of course, there are plays where it truly doesn't matter what race the character is. It's tough to talk about stuff like this, like trying to express feelings for which you don't have a word in your language. Hope I didn't stick my foot in it.