Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (review)

With the 1955 inauguration of the New York Shakespeare Festival, Joseph Papp's landmark commitment to colorblind casting entered the American theatrical lexicon as an innovative, socially engaged practice linked notably to the work of Shakespeare. Colorblind Shakespeare, the first collection of its kind, is therefore an important intervention in what has become a contentious debate over racial surrogacy and representation. It boasts eleven original pieces, divided into three sections, in addition to an introductory essay by editor Ayanna Thompson, a foreword by Ania Loomba, and an afterword by Peter Erickson. The longest portion, part 1, "The Semiotics of (Not) Viewing Race," includes Angela C. Pao's case histories of the roles of Iago and Emilia in Othello played by black actors, notable examples being the 1990–91 Harold Scott production (for the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger) and the 1995 Penny Metropulos staging for the Acting Company, and Courtney Lehmann's compelling anatomy of Kenneth Branagh's own suppressed ethnic history in his ostensibly race-neutral musical Love's Labour's Lost (2000). Part 2, "Practicing Colorblindness: The Players Speak," consists of an essay by actor-director Antonio Ocampo-Guzman and Thompson's interview with actor-director Timothy Douglas. The personal narratives and critical observations of these artists afford a practical intimacy with the issues that fulfills the collection's performance aims from a practitioner's perspective. Part 3, "Future Possibilities/Future Directions," offers a more eclectic grouping ranging from Richard Burt's argument for the importance of the middlebrow genre of television and Margo Hendricks's detailed scrutiny of hand gestures, to Francesca T. Royster's reading of Edward Hall's Rose Rage (Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 2003), with its central trope of butchery as a meditation on the ideological violence of whiteness "as an often unmarked privileged location of social belonging" (221). Such a brief overview can only suggest the broad contours of a rich and admirable undertaking.

Positing talent over race, colorblind or nontraditional casting imagined a democratization of performance—with practical, material benefits for unemployed non-white actors—aimed at combating persistent social segregation and undermining racial hierarchies with a vision of race neutrality. Audiences were simultaneously required to ignore all racial signs, pretend they did not matter, and still enliven their sociopolitical consciousness with onstage racial plurality serving as a catalyst. Yet even in colorblind casting's prototypical form as advocated by Papp from the 1950s to the 1970s, black actors were denied romantic leads, marginalized in sidekick roles, and barred from interracial couplings onstage. In its mainstream application, further complications evolved. Given the divisive history of blackface in American and British theater, evidently black roles (Aaron the Moor and Othello) were exclusively retained for black actors. Additionally, nontraditional casting presented opportunities to capitalize on an actor's appearance, where blackness as a cultural signifier was co-opted to mediate general social themes of subjugation and otherness in decidedly color-conscious productions. Ocampo-Guzman cites " 'colordeaf ' casting" (132), the linguistic, multicultural corollary to the visual preoccupation of colorblind practices, to advocate on behalf of actors required to surrender their language (accents, styles of speech) to the repressive aesthetic of "received pronunciation" and whose "sounds, even when their native language is English, are corrected to meet the standard, which of course has not been examined in generations" (132). As Pao notes, the tensions between the original ideal and subsequent practices highlight the question posed directly or indirectly by the collection's contributors: in light of color's enduring and uncompromising visibility in contemporary life, when has colorblindness ever been blind?

August Wilson's historic 1996 address, "The Ground on Which I Stand," radicalizes this question in its rejection of colorblind casting as "an aberrant idea that has never had any validity other than as a tool of the Cultural Imperialist,"¹ where the material presence of the black actor with its embedded history of oppression is suspended in a privileged, universal whiteness...