Nontraditional

Plays are not real in the sense that bullfights are real; none of the performers is fighting for his life, or his love, or his standing in the community. Each player will still be there, breathing and unchanged, at the curtain call. But if the show is any good, we in the audience shall have been responding with part of our minds as if we had actually been attending a bullfight, or a wedding, or whatever.

That half-belief comes partly from self-persuasion, but pretense in our own minds is seldom sufficient. We require artifice as well. We want acting, makeup, costume, setting, and lighting—and not least the corporeality of the performer—to help us half-believe.

To that end, some kind of verisimilitude in the actor's appearance seems tremendously helpful. All other things being equal, we in the audience usually do best at persuading ourselves of the reality of this unreal spectacle when presented with a plausible physical correspondence between the actor and the role, what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in its regulation allowing sex discrimination in casting speaks of as "authenticity." In English-speaking theater, for at least three hundred years, the conventions of the artifice have usually relied upon such authenticity. We have historically looked for men to play men, women to play women, the old to play the old, the young to play the young, and (though we have, as will be seen, tolerated some defections from this norm) for the racial divisions of the characters to be matched by those of the performers.

Of late that has been changing explosively, with a vogue for "nontraditional" casting (spelled both with and without a hyphen). The phrase gained currency after a theatrical industry survey and a conference in 1986 generated the Non-Traditional Casting Project.

The quintessential show of 2015, Hamilton, did not merely tolerate nontraditionally casting our white Founding Fathers (and Mothers) with nonwhite performers; it caused a controversy by recruiting replacements for its original cast and members of a touring company cast with a casting notice that specifically called for only "NON-WHITE ACTORS" (all caps in the original). After the outcry, the non-white language was brought down to lower case and a confusing additional phrase was added: "Performers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are encouraged to attend." A 2015 production of Spring Awakening previously mentioned in these pages cast many of the roles with deaf actors whose American Sign Language speech and "singing" was tracked by differently abled performers voicing what the actors could not; one of the performers navigated the stage, even the dance numbers, in a wheelchair.

One argument for nontraditional casting is uncontroversial: it is well-recognized that there are too many roles which, if the demands of authenticity were strictly complied with, would go to fully-abled white men, leaving not enough roles left over to give anything like parity to other performers. There is little need to discuss the obvious parity problem. But there are more reasons for eschewing authenticity than simply avoiding a lack of equity.

The multiplicity of reasons has given rise to an accepted taxonomy. In an indispensable 2010 study, No Safe Spaces, scholar Angela Pao has summarized the types: color-blind (and I would add gender-blind and ability-blind) casting (aiming for the best performer); societal casting (putting ethnic, female, or disabled actors in roles they might perform in the real world, though I'd argue this actually conforms to authenticity's agenda); conceptual casting (nontraditional casting to give the play greater resonance); and cross-cultural casting (transposing the entire world of the play to a different setting).

Whatever the motivation or the rationale, it is a problem. None of us are race-blind, gender-blind, age-blind, or ability-blind. And we think plenty about ethnicity too. We do notice, much as most of us wish we didn't, when confronted by anti-authentic casting. Anyone who says he or she doesn't notice all these differentiations is simply lying. And since we do notice, we find the suspension of disbelief harder every single time...