No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater

Four. Beyond Type: Re-casting Modern Drama and National Identity

chapter four Beyond Type Re-casting Modern Drama and National Identity What are the main characteristics of this form? We know it by heart, of course, since most of the plays we see are realistic plays. It is written in prose; it makes believe it is taking place independently of an audience which views it through a “fourth wall,” the grand objective being to make everything seem true to life in life’s most evident and apparent sense. In contrast, think of any play by Aeschylus. You are never under an illusion in his plays that you are watching “life”; you are watching a play, an art work. —arthur miller While the various forms of nontraditional casting have come to be widely accepted in European classical tragedies and comedies, there continues to be greater resistance to racial mixing or cultural transposition in modern or contemporary domestic drama. The Los Angeles Times reporter covering the First National Symposium on Non-Traditional Casting posed these questions: Can a black actor be convincing in the title role of Shakespeare’s “Henry V”? Can an Asian or Hispanic actor be believable as part of an Anglo family in Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”? Can any “ethnic” actor assimilate into the upper-crust, WASPish society portrayed in Philip Barry’s “The Philadelphia Story”?1 By the time of the symposium, it was generally agreed that the answer to the ‹rst question was yes, but there was substantial disagreement as 116 to the viability of the other examples. Racially mixed casts had performed in realistic European and American modern drama since the 1960s with mixed responses. A former member of the Guthrie Theatre Company recalled that when a black actor performed the role of the son in Douglas Campbell’s 1966 production of August Strindberg’s Dance of Death, in which the two parents were played by white actors, he was well received by Twin Cities audiences and critics.2 Kenneth Washington , director of company development for the Guthrie, however, heard from older colleagues that there were also many patrons who could not understand or accept the idea of such mixed racial casting.3 Earle Hyman, who has performed Ibsen in Norway and in Norwegian, was one of the ‹rst African American actors to realize these roles on American stages.4 But in the 1980s, such casting remained frequently subject to criticism. When Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, cast African American actor Lou Gossett as Vershinin in his production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters for the 1985–86 season, the result was described as “unfortunate” and worse. As Davidson put it in retrospect, “I didn’t think that was such a big deal, but the audience did.”5 On the other hand, the 1989 casting of Jeanne Sakata in the title role of The Lady from the Sea, for the Fountain Theatre , an organization “dedicated to providing a nurturing, creative home for multi-ethnic theatre and dance artists,” received praise from L.A. Times drama critic Ray Loynd: Non-traditional casting in the major female role lights up Henrik Ibsen ’s psychological study of a woman’s quest for freedom of choice in the tender “The Lady from the Sea” (1888). Jeanne Sakata’s Asian Norwegian strongly serves the cause of colorblind casting as Sakata impressively dramatizes the quiet determination of a wife drawn to a mesmerizing sailor from the sea.6 In these productions, the approach was color-blind (although, as Loynd’s expression “Asian Norwegian” reminds us, “color-blind” casting is never really color-blind). Libby Appel took a conceptual approach in her 1993 production of The Cherry Orchard for the Indiana Repertory Theatre. The serfs were played by black actors to transpose the play’s power relations into an American context. While this staging was not subject to the same objections of implausibility as color-blind casting, the choice did raise objections much like those expressed when black acBeyond Type • 117 tresses are assigned the role of Bianca—that legacies of racial inequality were being reinforced rather than critiqued or dislodged. The controversies seem to have abated in recent years where latenineteenth - and early-twentieth-century European modern drama is concerned. Over the past ten years, multiracial productions of European modern domestic drama have become far more common. These productions are usually performed by resident repertory companies whose members are familiar to audiences...