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

Afterword

Afterword The theater can play only a small part in the vast change that is certainly coming. It is under no special obligation to lead. By nature, theater is a somewhat sluggish form, always a bit behind the underground pressures moving society as a whole. Because it is a public form, addressing itself nightly to diverse minds, it lags behind agile minds working in private. It is forced to unite and move an exceedingly diversi ‹ed mass in no more than two-and-a-half hours, and that is a dif‹cult thing to do. It has never been a disgrace for the theater to wait until a wind has become a prevailing wind before reproducing its sound for all comers. But there is already an urgency inside it, echoing the urgency that is on the streets. indeed, it is a measure of how far the streets have gone to see how quickly the theater is catching up. a solution is wanted now. —walter kerr Since multiracial casting ‹rst became a regular part of the American theater scene a half century ago, the practices have prompted myriad debates , discussions, and developments. Theater professionals, critics, and audiences have been led to articulate or to reexamine their assumptions concerning fundamental theater practices and the relationship of theater to contemporary society. Productions cast nontraditionally have foregrounded questions about the parameters for representation attached to dramatic genres, the bases for establishing different modes of reception, the function of the actor and the nature of acting as a semiotic activity, the expression of ideological values through artistic practices , and the continuing part dramatic performance has to play in de‹ning a national cultural identity. Particular theater productions have 222 been seized as opportunities for artists, spectators, critics, and even people not normally interested in the theater to make political or ideological statements, both progressive and conservative. Experiments in casting, like all innovations, have demonstrated the ›exible and contingent nature of the classi‹cations and conceptions that are integral parts of complex systems of meaning. Nontraditional casting practices materialized the deeply ingrained conventions of realism and naturalism that pervade all genres of contemporary Euroamerican theater, except avowedly antirealistic works, and the attendant habits of spectatorship. Walter Kerr gives a vivid account of these habits in action : Naturalism has developed in its audiences what may be called a strict historical sense. When, in the Association of Producing Artists’ production of “War and Peace,” Olivia Cole appears as the wife of the 19th-century Russian prince Andrei Bolkonski, I ‹nd my head instantly ‹lled with thoughts that have nothing to do with the meaning or movement of the play. The production is naturalistic or realistic in feeling, but I am aware that members of the Russian ruling class in the 19th century did not marry Negroes; it is doubtful that they even had any opportunity to do so. At the same time that the historical stage picture is being jarred out of focus for me, I am busy explaining away what has startled me. “Oh,” I say to myself, “the A.P.A. has at last taken some Negro members into the company.” I now struggle between moral approval of this step and historical disbelief in what I am seeing . All the while I am doing this the play is going on without me, or against me. I am temporarily uprooted, taken out of the 19th-century play and into the 20th-century United States. Wires have been crossed. The experience has not been spoiled but it has been in some way fuzzed. In fact, naturalistic form has violated itself. These distractions lead Kerr to ask: What is naturalism worth to the theater? How deeply ingrained, how important to the sustained illusion we seek in the theater, is our habit of looking at the stage with the eyes of photographers? Is the particular kind of historical sensibility which naturalism has engendered in us part and parcel of the theater as such, one of its real roots, or is it perhaps a passing, super‹cial and irrelevant phenomenon?1 Afterword • 223 Kerr’s conclusion is the latter. In the ‹nal paragraphs of his extensive and perceptive exploration of the network of questions raised by the integration of theater companies, he writes: “What is good about approaching the matter theatrically rather than sociologically is this: so long as we undertake to increase Negro employment in the theater simply...