No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater by Angela C. Pao (review)

Radical U.S. social movements of the 1960s and 1970s regarded culture as a crucial site on which to challenge systemic inequities and materialize social transformation. Alongside other cultural institutions re-forming the public, theater both reflected and produced social changes around race. Angela Pao deftly reappraises this significant impact of theater in No Safe Spaces through astute case studies of renowned recastings of race to demonstrate the theoretical and sociocultural work that nontraditional casting performs. Amid debates over racial integration, nontraditional and multiracial casting gained prominence as productions recasted unmarked characters with actors along social differences, such as race, ethnicity, and nationality. These practices aimed to increase employment opportunities for nonwhite actors and interrogate stereotypical racial representations. Attending to the particularities of theatrical conventions and sociohistorical contexts, Pao locates the work of nontraditional casting between "theatrical semiosis and racial formation" to argue for the generative resources that theater and the body provide in rewriting conceptions of race toward the goal of social justice (140).

The book opens with two chapters establishing its theoretical foundation. Chapter 1 emphasizes theatrical productions as "meaning-making system[s]," in which the semiotic properties of the performer's body are central (27). Within this system, genres serve as contracts between performers and spectators about the expected protocols of the performance. Nontraditional casting disrupts the "reality effect" of a performance—as race embodiment unsettles the mimetic relationship between the body of the character and the performer—and illuminates these conventional expectations, necessitating a reevaluation of the shifts within the semiotic system (35). Despite common criticisms about this practice made on the grounds of realism, Pao notes that there is actually a paradox, in that nontraditional casting is critiqued as rendering a play either too realistic or not realistic enough. Thus, what race threatens is not realism, but rather "the normativity of white social and cultural dominance" upheld through cultural codes (38).

Elaborating on these cultural codes, chapter 2 works through Michael Omi and Howard Winant's theorizations of racial formation, underscoring the centrality placed on the body as the nexus between the complementary components of cultural representations and sociopolitical structures. Pao critiques color-blind casting through their "ethnicity paradigm," whereby pluralism flattens differential power relations and supposes an equal potential for all ethnic groups to "assimilate" into the desired ideal of whiteness. While color-blindness putatively does not see race, producers insistently stage "color-awareness," casting actors based on physical markers that reproduce what "looks" like a certain race (48). As Pao asserts in discussing the controversy surrounding Miss Saigon, "color-blindness" is linked to post-civil rights racial politics in which neoconservative and neoliberal agendas—as do discourses of the postracial—discredit sociohistorical materialities of race. Uncritical forms of nontraditional casting risk reproducing (neo)liberal multiculturalist views of difference.

The next four chapters provide case studies of nontraditional casting in the following genres: the classics, modern drama, antirealistic drama, and Broadway musicals. The first two are discussed further below for their particularly compelling insights into the performance of race and national identity. In chapter 3, Pao notes that temporal and spatial distance allow for greater frequency of nontraditional casting within the classics. Examining adaptations of Othello, Pao points toward Harold Scott's reinterpretation with the Shakespeare Theatre Company to explore how nontraditional casting and explorations into everyday performances of race can be most generative. His conceptual recasting reinterpreted race throughout the entire production, manifesting itself through visual cues, props, costume designs, and directorial choices. Explanatory materials and discussions with the cast further established a dialogue with audience members about the conceptual choices. Thus, viewers were prepared with "protocols of reception" to question existent understandings of the play and explore the interpretative possibilities when race is recasted (102). Instead of focusing on nontraditional casting as a product, as in color-blind casting, "multiracial...