Color Blind Casting, Alive Again

A letter to the NYT about Phylicia Rashad's performance in August: Osage County has been circling around, and it's worth reading largely because it is such a startling example of unreflective thinking.

 

I am offended that Phylicia Rashad is playing a white woman’s role in “August: Osage County.” It doesn’t make sense that she would have white siblings and children.

Offended? Nonsense. Frustrated, surprised, confused, irritated, exhausted, outraged even: maybe. But what would the offense be?  Your objection, is that it "doesn't make sense."  So you're not offended, you're confused.  But, there are some other things that don't make sense: people on a tall thing pretending to be people they are not, saying things they don't mean, wearing clothes that aren't theirs, pretending that you're not watching (except for that guy in the first scene, who talks right to you).

What is it about this particular convention that is offensive?  I've written before a few times about color-blind casting, and I still think that as a convention it is perhaps too young to have become conventional, but I think that it will. When was the last time someone was offended by a convention of the theater? Christian moralists decried acting as dishonest until they exploited it to share their faith.  Elizabethan nobility used costumers' demand to sell their once-used clothing to keep money and save face, and so turned a blind eye on the dangerous blurring of class distinction that the theater represented.  Today race is a central issue in our culture and one to which both social conscience and social structure are bound.  The topic here is an aesthetic issue that happens to deal with race so understandably then, the stakes are high. "Not making sense" works as an analysis of color-blind casting if you stay in the realm of aesthetics: this is an arguable position.  But outside of aesthetics, a rejection of Ms. Rashad's performance will fall flat and hard.

Unfortunately, the letter's author describes Ms. Rashad as "playing a white woman's role" rather than "playing a white woman," which makes his argument seem like it's much more about taking jobs than about aesthetic possibility or so-called suspension of disbelief. So, this isn't an aesthetic argument and this person is a fool.

If this were an aesthetic argument I would raise this question: aside from whether or not we can "forget" Ms. Rashad's race, can we "forget" Ms. Rashad?  The most powerful alienating factor in modern performing arts - and the one which no one talks about - is fame.  As far as suspension of disbelief goes, who the hell on Broadway knew who Deanna Dunagan was before this play?  Wasn't she just Violet Westin?  But Ms. Rashad is instantly recognizable from her TV work with Bill Cosby and from her previous Broadway successes, including last year's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  At least as meaningful as whether we can accept her as playing a white character, is how it is that we accept her as anyone other than Phylicia Rashad.  I think the answer to both of them must be the same.

Conspiracy and Theatricality

Anne Nicholson Weber reminded me of this great excerpt from her interview with the great Nicholas Hytner in Upstaged.  

Throughout the history of the theatre, theatre artists have wanted to provoke their audience using alienating devices such as masks, boys playing girls, dance, verse dialogue -- devices which quite plainly do not produce a literal image of the world outside. They say, “This isn’t the real world, this is a poetic image of the real world through which we can agree to discover stuff about the real world” -- exactly the same way as if I am a Shakespeare heroine, I have to put on man’s clothes, to be not myself, in order to discover who I am and where I fit in the world. What we’re doing here is conspiring together: let’s make our world not the real world in order to discover what the real world is like.

I don’t think this is a feature of film as a form, but it is of the stage. And over and over again, you see theatre artists pushing this as hard as they can. What flashes in my mind is an example from the play I’m working on at the moment, The Winter’s Tale. I’ve not counted them, but seven or eight times in the last act, in preparation for his final coup when the statue of Hermione comes to life, Shakespeare has someone say, “This is like an old tale”, “This is a mouldy old tale”, “This is like an old tale still”, “If this were shown you on the stage you’d hoot at it.” He keeps insisting, “What I’m showing doesn’t make any sense, it’s not real,” drawing attention to the unreality of it, because he’s written 35 plays by now and he knows that we will believe, and in fact that the more that he tells us that we won’t believe, the bigger the shock and the huger and more resonant the thrill when we do. And at the end of an evening, the more you feel that you’ve achieved something -- that something has been required of your imagination and you’ve given it -- the better you feel.

Always.

It's interesting to me that he uses the terms "alienation" and "conspiracy" in such close proximity and in some sense to refer to the same thing.  What gets alienated in this context is the story, the actors reinforce their relationship with the audience at the expense of their relationship with the narrative.  Fantastic.