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Colorblind bastion main12/20/2023 ![]() ![]() The stuff that dreams are made of." Until we are certain that dreams from every segment of society are getting their hour upon the stage, Schreiber can stick to playing Iago. LaBute wants colorblind casting to be "a two-way street," and he finishes by writing, "All I'm asking is that you let the theatre, that last bastion of illusion.remain exactly that. We haven't progressed quite as far as the playwright would like to think. An African-American man, for example, has a better chance of going to prison than to a four-year college funding for arts education in the inner city lags far behind that in the suburbs and whites get a disproportionate share of the roles in theatre, film, and television. What he stubbornly refuses to acknowledge is that American history will never be collective as long as its aftereffects are played out unequally in the present. There is something unsettling about LaBute-a writer whose work is frequently produced and almost always employs white actors-suggesting that racism is merely a perception ("Color is going to remain the great dividing line as long as we allow it to be") and that our stories are interchangeable ("Today we should embrace the idea of a collective history and speed off into the future holding hands"). But writers of color still find it difficult to get their work produced in the theatre, particularly in New York, and as a consequence the actors on Broadway and Off-Broadway stages remain largely white. It is easy to get complacent with Radio Golf up and running, Audra McDonald drawing raves in 110 in the Shade, The Color Purple eclipsing the 600-show mark, and Usher wowing audiences in Chicago earlier in the season. ![]() More important, LaBute willfully ignores the central problem that colorblind casting has been trying to address by increasing access to acting jobs for people who historically have been barred from them, intentionally or otherwise. However, for LaBute to casually state that white actors could tackle Wilson's plays on the African-American experience is to express a profound disregard for the substance of the work. Where race and ethnicity are not integral to theme, the parts should go to the best actors available-though we would hope Latino and Asian actors would be strongly considered for those roles. This is not to suggest that an actor such as Carol Lawrence shouldn't play Maria in West Side Story or Jonathan Pryce should be barred from playing the Engineer in Miss Saigon. ![]() However, an all-black production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (scheduled for Broadway in 2008) could be a revelation, because its themes of patriarchy, class, and closeted homosexuality might assume a greater weight when played out within the context of an African-American family. With an all-white cast, A Raisin in the Sun would become just another story about the working class and the American dream, ground already well-covered by Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller. While it is imperative that the cultural world keep itself free from political correctness to remain creatively fertile, LaBute is mistaken in his assumption that, artistically speaking, race is a fungible element in every play. "For most white actors today, roles of color-from the classics to some of the sensational writing that is currently being done for the theatre-are not even an option for them, and I'm not sure why," he writes. In a May 6 article in the Los Angeles Times, he wonders why colorblind casting is not an equal transaction, why Denzel Washington can play Brutus but Liev Schreiber cannot play Othello, or why an all-white version of A Raisin in the Sun could never go forward. Playwright and screenwriter Neil LaBute has taken a different view, suggesting in a recent essay that history is a prison from which people must escape, particularly those who work in the theatre. In Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jamie Tyrone declares, "There is no present or future-only the past happening over and over again-now." In August Wilson's Radio Golf, an African-American mayoral candidate struggles with the compromises of assimilation and gentrification and what they portend for black heritage and black identity. Two plays currently on Broadway wrestle with the influence of the past on the present, and each asserts that the former can no more be excised from the latter than a drop of ink can be extracted from a bottle of milk. ![]()
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