Cultural Casting?
Written by Tony Adams Monday, 03 August 2009 15:19
Not too long ago I saw a show by a new company. It was a script I know very well, but also one that is not produced that often. The script is set in Latin America. While it doesn't specifically stated where, it's pretty hard to miss--all the character names are the Spanish forms (IE Michael would be Miguel, John would be Juan etc.,) among other points in the script.In this particular production it was stripped of that cultural milieu. The cast was entirely white. It was jolting. (for me at least.) Not so much because the color of the actors, but there was definitely something missing. I'm not sure how to describe it--the rhythm and feeling of the play was off as if the Afro-Cuban All Stars were out sick and Michael Buble was subbing.
A while back, I wrote a post just counting the number of reviews for that particular week by male-female ratio. (I've been meaning to get back to that for a while, but time seems to be getting away faster and faster lately.) Around that time a local critic told me they thought having more voices that don’t view minority experience as some brand of exotica would be a good thing, after the critic had walked out of a theatre and overheard “I just felt like I needed to be black to get this show.”
The notion of exotica is something that I always have to be conscious of. With a writer like Nilo Cruz, or Maria Irene Fornes' later works, the way they write about Cuba is how I would wish to paint if I were a painter. I think it's easy to mistake romanticism and the poetic for exoticism. With the work that we do, it's a real danger every time we step on the boards.
I'm always reminded of how Lorca talked about flamenco versus what is put up for tourists in bars. It's very easy if we're not careful to put up something for tourists and not even begin to reach the soul of the cante jondo, as it were.
But, I don't know if it's ever possible to completely get away from that notion of exotica. I know some of our company members that are first generation Americans have an exotic notion of the magic land of their parents, from all the stories they heard as kids. I think we to some extent always view other worlds as exotic. An Moroccan friend in Paris once told me how exotic he thought Iowa was. I think to some extent it is another bias we have to be aware of.
But what happens when you're confronted not with cultural tourism, but with a dearth of cultural signposts?
Early on when talking to Rotimi about A Shroud for Lazarus, I asked him his thoughts on casting. I know many writers have different ideas about it, so I wanted to check in with him before going into auditions. For a play set in Western Africa, did he think it should be a predominantly black cast or an exclusively black cast (or color-blind)? His answer is a close parallel to my own thoughts:
Theatre, as I conceive it, is about consistently making belief, not about literal one-to-one correspondences. I don't think it is logically coherent for me to, on the one hand, expect more colour-blind casting from the big theatres and to see nothing wrong when a black actor plays the king of England in Shakespeare's history plays while, on the other hand, to insist on having only black actors in a play set in an African community.
While taking care to ensure there is a good number of black actors in the play (since they are available in Chicago), the casting should be better if it is principally informed by artistic rather than racial factors, so the cast can come from an assortment of racial backgrounds.
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