<p>I was a working professional when NTC started to make inroads. I was one of the early supporters, and I assume that there are still letters from me hidden in files in the vaults of many theaters and the Actor's Equity office in New York. The issue then, as it is now, is that ethnic actors had a huge struggle to succeed because there were so few roles specifically written for them. If we didn't open up Shakespeare, Restoration Comedy, and the like to ethnic actors, they would find it nearly impossible to make a living.</p>
<p>Now, I'm going to switch topics for just a minute before coming back. I promise it's relevant (or at least I think it is).</p>
<p>I once had a director who told an amusing story about himself. He was directing a play (the title escapes me) in the university in which he worked, and he needed some junk to litter the stage. So, he went to storage and found a lot of stuff. One thing he found was a large cross, which he placed on the stage propped up at an angle for no particular reason except that it looked pretty good that way. Opening night came and the curtain went up and closed. The young director greeted people backstage afterwards, and the first thing someone said was, "I really enjoyed the show. But I spent the whole time wondering how to tie in the symbolism of the cross. What was that about?" When the young director told the man that it meant nothing at all, the man was incensed. He had been deceived and sent on a fool's errand to extract meaning from the meaningless.</p>
<p>Symbolism matters, and in some cases, the color of someone's skin is a symbol. Let's take a concrete example. Say I'm doing Othello. Like most of Shakespeare's great plays, Othello has many themes. A director can choose to emphasize or deemphasize those themes as she chooses by the way she cuts the script, the staging, the shape of the scenes, the concept, etc. I suppose it's possible that a director could decide to excise all references to race, but that would gut the play. Othello, on a very deep level, is about mistreatment of a blackamoor. His actions and motivations make most sense in light of what we know or infer about the many slights visited upon him because of his race.</p>
<p>Now, if you cast a white man as Othello, what happens to the play? If you want to cast Othello as white and everyone else as black, that might be interesting and useful. But what about a white Othello, a black Cassio, and a white Des. What would I make of all those lines referring to Othello's blackness? What would it mean that the white Othello is insanely jealous over Des's attraction to a black man? I would spend my whole time wondering what that leaning cross on stage was meant to mean. And if the NTC in a play that is mostly ABOUT race is just some whim of color-blindness on the part of the director, I'm going to be ticked for being put through the intellectual exercise of trying to figure out what something means, when it means nothing.</p>
<p>I see theater everywhere. If I stop at some motel on a long car trip and there's community or college or high school theater going on, I'm going to go. Some of what I see is amateurish, of course, but I love that stuff! What I hate is when a devotion to NTC turns a play incomprehensible, or even ugly. For instance, I saw a production of Little Shop where the entire cast was white. It was an area of the country where it must be very hard to find any African Americans at all, let alone ones who act and sing. In this case, the white women did the AA dialect in the script. It was rather uncomfortable, and came off as racist. </p>
<p>So, as you can see, the point I'm trying to make is that, in those cases where an actor's race must be interpreted as symbolic, NTC had better tie in to the concept and there had better be meaning in the casting or the audience will be deceived. It is also imperative that it not come off as mocking in any way.</p>
<p>Theater professionals are in the business of illusion. Illusions work only so long as the audience suspends disbelief. It is not difficult to suspend disbelief by casting an AA Viola, Menelaus, or Nora. There's nothing in those plays that has anything to do with race (that I recall). But if a play has racial conflict as its theme, NTC becomes symbolic, and that changes the meaning of the play. One must be very careful with that.</p>
<p>[Note: It just occurred to me that it might be quite interesting to cast Shylock and his daughter as African Americans. Since the play is about discrimination, that choice might increase the power of the main point of the play. For "Fiddler," I could see casting the entire family as AA for the same reason.]</p>