Race, Casting, & the Playwright

When I was a junior in high school, I auditioned for The Crucible. I remember walking onto the stage, nervous as usual. I looked at the director and then began. As I tried my best to act out a monologue I'd only read a number of times, I looked up at the director of the play and realized that what I did, didn't actually matter. The director, who was a teacher, wasn't paying any attention to me. When I finished, he finally looked up, thanked me, and said he'd post the final cast list later that day.

I knew I would come back later to look at the cast list, but I also knew my name wouldn't be on it. How could I be cast when the director hadn't even watched me?

What I would figure out later was this: The Crucible has one black female character: Tituba. The girl who was cast as Tituba had auditioned before me. The director didn't look at me because he had already cast the black female role in his mind. He didn't need me, in other words, because I couldn't play anyone else.

This was one of my first lessons in race and theater. Even though the script didn't specifically say that the other characters were white, it was implied by the time period, the location, the history, and the fact that Arthur Miller specified Tituba's race.

(Through a turn of events, I ended up having to take over the role of Ann Putnam when a girl had to drop out. I should mention that this happened after I discussed the issue of being ignored in the audition with another faculty member who, against my wishes, then discussed it with the director. I should mention that the director awkwardly confronted me outside of class one day to apologize.)

In college, I was on several theater boards and sophomore year I found myself having a lot of discussions about race and auditions. One board was having particular difficulty getting people of color to audition for a certain show and it made the board wonder why the number of people of color auditioning was low compared to the number of actors of color on campus.

I looked around the room and realized that I was the only student of color on the board that semester (that would change as the year went on). I spoke up and admitted that when I went in and read a play description, I always made sure to read how the characters were described. I knew going in whether there was a role that specifically called for a black female, a girl of color, or anything in-between. If there wasn't specifically a role for a girl of color, I knew there was a big chance I wouldn't be cast. I knew this in part because no one was begging me to audition for the play with no specific black characters. The board, myself included, only begged actors of color to audition when there were specific roles for them. Why would you want to be a part of a theater that did that? Why would you audition for a play when you felt as though you weren't going to get cast anyway? I was guessing that I wasn't the only one making that connection. Friends of mine came up to me later and said they had never really thought about that before. I said that, being a black female theater major, I thought about it all the time.

Even despite that conversation and everything that came out of it (including open talks on race, casting, and theater), I found myself completely shocked when I was cast the following semester as a Boston detective in the 1950s who was dating an FBI agent. Yes, race wasn't mentioned in the character description, but history told me that the chances of Maggie Pelletier being black were slim to none. I thought I was un-castable because of my race. Instead of the theater putting me in a box, I put myself there. Luckily, the director was awesome and more open-minded than me. Luckily, I auditioned anyway. Thank god I did. It was one of the best acting experiences I ever had.

I am taking you down memory lane because a friend of mine alerted me to an article discussing race and casting in the big, bad, real world late last night and I found myself staying up to write this post in response. Dominique Morisseau writes in Colorblind Casting or Color-Consciousness?:

"...there is an un-spoken rule in the theater that no one is talking about. Character descriptions in plays, which may eventually be shared in casting breakdowns, are coding a tone of racial inequality in the theater. Unless race is specified, we actors of color (yes, I am also one of them) know that we are most-likely not going to be seriously considered for the role, because no racial specification usually translates to “white”."

So my high school and college experiences weren't far off from the real world, which is particularly sad because school has the power to acknowledge/discuss/break free of these trappings. It has the power, and I think the duty, to complicate casting and, if appropriate, talk about it. For example, the 1950s Boston detective character I played dates a FBI agent. I was black. The actor playing my boyfriend was white. While the play wasn't written to tackle interracial relationships in 1950s Boston, our production had the power to discuss it and bring the play to another level. Did we discuss it? Honestly, not really. Maybe during the talkback. Could we have discussed it more? Certainly. But we also didn't need to. It was a comedy. Race didn't change the comedy.

But I, and I am sure other students of color, learned in school that the no race = most likely white lesson earlier on. This is a lesson I spent a lot of time thinking about and it contributed to my decision not to pursue acting after college. Morisseau's post wasn't just interesting to me since it was pointing out this theater reality, but it was also interesting because it pointed out how I as a writer, as a playwright, am in the position to do something about it. She writes:

If you are basing your character off of a woman from a predominately white community, do you have a preference for her race? If so, be unafraid to own that. If your character is white in your mind and that’s what you intend, I don’t think there is any shame in that. We are writing real people, after all. I say, OWN it. Could it not encourage playwrights to be clear and specific about the kind of people they are writing? Distinguish the race of the character. Think about their speech and their dialogue. Is it reflective of a particular cultural rhythm? Or is it intentionally neutral? And if the character is truly not any particular race, try noting your descriptions something like this:

KAREN- Any Race.

I wrote a while ago that the play I am working on doesn't specify race. If I am honest with myself, I know that if a theater gets a hold of this play, chances are the theater will read my characters as white and will cast accordingly. I truly want my play to be open to anyone. So I am considering what Morisseau writes because I think she has a valid point. I think she is right on the money actually. When I write a play that has characters of a specific race/ethnicity, I will be sure to be honest about it. For now though, with the play I am currently working on, I really don't want a student to read my play one day and think that she/he won't be cast in it because she/he is not white (or for a white student to read it and think he/she can't be cast either). No way. I am not contributing to that. Not if I can help it.

Special thanks to Michelle for sending the article my way!