Actors, Casting, Race, and Tennessee Williams
by Augustin J Correro
This Blog Post Is Equipped with Three Disclaimers and a Trigger Warning for Everyone’s Safety.
Trigger Warning: This post contains one writer’s ideas regarding theatrical production in regards to race, racial symbolism, and other race-and-ethnicity-centered topics. It centers around casting, concept, and actors.
In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I, there is a ballet in the second act performed by Siamese characters that depicts the story of the “Small House of Uncle Thomas”. The story is adapted by the dancers from Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s 19th century novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The selection of this particular story as is a tribute to the King’s children’s governess Anna, a white English woman. The anti-slavery message is pointed, but in The King and I, as is the case in so many classics, the colonial white savior comes to teach a valuable lesson to the less “evolved” characters. The result is that the message may be delivered in a way that isn’t most effective.
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American Slavery, as explained by Siamese dancers,
as told by Rodgers & Hammerstein |
But what if Anna is a black actor? Does her place as the symbol of the savior-teacher mean something else (something more?) if she’s not white? Can it? Must it?
Examining to another classic, what happens if Romeo and Juliet is cast primarily (or entirely) with Latinx actors? While it can change the meaning of the production, must it? Can it not? Does it have to? Is it different for each audience member?
Theatre makers make several considerations when it comes to casting, play selection, hiring, and staging. Sometimes symbols get lost—especially in classics in which the symbols can easily be taken for granted. As you might have guessed, it’s no different for Tennessee Williams. This essay attempts to scratch the surface of the topics of race and ethnicity in casting and producing the plays of Tennessee Williams.
A conversation has been ignited in New Orleans regarding the place of black bodies in Williams’ plays, and the place of Williams’ plays in a world where the value of black bodies has increased exponentially since the plays were written. I can think of no better setting for this conversation than in New Orleans. Recently, I enjoyed a panel discussion prior to Southern Rep Theatre’s production of Sweet Bird of Youth which explored this topic in detail. A panel of all African-American writers described their connections to the universality of Williams’ work while also negotiating the sensitivities of racially diverse casting and a lack of in-written black characters in classic plays (The panel description can be viewed midway down the page here). While some of the opinions expressed might be unpopular, this writer and theatre-maker agrees that the conversation must be explored. For various reasons, I will not be discussing the symbolism in that specific production of Sweet Bird, but will instead pose several “what-if” scenarios from A Streetcar Named Desire.
First Disclaimer: The White Man Has a Head Start
It is worth stating that white actors have a massive advantage in regards to the availability of roles in theatre, film, and television. This is because the dominant voices in storytelling have been white for centuries in Western Civilization. Naturally, those white storytellers write white characters. The same is generally true for male writers writing stories which primarily concern men. It is something theatre-makers should be conscious of, although there is no one monolithic solution to inequity in opportunity. It’s absolutely true of Tennessee Williams, but rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water and stopping production of Williams altogether, we choose to continue producing Williams plays with this conundrum as a consideration. Ergo, if we wait around for more roles for actors of color to play, the gulf between them and opportunity will only continue to expand, since there’s such a wealth of white writing, and white writers will continue to tell their stories.
Second Disclaimer:
The playwright in question was white. He tried as best as he could figure, as a moneyed white gay man in the mid-1900s, to represent the underrepresented. We therefore assume for the purpose of this essay that any racist ideals he ascribed to were not purposeful or malicious, and that he was not in fact the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. There is evidence of a continually evolving racial and cultural understanding in his published and unpublished writing.
Third Disclaimer:
This writer is also white, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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| Terrence Howard & James Earl Jones in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof |
So How Do We Inject Actors of Color Into Classics?
An oversimplification would be, “you just do”. However, there are some pitfalls when you are faced with two devices: stunt casting and problematic symbolism.
Stunt casting is rarely the actor’s fault. It’s usually a tool by a director or a producer in order to jar audiences into buying tickets. Stunt casting is when an actor is selected not because they’re right or ideal for the role, but because they’re popular, or might be incendiary, or for some other unartistic rationale not rooted in the text. Think of a community theatre production of A Streetcar Named Desire where the local grande dame and president of the Ladies’ Auxiliary at age 45 is selected to play Blanche—or worse, Stella. That’s stunt casting. It’s sin is obliviousness or willfully ignoring the problems it creates.
Symbolism is more nuanced—it’s trickier to sort out when it’s an issue. Sometimes, it’s not. There are plays which don’t use symbolism, in which case, the race of the actors really has no repercussion on the story. Of course, it’s good to be sensitive that the only black character isn’t a villain or a minstrel-type character, or that the only woman isn’t a loose floozy, or that the women don’t talk to one another exclusively about men (see: Bechdel Test, flawed but a point of interest). However, while it’s easy to mistake Williams for a steadfast realist, considering wide-release films and traditional stagings would convince audiences of that misconception, Williams used symbolism. He used symbolism a lot—and often the symbols were bodies onstage.
Problematic symbolism happens when the semiotics are ignored or are socially irresponsible. Semiotics is defined as the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. It is a realm of considerations which must be carefully examined, even if they could be easily overlooked. So: The entire cast is white except for Stanley and the Negro Woman. Even the Mexican woman selling flowers is a white woman (oops!). But then Stanley rapes Blanche, meaning that literally the only black man in the story is a rapist. This is a challenge for the director to work through before making this choice. Here’s why: if there is a dominant social narrative which is supported by the story being told onstage, but which is an unjust narrative, choices should be reconsidered. The dominant social narrative here is that black men are a danger to white women, that they are rapists, ill-bred, crude, and trifling (i.e., they will have sex with you and your pregnant sister, whether you like it or not). Because this is a dominant social narrative for large swaths of the country, the producer either feeds the unjust narrative, or doesnt: it can’t be neither. Stanley as a symbol represents a new world order which is both tender and overpowering, and this gets lost if he literally represents the fear white women have of virile black men.
So Where Does That Leave The Brilliant Actor I Want To Play Stanley?
Do we just not cast this guy because we’re afraid of the implications of a black male body committing rape? Well, no. This is where color-conscious casting comes into play. Color-conscious casting is not the same as color-blind casting. The latter operates on a defunct assumption that race means nothing to anyone, and that there are no implications of different colored bodies in different spaces. It sounds great, but it doesn’t really function. Even if the person casting decides it’s color-blind, that doesn’t mean that the audience or the actors involved share that color-blindness.
Color-conscious casting is much more complex. It’s casting with the understanding that there are implications to the choices as well as a separate, unequal pool of opportunities for actors of color, and choosing to craft and aesthetic and execute a production with that in mind. Again using Streetcar as an example, I am made to recall the 2012 Broadway production directed by Emily Mann starring Blair Underwood and Nicole Ari Parker. While Blanche, Stanley, and Mitch were black, Stella and other members of the cast were of various skin tones and racial and ethnic origins. This meant that Stanley was not the only black body, and that the heroes were not uniformly white.
Blair Underwood and Nicole Ari Parker in A Streetcar Named Desire
Common Producer Complaint: But Actors of Color Just Don’t Come Out!
This is a serious challenge for producers. Even Broadway productions have to make pointed efforts to invite and entice actors of color to show up for auditions. The summit of theatre arts has been long painted out of reach for communities of color, so there’s work to be done.
What should be undone is the snarl of ideas that historical precedent and historical accuracy are valid reasons to bar bodies of color from opportunities.
We as theatre-makers should do as much as we can to see the work of artists of color, whose platforms might not be as prominent as white artists. You may even have to go where black, brown, red, and yellow people are. The next step is to cast who is best for roles, period. From time to time, this may mean casting someone who is talented and right for the role who has a small skills gap. If it means that your director must work more to give an actor of color some additional coaching because he/she/they didn’t get to go to theatre camp each summer, it may be what needs to happen to reflect the community in which you’re presenting the work.
It’s Not All Bad News, Though.
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| LaKesha Glover in Small Craft Warnings. Photo by Ride Hamilton |
At first sight, this would imply that no Asian-American ever has been cast in any iconic Williams role. Upon reading the article, it’s only about Maggie Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Either way, it’s a step in the right direction. TWTC’s production of The Rose Tattoo Featured an actor of Thai descent as Serafina Delle Rose in 2016. In 2015, Small Craft Warnings featured two African-American actors in roles almost exclusively ever played by white actors: they were messy characters, but they were situated in a room full of otherwise messy characters (i.e., the full burden of being violent, loud, and flawed didn’t fall summarily on the backs of the black folk).
People are symbols in Williams. There’s a responsibility that comes with storytelling and wielding symbols. Race and color do carry meaning. These three facts are intertwined, and should be handled with same same care as any other aspect of a production.
In summary, if we expect plays by Williams to be exalted in the same way as plays by Shakespeare, which I think they deserve, the doors to a multicultural society of actors, designers, and storytellers must be open so that they can lay hands on his plays. Williams’ plays are American. Now America is changed—the lens through which we view her playwright’s theatre must be checked and adjusted from time to time.
