OK, it takes some girding of me’ loins to jump into this stuff.. you know theater, representation, diversity, inclusion and all that jazz. But these articles have a cumulative affect on me that prompts…
A BLOG
“Who Can Play the King?”
The New York Times asks.. as if the question wasn’t entirely rhetorical. But, the question is not about representation.. and it’s not being directed at the people who may venture to answer it, even with the looming shadow of social justice warriors itching to press the arrow thingy on Twitter.
Instead, the question lies in a morass of entitlement, fear, greed, preciousness, self absorption and the nonsensical current state of the art.
The sane answer to “Who Can Play the King?” is whoever the fuck gets cast. Like anybody who a director and producer and theater company wants to throw up there on their stage.
Perhaps another sane answer is who the fuck cares as long as they’re good.
But, of course, those are not the right answers.
With the current vivisection of identity, we must clumsily throw into the mix outward signs of physical disability, race, gender, sexuality and God knows what else and start there.
Why are we starting there?
Now that’s a much better question.
And the answer to that question from the fearless may be…we have to start there because we may get piled on mostly by people who won’t see our show in the first place, but go on social media with a lazy sense of life and give us nonstop shit that’s mostly based in contempt.
Now, I think it’s a great idea to cast a black woman or a dude with radial dysplasia as Richard III. Or a white guy who may not have any outward signs of disability whatsoever, but may have PTSD, BiPolar disorder or dyslexia or whatevs… but I would assume he’d have to fess that up in press releases.
But, the premise of of asking this question .. who can play the king.. isn’t based on who can play the king.
It’s who can’t.
Tom Hanks recently said that today he would, correctly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in the film “Philadelphia,” which he starred in with Denzel Washington.
Correctly?
Now there are questions about who should play gay characters (Tom Hanks recently told The New York Times Magazine that today he would, rightly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in his Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film “Philadelphia”) or transgender characters (Eddie Redmayne said last year that it had been a “mistake” to play a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl”) or characters of different ethnicities and religions. (Bradley Cooper faced criticism this year for using a prosthetic nose to play the Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic.)
Gregory Doran, who was until recently the Royal Shakespeare’s artistic director, told The Times of London earlier this year that having actors pretend to be disabled to play “Richard III” would “probably not be acceptable” these days
Acting is pretending. That’s literally what acting is….
So, the upshot of this is you gotta be gay to play gay, and logically you should have AIDS and be a lawyer to play a lawyer with AIDS, and, in the case of Richard III have scoliosis of the spine, not any garden variety disability.
That is indeed the argument that’s being presented. And, of course, it’s not only completely illogical and insane, it’s evolved into some sort of moral edict that always has a “right” and a “wrong”…
Usually the wrong is a cisgendered white dude. Let’s face it. Or possibly a Karen… an innocuousbutnotreally pejorative.
And that, my friends, is based on the mistaken notion that white men work more. But based on representation in AEA…in terms of sheer numbers, the union is clogged with white dudes who on average don’t work as much as their minority counterparts.. which is not saying there shouldn’t be more opportunities for all. Women of any background don’t work as much as men.
Anyway, opportunity is a slippery slope.. and that should be part of the conversation. But no one wants to suit up..
I still wonder why? I guess that’s another question…
In 2016, while accepting an Emmy for his turn as a transgender character in “Transparent,” Jeffrey Tambor said that he hoped to be “the last cisgender male to play a transgender female.” Now, with a “Transparent” stage musical being created in Los Angeles, its creator, Joey Soloway, vowed in an interview: “No trans person should be played by a cis person. Zero tolerance.”
Since 2016 Tambor has been rather idle…
I think one of the motivations behind the fervent push for the “rethinking of cultural norms around identity, representation, diversity, opportunity” yada yada is the notion that somehow artists are doing their part to change society.. you know, somehow that’s gonna do the trick. We’re going to change the world!
Joey Soloway’s “zero tolerance” remark. Throw down!
There are more anti-trans bills in legislatures around the country than ever before. There are more anti LGBTQ bills now.. the Supreme Court has put gay marriage on the old Clarence chopping block. Violence has increased against the LGBTQ community in the last few years as well. Oh, and abortion is illegal now federally.
So, the threats of “zero tolerance” in a musical just don’t seem to be landing. Things have gotten worse, way worse and not better all the way around.
Soloway’s statement sounds sorta fascist to me honestly. It’s full of that sound and fury thing and signifying nothing. Geez I hope that resonates. Anyway…
But it will fire up the thumbs on social media… while simultaneously protections are shitting the bed.
Perhaps some different crafting is in order, while the very people who are supposedly being advocated for are being dehumanized in real life and not on a set.
The artistic bubble gets ever thicker, and less relevant… while the backlash obviously gets stronger.
I read an article in Buzzfeed recently.. one that just popped up in my sosh… that listed the wrongs done to actors who didn’t get cast for a variety of reasons.. height, weight, ethnicity, not sexy, sorta ugly, etc. and looked to blame producers I guess and portray the actors all as victims.. famous victims at that who survived the trauma. Somehow I couldn’t muster much sympathy…
I came upon the intersection of all the crazy today as fate would have it when I read this article:
A “Bridgerton” musical was hatched on Tik Tok .. ostensibly for fun. It then turned into a thing.. like a real musical that was being performed under the guise of charity at first.. you know a benefit for actors sidelined by the pandemic.
OK.. cool. Then the writers signed with CAA and their Bridgerton musical was just performed at the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra and stars and such.
For big ticket prices. To a sold out house.
But the ladies who wrote it never bothered to get the rights from Netflix for adapting their work, after repeated attempts by the streaming service to arrange a deal.
So, they were stealing. And took the money.. and took someone else’s work to call their own. Because they could? Because they’re them? Because they’re kinda cute?
I know from experience writers can’t move their work forward without proof of ownership… how the fuck did this happen? It leads me to think identity politics and entitlement have seeped into revered artistic institutions .. which may sound familiar if you’ve been alive for the last 5 years…
Here’s the complaint.. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22123651-netflix-v-barlow
“The essential nature of art is freedom,” said the Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, whose many credits include Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” though Mr. Abraham is not Jewish. “Once we impose any kind of control over it, it’s no longer free.”
Evidently Mr. Abraham is not Jewish, perhaps we should ignore what he has to say
The biggest casualty of the absurd fixation on identity politics in theater today is not only freedom to create, but empathy. It’s evaporating from the creative side and tragically from the audience. Theater can’t exist without empathy… unless these peeps just want to watch their own shows.
“A hundred years from now, do I hope white actors could play Othello?” said Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director. “Sure, because it would mean racism wasn’t the explosive issue it is now.”
Now that fascinated me.. coming from Oskar. Oskar is a great, brilliant thinker and an all around mensch.
There are two things that struck me about what he said.. the first is he, of course, contributed to the racial divide .. the Public’s goal was to “decentralize whiteness” in their production of “The Visitor” and they just played identity politics volleyball for weeks trying to figure out what to do with the controversy surrounding their show.. mostly trying to appease actors. And not writers or creators. In my opinion, a big mistake. But, at the end of the day trying to save their institution from itself it seems to me.
But what sorta gave me hope is it’s clear Oskar is looking for a way out of the crazy… if there’s a God it won’t take a hundred years.
Maybe it will, who knows? But, maybe now is the time to see a show and suspend our disbelief and turn off our virtue signal and righteous indignation and all of that bullshit and simply, let art be.
Robert DuSold 
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