Equal Opportunity Casting

This started when my friends, who know that I come from an arts school, constantly asked me why I'm not active with the arts here. I finally opened up to share with some of them my thoughts and they told me I wasn't crazy nor unreasonable (thank you for that), and inspired me to write an editorial which I hope to publish in the school newspaper, and share with the theater folks here. Then I found out that there have been many others who have also thought about this issue for a long time, and that I am not the first nor am I alone. I love theater with all my heart, and this is an issue dearly important to me. I wanted to share the most updated draft of this op-ed with you, and if you had any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks,
Jason

1/13/08 Update: THANK YOU SO MUCH EVERYONE! for your support, ideas, criticisms, love, and corrections. I feel like each draft has truly become more meaningful and thoughtful than the last, and I hope you do too. Please feel free to continue sending me feedback, criticisms, ideas, etc. through either of my two email addresses: jjwong@fas.harvard.edu or jwong.ofcounsel@gmail.com or through the comments section.

1/13/08 Update: I was emailed this evening by the President of the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club!! She wants to meet and discuss the op-ed's concerns. I will continue to send updates, and I hope that one or two people will accompany me because honestly the changes proposed are definitely meant to embody diverse interests, not just my point of view. Keep sending suggestions and ideas, and I will do my best to present them! If you are available to meet, email me your cell phone number, so I can let you know of the time and place!! Thanks again! This is a really positive sign.

1/14/08 Update: We have continued our discussion and decided to initially meet alone regarding the editorial. However, it seems clear that from this we can initiate processes that will allow for everyone interested to voice their opinion and be involved in this issue. Please, continue sending contact information if you're interested. This is an amazing opportunity for some positive change. I hope you won't let it die out. I'll continue keeping you informed. Keep in touch!

1/15/08 Update: I met with the Prez today for three hours! It was fairly productive. We had quite the discussion over the root causes of underrepresentation, silly hobbits (just testing you!), HRDC responsibility, next steps, etc. Even though we had a few disagreements, we found many areas of common ground and my impression is that she is genuinely interested in seeing this issue through, and doing what she can in her role so that we may start taking some meaningful action and sooner or later start seeing some meaningful results. I'm actually really impressed with her concern and dedication for this issue. I honestly think this is the beginning of an opportunity for many members of the community to start actively participating in discussions and actions that increase minority representation on stage. I talked with Jimmy (the former president of AAA), and we are hoping on having a meeting of interested Asian Americans/Asians who are interested in this issue over intersession, around the 24th. We will talk begin to initiate talks with the board of AAA about this. If you're interested please email me! We'll keep you updated on the details. We'd also like to get in touch with BlackCAST, compania del teatro bilingue, etc. to start the ground work on coalition building and community representation. This is a really important time right now in community organizing, and in pro-actively working with the HRDC to commit to a more multicultural Harvard theater community. Definitely help if you can, either in submitting ideas over the email which we can represent, in showing up for meetings in person, in involving other affected groups, etc.!

Equal Opportunity Casting

Note: In this article I reference Oh Dad, Poor Dad and The Mikado as an example of a pattern of productions at Harvard. The mention is not intended to single out various plays, but instead to make a point in general about Harvard theater.

This past fall, the New College Theater celebrated its grand re-opening with an excellent production of the hilariously absurd play, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad. However, two very important things were missing: 1) the presence of minorities, and 2) awareness of this absence. Unfortunately, the audience and production staff were oblivious to this lack of minority representation.

That Harvard-affiliated and -subsidized productions should better represent the diversity of its student body is a no-brainer. That there is little movement toward this goal, and also a history of homogeneity in Harvard’s theater community, is a cause of concern for all of Harvard’s artists, activists, and students. Too few conceive of ethnic leads in major productions, and too few wonder why minorities are conspicuously absent from the main stage.

Minorities make up nearly half of the Harvard population. Yet minority actors, directors, producers, and techies are few and far between. When you go to watch Harvard productions, can you find more than a handful of active minority actors—apart from those who participate in productions that are inherently ethnic or are produced by ethnic organizations, such as BlackCAST or Bodas de Sangre? Certain ethnicities, particularly Asian and Middle Eastern ethnicities, are nearly absent in key Harvard productions. Where are these underrepresented minorities onstage in productions, or even on the HRDC board, or in the Office of the Arts?

No one goes to a theatrical production expecting that 21% of the cast should mirror the Asian student population proportionately; or that at Harvard a cast that is 40% minority is representative of the larger student population. At the same time, it is unfortunate that no one expects to go to a production to see ethnicities play roles in productions that were written in an era that Caucasians predominated.

No one can blame a producer, director, or casting director for looking at a quintessentially American role like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman and visualizing a white actor. Even though Willy Loman’s character encompasses all people and ethnicities who struggle to achieve the American Dream, theatrical representations of this play predominantly utilize white actors. However, is there any reason Willy Loman cannot be played by an African-, Asian-, or Latino-American, or by a representative of one of the many other groups of people who also struggle with the American Dream?

There are none; because in fact the American Dream is inherently multicultural and involves people of different ethnicities. But no one at Harvard openly discusses this, and we’re used to reading and watching shows written by Miller, Kopit, et al. and imagining only white actors in these productions. People need to start imagining these plays and storylines encompassing a broader range of people and experiences, rather than limiting them to the monochromatic theatrical productions they are currently stuck in.

The problem is that no one is questioning why we have an obsession with white actors, especially in this day and age. Casts of various plays can be taken from the pre-Civil Rights era and planted on today’s stages and no one would even know the difference. For example, it is almost taken for granted that the major roles of Jonathan and Rosalie in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, will be cast white. Many people may believe that the plays worth producing are written for white actors, but this line of thought leaves little room for actors from other ethnicities to find roles that are not a stereotype of their ethnic appearance and/or are not minor roles. Furthermore, this line of thought does not explain why inherently Asian roles in productions such as The Mikado are played by white actors, even though the characters are supposedly Japanese.

For whatever reason, we almost seem to reject ethnic talent automatically, and we miss key opportunities to expose theater-going audiences to the modern multicultural experience.

Of course, the idea of “color-blind” casting is a controversial one in the larger theatrical world; many question whether or not ethnicities can be successfully merged with their white counterparts in theatrical productions. August Wilson argued that ethnic experiences are distinct and unique, and therefore could not be intermingled. His opposite, Robert Brustein, argued that they could when he stated that “theater works best as a unifying rather than a segregating medium.” At Harvard this discussion should be happening publicly, regardless of which side of the debate you are on. Activists on both sides should be promoting, and producing, theatrical performances that represent their beliefs with actors of all ethnicities. But they aren’t. If this discussion is taking place at all, it is not taking place in a public forum, much less in theatrical performances here. The theater scene still does not involve nearly the number of minorities that it should, whether in ethnic-oriented productions, or in “color-blind” productions.

Because of my experience in theater, I am a firm supporter of “color-blind” performances. The question ultimately arises: if we cast ethnic actors in major roles, will the quality of our productions be the same as they would without ethnic actors? No, these productions won’t have the same quality. Nor should they, because these productions will finally embrace and acknowledge the diversity of our society. Productions will evolve to become more inclusive, and more meaningful to a multicultural society than they would be if we maintained the status quo.

At my arts high school, productions are naturally nontraditionally cast. For example, it was determined in high school that an African American actor should play Dennis Shepard in The Laramie Project, the father of a gay student (Matthew Shepard) who was killed in a hate crime. He was cast because his performance and talents merited such an important role. He brought the entire audience to tears, every time. Audiences would not have had that chance to see him were the director to limit himself to the idea that Dennis Shepard should be a white character. Coincidentally, even though I am Chinese, I played a redneck farmer and a homophobic priest among other roles in that same play. The casts for all our performances were full of such examples. No one thought anything of the ethnicity of the actor who played the role, only that he or she played it well.

A few Freshman Urban Program colleagues pointed out to me in an email that we should recognize organizations such as BlackCAST, compania del teatro bilingue, and Student Theater Advancing Growth and Empowerment (STAGE) for attempting to encourage theater participation by people who have traditionally never had the opportunity to be involved. We should definitely recognize their Herculean efforts to diversify the talent pool not only at Harvard but in high schools all over the Boston area. But their efforts alone are not enough. We need to call for broader diversification in mainstream Harvard productions before the dream of multiculturalism can be truly said to have arrived.

In places where diversity has a history of being conspicuously absent, we need to determine whether or not we really do have monochromatic preferences, and then determine that we will not be limited by our predilections toward actors of one type. By this I mean we need to open up our minds, and stages, to the idea of ethnic leads in traditionally white roles. Other solutions include creating ethnically conscious productions, and using ethnicity in creative ways: Patrick Stewart famously reversed the colors in his production of Othello a few years ago in Washington D.C. We simply must not just sit around, do nothing and allow the current state of affairs to persist.

Isn’t theater, after all, supposed to challenge society, the human condition, and traditionally held beliefs through art?

At some point, one wonders when the status quo will ever change to better represent our increasingly diverse society. It won’t change until we consciously will ourselves to confront this issue, today. If we wait, more decades might pass before we recognize that this may be a racial and equal opportunity issue. We cannot wait for a better time than now to challenge ourselves to consider imagining an African American, or an Asian, or a Latino, in major American roles such as Willy, or Rosalie, or Jonathan. Only when we, as actors, directors, casting directors, critics, producers and audience members, open up to the idea of such a possibility will ethnic actors truly be given an equal chance to perform in those roles.

Many of us, of all colors and stripes, are waiting for that day to come.

Jason Wong, a sophomore in Quincy House, played Jonathan in “Oh Dad, Poor Dad” in high school and graduated with honors from the Drama Department at San Francisco School of the Arts. He is also a California State Arts Scholar in the Dramatic Arts.