Non-traditional Casting
By Jack Marshall
That Championship Season,
when it played on Broadway in 1972, was about five white,
middle aged men in the Lackawanna Valley of Pennsylvania.
This was where Jason Miller grew up. In transferring the
drama to Alabama and casting the play with African
American actors, The American Century Theater and director
Ed Bishop are to some extent changing the author's intent
and veering from the company's usual production practice
of trying to stay as close to the spirit of the original
show as possible. This is the still-controversial realm of
non-traditional casting, and
That Championship Season
is an excellent case study of the practice.
First, let's get our terms straight. "Non-traditional
casting" is not the same as "color-blind casting," though
it is frequently used to describe the practice of casting
without any regard to race and sometimes gender, age, and
physical disability. The latter practice, illustrated
locally by the Arena Stage's provocative revival of
Our Town
and on Broadway with the revival of
Carousel,
often becomes a case of sacrificing the audience's
enjoyment and understanding of a show to political
objectives. When siblings are presented as belonging to
different races in a 19th
Century New England town, it is likely to create confusion
and distraction that are impediments to telling the
playwright's story.
The common argument defending color-blind casting, that
audiences "get used to it" over the course of the evening,
is no argument at all. Audiences will "get used to" a too
cold theater, a rickety set or an actor's annoying
mannerisms too, but that doesn't mean that they are good
features to have, or that there is a justification for
making ticket-buyers endure them.
The primary objective served by color-blind and
gender-blind casting is to increase employment
opportunities for groups of actors who are historically
under-represented among the characters of major stage
works. When that can be accomplished without undermining
the script, it is laudable, but this is more likely to be
the case when the race or gender of the original character
is irrelevant to the story. Charley, Willy Loman's
soft-touch neighbor in
Death of a Salesman, could be cast with a black
actor and there would be no resulting confusion. Charley
could be black; he just wasn't written that way. But
casting Biff, Willy's oldest son, with a black actor would
be confusing and suggests a back-story to Miller's play
that would be a distraction. A
black
actor would have to play Biff as a
white
man, a too-difficult assignment. But playing him as a
black man in a white-bread '50s house-hold makes no sense.
Sometimes non-traditional casting can run afoul of
copyright laws. U.S. copyright laws give the playwright
ownership of all "derivative works" arising from his or
her creation. Thus the all-female version of Neil Simon's
The Odd Couple
was, in effect, a different play derived from his original
hit; only Simon could do it, because it substantively
changed the original play and its characters. A female
version of
That Championship Season
would require substantial re-writing and require
permission from Miller's estate or license-holder, even
though women's basketball is common enough at high schools
and college to make such a production conceivable.
This version of
That Championship Season was not significantly
changed, with the exception of a change in local and the
alteration of few ethnic and racial references. Still,
African-Americans have not been cast to portray white men.
The championship high school team in this production was
an all-black team, and they live in a community with a
substantial African-American population, unlike the
Lackawanna Valley. This cast turns the play into a drama
about the reunion of a black high school team, twenty
years after its life-altering triumph, in a Southern town.
Is that fair to Jason Miller's work?
One could argue that it's a
gift
to the work. If Miller's play proves versatile and
successful with a different kind of cast than it
traditionally employs, then it becomes accessible to more
companies, artists and communities. Its chances of
survival and lasting popularity have been increased. But
is it a
legitimate
change, one that does not overstep the director's artistic
right to interpret a playwright's vision?
Answering this question requires an answer to a different
one, and the inquiry must be an honest. I once saw a
production of Gilbert and Sullivan's
H.M.S. Pinafore
in which the Captain, a character who rejects his
daughter's choice of a sailor as the love of her life
because he is "beneath her station," was played by a
terrific black baritone. Now,
Pinafore is a satire on the British class system
in Victorian times; a black captain who was a class snob
simply didn't and couldn't exist during the show's
required time period.. But
H.M.S. Pinafore
is an absurd comedy and musical entertainment; the class
issues are simply a plot device, and one that hasn't had
much connection to the real world in decades. The famous
trick resolution of the story, in which a nurse reveals
that the Captain and the lowly sailor were switched as
infants, so the Captain is really the sailor and
vice-versa, was always ridiculous (the Captain is about
twenty years older than the sailor), and simply more so
when the Captain was black and the sailor was white. The
operetta's objective---to be funny, fun, and musically
enjoyable---was not impeded and quite possibly enhanced by
the non-traditional casting. But musical theater is an
easier case: look at opera, where black divas are
routinely cast as "Carmen." What counts isn't "Does she
look Spanish?" but rather "How well can she sing the
part?" A non-musical drama, however, may be less
forgiving. Thus the key questions are what the objective
of the work really is, and whether non-traditional casting
help it, undermine it, or make no difference at all.
That Championship Season
is a VietNam era play; in many respects, it is the epitome
of a VietNam era play. It premiered in 1972, at a tense
time in the public debate over the war. As anti-war
candidate George McGovern headed to a landslide defeat by
President Richard Nixon, many Americans felt that the
country had lost its way. The World War II generation was
living on the memory of its past triumph, a predominant
theory held, while the intervening years had eroded its
values and idealism. 1972 was still in a hang-over (or LSD
flashback?) from the deep Sixties; the graduating college
classes of that year had seen sit-ins, campus strikes,
riots, protests and violence. The feeling lingered that
anyone over the age of 30 (the "heroes" of
That Championship Season
are all over 35) was corrupt and couldn't be trusted.
Miller's characters and script reflect all of this. His
aging basketball team is a stand-in for the country as a
whole; its trophy the reputation and ideals of the past
that are being tarnished with each passing year.
An all-black team communicates this as clearly as an
all-white team. The metaphor survives. Moreover, the
casting choice makes the play universal; it clarifies
Miller's point by eliminating any chance that he intended
to comment on the
ennui
and desperation of struggling Pennsylvania mining town. It
is a play about America, not Pennsylvania.
But it is also a play about bigotry. The strongest
objection to the non-traditional casting of the American
Century Theater production is that the bigoted and hateful
comments against Jews and blacks now come from a Coach who
is black himself, rather than the red-necked white coach
originally played by Charles Durning. Isn't this a
distortion? In the view of Ed Bishop, it is not.
In 1972 the Civil Rights movement was still teetering on
the edge of violence; calling attention to the casual
racism of Middle America was still vibrant theme in
American drama and film. Today, there is a greater
understanding that all forms of hatred can infect any
group. Bishop strongly believes that it is important to
show that African Americans, as Americans, are fully
capable of the same habits and conduct incubated by our
culture. Again, the message is more powerful if it is more
universal.
That Championship Season is an ideal play for a
non-traditional casting approach, which is why the
American Century Theater decided that it was fair to both
play and playwright. The perplexing challenges of
non-traditional casting for artists and audiences
continue, however. New York City's Non-Traditional Casting
Project continues to take the lead in exploring and
encouraging the practice, and its web site (www.ntcp.org) provides a wealth
of information on the topic. Among the many provocative
essays on the organization's site is one by theater critic
Jeremy Gerard, writing in 1994. He concludes,
Mixing up race and gender have long been tools used
effectively by politically-oriented directors, and some of
the theater-going experiences that still stand out in my
memory -- Gloria Foster's Mother Courage, Morgan Freeman's
Coriolanus, Raul Julia's Petruchio, Diane Venora's Hamlet,
to name just four from the Papp legacy -- were
electrifying precisely because of the way race and gender
were employed to force an audience to view a familiar work
in a completely new social context.
It goes without saying that we are still a long way
from a theater in which talent prevails over other casting
considerations, particularly in the mainstream. But in
those places where non-traditional casting, and especially
colorblind casting, has long been established, audiences
and critics alike are confronted with an interesting
challenge. For if we suspend disbelief on matters of race
and gender, we risk willfully ignoring a key point of a
production. But if such casting prompts us to wonder about
the political implications of a production, we must do so
by putting aside the very notion of non-traditional
casting. It's a dilemma I haven't fully worked out, and
one I suspect stymies many of my colleagues as well.
The test, in the final analysis, is whether or not
non-traditional casting results in good art as well as a
memorable theater experience. And that will always be
affected most by the power of what is on the page as well
as the talents of those on the stage.
~ Originally published in 2007 in the
Audience Guide
for TACT's production of
That Championship Season.
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