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No Safe Spaces
Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater
By ANGELA C. PAO
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2010
University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-07121-0
Chapter One
Bearing the Weight of Reality The Theatricality of Cross-Racial Corporeal Encounters
In the theatre, one can say, "this is just an act," and de-realize the act, make acting into something quite distinct from what is real.... The various conventions which announce that "this is only a play" allow strict lines to be drawn between the performance and life.... On the street or in the bus, the act [of transvestism] becomes dangerous ... precisely because there are no theatrical conventions to delimit the purely imaginary character of the act, indeed, on the street or in the bus, there is no presumption that the act is distinct from a reality; the disquieting effect of the act is that there are no conventions that facilitate making this separation. -JUDITH BUTLER
The potency of nontraditional casting as a form of social activism, a forum for cultural criticism, and a source of artistic innovation derives from a peculiar situation created by modern realistic and naturalistic acting traditions whereby two more or less fully constituted identities-that of the actor and that of the character-inhabit the same body. In Western dramatic theater, this relationship has been variously construed from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present, but by the turn of the nineteenth century, the tradition of mimetic representation had evolved into a full-fledged commitment to creating the illusion that the actor was no longer simply playing a character but actually becoming that other personage. Konstantin Stanislavsky designated the "embodiment of the role" as one of the key phases in its creation. The first part of the process of embodiment began with "the intellectual creation of an outer image, with the aid of the imagination, the inner eye, ear and so forth." From there the actor went on to transfer the design or "typical lines" of the character's external appearance to his own face and body:
He tries all kinds of ways of dressing his hair, of using his eyebrows; he contracts various muscles of his face and body, tries out various ways of using his eyes, of walking, gesticulating, bowing, shaking hands, moving about. This experiment is carried further with make-up. He will put on a whole series of wigs, paste on all sorts of beards, mustaches, use colored creams to try to find the exact shade of complexion, lines of wrinkles, shadows, highlights, until he stumbles on the thing he is looking for.
If, however, actors trained and working in the realistic tradition are to be judged according to their ability to successfully inscribe another being's history as well as their appearance onto their own bodies, what happens when the racial identity of the actor does not match that of the character as originally conceived? This is a complex question that can only be answered by considering casting as part of the greater semiotic system of theatrical activity-activity that is an artistic, sociocultural, and historic process of creation and communication.
Paradoxes of the Body
The actor is everything in the theatre. We can do without everything in a performance except him. He is the flesh of the show, the spectator's pleasure. He is, irrefutably, presence itself. But capturing him as a function of the signs he produces is not an easy task.... He is the site of all paradoxes. -ANNE UBERSFELD
Traditionally, in the more or less realistic modes of dramatic performance that dominated the Western stage after the Renaissance, the theatrical or performant aspects of the staged production were subordinated to and finally even dissolved into the fictional or diegetic elements. Increasingly, the imaginary universe of the play came to take precedence over the real time and place shared by actors and audience. The conventions of realism and naturalism require that all the elements on stage work with the cooperation of the audience to sustain the mimetic illusion, in which iconic signs refer directly to reality. A comfortable distance must be set up between the performer and the observer as the time and space of the stage is differentiated from that of the auditorium.
As far as the actor-character relationship is concerned, the conventions of realism demand that in the dialogue between the real presence of the actor and the imaginary figure of the character, the voice of the former must be submerged beneath the voice of the latter. In a situation where both actor and character lay claim to the same body, the dramatic actor must appear to cede ownership for the duration of a performance. In modern Western theater, the dramatic actor's methods of preparation and style of performing and the audience's mode of reception always cooperated, until relatively recently, to endorse the ascendancy of the character over the actor. In twentieth- and early twenty-first-century American theater, these are the conventions that have prevailed whether the play is a classical tragedy or comedy, a modern domestic drama, or an American musical. In contrast, antirealistic forms of theater, usually viewed as standing in stark opposition to realistic or naturalistic theater, rely on "the sort of reproduction that declares itself as artificial, fictive and theatrical." There is a deliberate break with mimesis so that instead of referring to a "real" world, signs in antirealistic theater refer to themselves. This is how Fernando de Toro makes the distinction:
One only has to think of Artaud or Brecht. Brechtian theatre is based on theatricality and the reflexive nature of the sign that actually creates itself. The distance effect caused by the characters (imitating but not incarnating, speaking in quotes), by other components of the production (lighting, film projections, etc.), and even by the story structure (fragmented, autonomous scenes) ... inform[s] us that "we are in the theatre." In non-illusionist theatre, what is most real and fundamental is the message and playfulness, and not the referential illusion.
Although actors may still impersonate characters, the success of the performance does not rely on the seamless simulation of a living human being.
Like all artistic innovations, the array of race-conscious approaches to casting promoted since the 1960s necessarily developed within the framework of these preexisting forms and conventions. But taking shape at a moment of historical rupture, they also broke with past practices to introduce a new register of meaning and new enunciative possibilities for all forms of dramatic theater. Nontraditional casting represented a shift in theatrical signification of an order that had last occurred in Anglo-American theater three hundred years earlier, when female parts began being played by female actors. Indeed, the innovations of the mid-twentieth century were even more radical in terms of both the representational and the sociocultural dimensions of performance. As far as the relationship of the fictional or diegetic world to the real world was concerned, the casting of women to play women diminished the distance between representation and reality, thus reinforcing what has been the dominant impulse in Western dramatic theater. In contrast, most forms of nontraditional casting serve to widen those gaps. In the process, in ways that I will discuss below, the actor's corporeality acquired a new significance, and the semiotization of the actor's body advanced in unprecedented ways.
As a sociocultural institution, the theater has always been closely linked to the political aspects of civic, state, and national life, and casting has been a visibly, even notoriously, politicized process. Prior to the inception of nontraditional casting, however, as far as the selection of actors was concerned, ideological forces operated through the patronage of particular companies or the hiring, as opposed to the casting, of individual actors. By the same token, negative pressure was applied through the banishment or proscription of entire troupes and the imprisonment or, in more enlightened times, the firing of individual thespians whose allegiances or opinions offended those in authority. The distribution of roles in individual productions, however, was not in itself instrumental in relaying social values or challenging political positions until nontraditional casting emerged as a concept and a practice. The very idea of a casting schema as a semantic field or an interpretive register for a dramatic text emerged only when the race or ethnicity of the actor became a relevant factor. The casting of dramatic roles, heretofore relegated to the semiotic cellars of theatrical convention or mimetic correspondence, became elevated to the status of an expressive language of the stage.
Nontraditional casting added new codes to the elaborate repertoire of signs produced by the actor's body. Ubersfeld has described the actor as "a human being, whose role, in his own practice, is to create signs, to be transformed (to transform himself into a system of signs)." She goes on to note: "but this transformation cannot be complete," for "there is an unsemanticized remainder." As long as acting companies and casts were composed exclusively of white or Caucasian actors and played to predominantly or entirely white audiences, natural skin color and facial features (as opposed to facial expressions or features altered by makeup or dye) that marked an actor as belonging to a particular race remained among these unsemanticized elements. This situation mirrored the social privilege of white neutrality or invisibility. In continental European theaters, color-blind, cross-cultural, or race-based conceptual casting remained so marginal or foreign that none of the impressive studies of theater semiotics published in Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s even mentions an actor's racial or ethnic characteristics as a source of potential signifiers. Racially diverse casting practices effected the transformation of the formerly transparent physical features commonly used to identify an individual's race into a rich variety of theatrical signs-signs produced conjointly by the director and the actor. This process of transformation was not confined to actors of color but extended to white actors as well. Once endowed with semantic force, the physical and visual racial markers did not just function as discrete signifiers; they instigated a new dialectical relationship with the other signifiers generated by the actor's body and with other signifying systems of the stage-sets, costumes, lighting. Most importantly, nontraditional casting revises the most critical relationship in dramatic traditions-that which exists between the actor and the character-prompting the spectator to exercise new modes of perception and learn new protocols of reception.
Adjustments to the standard actor-character relationship, such as those imposed by nontraditional casting, have a critical impact beyond the way one experiences the actor's performance, because that performance is not just one element among others in the meaning-making system of the realistic or naturalistic stage. More than any other single element, the actor's physical presence on stage controls the production of meaning as his or her body becomes the most arresting point of intersection for visual, auditory, sociocultural, and ideological codes. The full implications of the animating effect of the human presence on stage are vividly summarized by Gay McAuley in her study of theatrical space:
The stage, even when set and lit ready for the performance, will keep the spectators' attention for a very short time if no actors are present, for in the theatre it is the presence of the actors that makes the space meaningful. It is through the body and the person of the actor that all the contributing systems of meaning (visual, vocal, spatial, fictional) are activated, and the actor/performer is without doubt the most important agent in all the signifying processes involved in the performance event.
Without the performer, there can be no theatrical semiosis. Consequently, as Ubersfeld notes, the audience's observation of the actor is its most difficult and most exciting task. Much of the pleasure and fascination of watching a performance comes from seeing how actors resolve the fundamental paradox of the dramatic actor performing in a realistic or naturalistic mode-the contradiction between the presence of the flesh-and-blood performer and the absence of the imaginary character. This live balancing act also maintains the relationship between the real time of the performance and the diegetic time of the dramatic action, the actual space of the auditorium and stage and the fictional location of the play's setting. Forcing spectators to become aware of the concrete materiality of the actor's body rather than leaving them free to focus on the illusion of the character's physical and psychological qualities therefore does not merely require a re-encoding of the signifying functions assigned directly to the actor; any such shift instigates a realignment that traverses the entire semiotic system of a production. This is what happens when nontraditional casting magnifies the effects of the paradoxical relationship between actor and character.
The precise nature and degree of realignment varies according to the textual form of the play (classical forms of tragedy and comedy, realistic domestic drama, antirealistic drama) and the mode of performance associated with each (conventionalized, analogic, deconstructive), variations that will be illustrated in greater detail in chapters 3-6. Equally important are the variations that arise from the specific type of nontraditional casting used. Although all forms of nontraditional casting are commonly spoken of as if they belonged to the same order of theatrical representation, this is not the case. For example, if we consider the four approaches to race and casting originally identified-colorblind, conceptual, cross-cultural, and societal-we find that each type assumes and generates a different relationship between representation and reality.
The ideal of color-blind casting asserts a radical split between the theatrical and the actual, claiming a high degree of autonomy for the representational space of the stage. The audience is asked to accept situations and relationships that generally run counter to actual experience and that contradict or disregard both history and biology. Although few directors actually expect audiences to be truly unaware of an actor's race, we are meant to remain unperturbed by the knowledge that England's kings and queens have all been white when we see black actors playing a Henry or a Richard or an Anne. Similarly, a racially mixed nuclear family in medieval Britain or nineteenth-century Scandinavia should not raise questions or objections of a scientific or sociological nature. What is believed or hoped is that race or ethnicity can in fact be neutralized as a signifying element. An actor's race will undoubtedly be noticed upon her or his entrance as the spectator takes an inventory of the character's or actor's physical attributes; but if the play subsequently fails to draw the audience's attention to the actor's difference, either directly or through allusion, this characteristic blends into the visual landscape of the scenic space. To put it another way, the actors' bodies become "unmarked" in terms of race or ethnicity. This dissolution of markers relies on the audience's capacity to separate the fictional world of the stage from the world of lived experience and to give it precedence over a received body of historical knowledge.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from No Safe Spaces by ANGELA C. PAO Copyright © 2010
by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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