The Nature Of Acting
No student of color should "be forced to leave behind their racial/ethnic identity when playing a role," said the Juilliard drama students -- totally missing the nature of acting.

The quote is from a Graham Daseler piece at Quillette about the woke silliness infusing acting these days along skin color and cultural lines:

A few years ago, I wrote an article about authenticity in acting. The inspiration for the piece came from actor Jeffrey Tambor, who was then playing the lead in the show Transparent. As he collected an Emmy for Outstanding Lead in a Comedy series, Tambor told the audience at LA's Microsoft Theater, "I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a female transgender on television." While I could see that Tambor's heart was in the right place, I didn't much care for his logic, which appeared to have both preposterous and ugly implications:

The natural corollary of Tambor's Emmy-night thought experiment, in which all future transgender parts are played by transgender performers, would be a world in which actors cease acting and, instead, are chosen based on a single genetically acquired characteristic. Would we really insist that all homosexual parts be played by homosexual performers, all heterosexuals by heterosexuals, all Jews by Jews, all blondes by blondes, all left-handed people by left-handed people, and on down the list of attributes given us at birth?

I blathered on a bit about the great performances that would be lost to us in such a world--Ian McKellen's Richard III, Hillary Swank's Brandon Teena, Philip Seymour Hoffman's Truman Capote--but I more or less felt that I'd made my point in that last sentence. The idea that actors should be defined by their race, gender, or sexual orientation rather than by their abilities seemed so blatantly bigoted that I didn't feel it needed further explanation.

...Colorblind casting is precisely what it sounds like--the practice of filling roles in a play or film regardless of skin color. Dev Patel's performance in The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) is one of many examples. Though Patel is of Gujarati heritage, he was cast as the titular hero of the film, an Englishman born in 19th-century Suffolk. Colorblind casting--or non-traditional casting, as it's sometimes called--has been around for more than a century. In the early 20th century, the Lincoln Theater in Harlem put on numerous colorblind productions, including stage adaptations of The Count of Monte Cristo and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

But the practice didn't become commonplace until the 1970s, when actors of color began gaining greater visibility on the stage and the screen. Colorblind casting was seen as a way for nonwhite actors to essay the great theatrical parts--Hamlet, Nora Helmer, Uncle Vanya, Lady Bracknell, Willy Loman, Blanche DuBois, and others--that had been denied them in the past. Eventually, it bled into cinema, as well. In 1993, Denzel Washington played Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon in Kenneth Branagh's luminous screen adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. More recently, Adrian Lester (who is black) and Gemma Chan (who is of Chinese descent) were given parts in Mary Queen of Scots (2018), despite the fact that the historical figures they played--Thomas Randolph and Bess of Hardwick, respectively--were both white. And then, of course, there's Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tony Award-winning musical, in which America's Founding Fathers were played by actors of color.

Not only does this give minorities more roles to play, but it also gives producers more talent to draw upon. Furthermore, it implicitly favors people of color, since few casting directors would dare hire a white actor for a black, Latino, or Asian part. The Juilliard drama students, however, didn't appear to see the upside of the practice. No student of color, they said, should "be forced to leave behind their racial/ethnic identity when playing a role." If, on rare occasions, a nonwhite actor were to play a white character, the choice would have to be emphasized within the narrative, focusing attention on the actor's race, rather than on his performance.

Needless to say, this was not the attitude of black actors a couple generations ago. "Why don't you ask me human questions?" Sidney Poitier chided a reporter in 1964. "Why is it everything you ask refers to the Negro-ness of my life and not to my acting?" Poitier--who, in 1967, became the first black man to win an Academy Award--made it plain that he didn't want to be known as a black actor but simply as an actor who was treated as an equal to his white peers. He chafed at being Hollywood's token black man, only offered roles that highlighted his race, like his part in A Patch of Blue (1965). "I'd hate for my gift--or whatever--to be circumscribed by color," he told the New York Times in 1965. "I'd like to explore King Lear, for instance."

...If you talk about race and casting long enough, you'll inevitably encounter the term "minstrelsy." The word is a kind of rhetorical A-bomb, designed to end all subsequent discussion. It's generally assumed that nothing good ever came from minstrelsy, and that any association with it is therefore discreditable.

However, 19th-century minstrelsy was not a uniquely white phenomenon. It was also popular among African Americans, many of whom formed their own minstrel troupes--McCabe & Young's Minstrels, Haverly's Genuine Colored Minstrels, and Richards & Pringle's Georgia Minstrels, among them. Actors love to dress up, and blackface was simply considered another disguise. They put on wigs, beards, false noses, anything that will help them shed their own personas and slip into others. That's why Robert De Niro and Christian Bale go to so much trouble to gain weight, lose weight, or put on muscle for their film roles. It helps them disappear into the characters they're playing.

In their 2012 book, Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop, Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen quote historian Nathan Irvin Huggins as follows: "White men put on black masks and became another self, one which was loose of limb, innocent of obligation to anything outside itself, indifferent to success (for whom success was impossible by racial definition), and thus a creature totally devoid of tension and deep anxiety." The same was true of black actors. Bert Williams, who became the most successful African American comedian of his generation, later explained how blackface helped him to find his voice as a young performer in the 1890s. He'd been struggling for some time when, one day, "just for a lark," he smeared on some blackface in a Detroit theater. "Nobody was more surprised than I was when it went like a house on fire," he said. "I began to find myself. It was not until I was able to see myself as another person that my sense of humor developed."

One of the benefits that blackface offered both white and black men was that it allowed them to express their emotions in ways that, in any other context, would have been perceived as unmanly at the time. In Gilded Age America, toughness was prized and emotionality abhorred. Theodore Roosevelt exemplified the ideal--strong, stoical, obsessed with hunting and war. In blackface, however, a man could drop this façade. He could clown or cry or pour out his heart to his lover as he'd never dare without the disguise. The black songwriter W.C. Handy, who was, at one time, a minstrel trouper himself, explained how cathartic this could be for the audience, as well as the performers: "Everyone knew that there were those who came to a minstrel show to cry as well as laugh. Ladies of that mauve decade [the 1890s] were likely to follow the plot of a song with much the same sentimental interest that their daughters show in the development of a movie theme nowadays. The tenors were required to tell the stories that jerked the tears."

To be sure, some minstrel acts--like the chicken-stealing sketch that Spike Lee reproduced in Bamboozled (2000)--were malignantly racist. Even the more benign acts tended to rely on condescending stereotypes, portraying blacks as ignorant "coons," tragic "mulattos," selfless "Toms," or jolly, big-bellied "mammies." They also glossed over the harsh realities that African Americans faced at the end of the 19th century. On the minstrel stage, the South became a prelapsarian paradise, untouched by the Industrial Revolution, free of either work or worry. Lynching, sharecropping, convict leasing, and the daily humiliation of racial apartheid were conveniently left out of the picture.

...By using the word minstrelsy so loosely, Phillips ignores these distinctions. She also creates a false equivalence between minstrelsy and other types of acting: "Any casting of a performer in the role of a race other than their own ... is an act of minstrelsy."

Any casting? This implies that if casting directors want to avoid accusations that they are involved in a modern-day minstrel show, they must make sure that all the actors share precisely the same ethnicity as the dramatis personae. How much Irish blood, then, must an actor have to play James Tyrone, the father in Long Day's Journey into Night? How much Puerto Rican blood does an actress need to play Maria in West Side Story? Can an actor from Kenya be given the part of a slave from West Africa, where most blacks were abducted during the triangle trade? Or would that, too, be an act of minstrelsy? What about nonspeaking roles? Though Spike Lee's recent film Da 5 Bloods (2020) takes place in Vietnam, it was mostly filmed in Thailand, using Thai extras who passed as Vietnamese. Minstrelsy or not? These are rhetorical questions, but they're precisely the kind of questions that arise in pursuit of pure ethnic authenticity. Like Russell Davies's proposal that only gay actors play gay parts, it's not just impractical--who does the checking?--but also a blueprint for the very kind of discrimination that critics like Phillips claim to abhor.

Of course, there are times when a movie or a play demands that we see the color of a character. In such cases, colorblindness is undesirable. Viewers would have been confused had a black man played the protagonist in Schindler's List (1993) or a white man played the lead in Menace II Society (1993). Like any other human characteristic--height, weight, age, gender, physical strength, ability to play an instrument--skin color matters when it's essential to the story being told. Sometimes, these conventions can be upended--in 1997, the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, DC staged a "photo negative" production of Othello in which the hero was played by white actor Patrick Stewart, while everyone else in the cast was black. But more often they can't.

One of the reasons that colorblind casting has been employed so much more frequently on the stage than the screen is that cinema puts a higher premium on verisimilitude than theater--viewers will accept a painted backdrop or a plastic sword in an off-Broadway show, but they'll snicker if they see them in a Hollywood film. Which is why Adrian Lester's casting in Mary Queen of Scots is a bit jarring at first. Is he an ambassador from an African nation, the viewer wonders? A slave given courtly attire? It takes a moment to realize that, even though his skin is black, his character is meant to be white. However brief this moment of confusion may be, it comes at a cost, breaking the spell of the story. If you have to stop and ponder, even for a minute or two, what a black man is doing in 16th-century Scotland, then you've stopped suspending your disbelief.

This is the best argument against colorblind casting. It's also the best argument against the kind of Eurocentric casting that [New York Times columnist Maya] Phillips, in her article, describes as minstrelsy.

...Just think of how much more circumscribed Ben Kingsley's career would have been if he'd only been allowed to play Indian characters. He's one of the most versatile actors in movie history, at various times playing a Maltese spy, a Russian detective, an Iranian colonel, a British gangster, a Persian prince, a South American doctor (nationality unknown), a Polish Holocaust survivor, and a Nazi war criminal. Or think of Oscar Isaac (a Juilliard alum). Where would he be without colorblind casting? Born in Guatemala to a Guatemalan mother and a Cuban father, Isaac has, since appearing in his first film at the age of 17, played everything from an American to an Iraqi to a Roman to a Mizrahi Jew to Prince John of England.

Part of the pleasure of watching fine actors like Kingsley and Isaac--and, for that matter, Christian Bale, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cate Blanchett, and John Turturro--is that they can be almost anyone. That's their gift. Why delimit it? Telling them who they can and can't play is like telling Goya what he can and can't paint or telling Nabokov what he can and can't write. It punishes them and us. At the beginning of his career, Isaac took steps to make sure this wouldn't happen to him, dropping his original surname, Hernández, so that he wouldn't only be offered Latino roles. "I don't want to just go up for the dead body, the gangster, the bandolero, whatever," he told In magazine. "I don't want to be defined by someone else's idea of what an Oscar Hernández should be playing."