it’s discrimination.
That means a playwright can’t make a play ABOUT race. If someone wrote a play about racial profiling or discrimination in some other form he shouldn’t count on minorities playing those being profiled? That’s reasonable to you?
Do you think that strip clubs that only hire women strippers are also engaging in discrimination?
…its probably a good thing then that you aren’t a professor of theatre in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts then. It doesn’t matter what you personally think. Try explaining to the judge that you didn’t follow the terms of the contract because “I personally thought otherwise.”
Because it is Clarion’s professional obligation to keep the writers agent updated on any changes on how the play is going to be used. This isn’t an update on “progress.” The writer doesn’t care if you are going into the second week of dress rehearsals. (Unless, of course, he didn’t know they were going into production at all.) But updates on usage.
This is why there is a contract and this is why there is an agent. You deal with the agent. You are not entitled to access to the writer. You aren’t entitled to a dialogue with the writer, you aren’t entitled to “input”.
But you are obligated to update the agent with any change in usage.
You have a fundamental mis-understanding of how the process works.
If you’re going to be so mindlessly reductive, then ALL casting is discriminatory.
For example, should casting directors be allowed to take gender and age into account when casting the leads in a romantic comedy? After all, gender and age are protected classes just like race and nationality are.
Why is it okay to say “this part should be played by a young woman” and not okay to say “this part should be played by a southeast Asian”?
No, that’s art!
Oh there are lots of reasons that is a good thing! Much better and happier at what I do do than I would be at that.
Yes, you have made it clear that you see malice where I see simple poor communication in both directions, inaccurate assumptions made by various individuals, and sloppy organizational structure. No question that the director’s understanding was that someone else was supposed to take care of getting the final contract signed and accepted, assumed they did, and that someone else never got the memo.
Unfortunately I have had the experience of being part of bureaucratic snafus made with no ill-intent (and am grateful that the administrative support I currently work with is for the most part highly competent, most of 'em anyway), human errors that a sloppy system allowed for … and of having to fix issues caused by unclear communication. It is not always easy to get different parties to cut each other some slack for honest mistakes and to take a position of empathy, especially if one side starts with a specific narrative in mind.
No, of course the college is not entitled to input. They asked for it and his nature is such that if he was not too busy at that point in time he would have been very happy to participate. All reasonable.
But no offense I do not think you quite have an understanding of how the process works. IF they had gotten a standard performance contract signed and that contract did not explicitly specify the less than standard clause of “Characters A, B, and C must be played by actors who are not White.” then the college would have been under no obligation to communicate to the agent how they had cast it, whether the writer asked about it or not. If the regrettably never executed contract did not specify that the play was to use one sort of set of props and costumes then they could have costumed the characters as space aliens or sea monsters and not needed to inform the agent of that change either for that matter.
You are only obligated to inform the agent of any change in use that is explicitly excluded by the contract.
Exactly.
I think they should do a remake of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” with Matt Damon reprising Sidney Poitier’s role. And maybe Channing Tatum or Jennifer Lawrence could struggle with the fish in a 2016 version of “The Old Man and the Sea.” And Cate Blanchett is clearly one of the most talented actors in the world today; i think she would be ideal for the lead in a new version of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
A bit of a digression from this work though. This is not a play about race, the writer states it is “universal” … his concern, agree or disagree, is that he writes with increasing the number of roles available for minority actors in mind. If you’ve read at all about the actual play it is essentially a more more irreverent (“blasphemous” to some) variant of “Jospeh” … a farce imagining of a teenaged Christ screwing around, doing weed, having sex and swearing, before he takes on the family business. Casting it as Joseph is usually cast, with no particular concern that North Africans play the parts of Portiphar or the Pharoah or the wife, or Semites play the brothers, is not something that obviously matters other than as a matter of the writer’s bigger political concerns of the history of casting Whites as minority characters and the lack of opportunity for minorities in theater. The director missed a beat in not understanding that the writer asking about whether or not she’d be able to cast it a certain way meant that his vision of it was that it had to be, but honestly I think missing that beat is understandable. Again, not excusing the “you got it” ball dropping on the final contract.
But also, yes, a predominantly Black college doing Anne Frank should be allowed to cast a Black woman as the title character. Really that would not be a big deal to understand that a college goes with who their bench is and that college education should include stretching to understanding cultures and groups and issues that are not your own.
It’s racist to say, “You cannot portray this character because you’re of the wrong race.”
Is it racist to say that a white man couldn’t have portrayed Django in Django Unchained?
And is it similarly sexist to say “You cannot portray this character because you’re of the wrong sex”?
The physical attributes of an actor can matter a great deal to the meaning of a movie or play. Sometimes it doesn’t make any difference whether a character is a man or a woman. Sometimes it doesn’t make any difference whether a character is black or white. But sometimes it DOES, and pretending otherwise so you can cry “Racism!” is disingenuous.
Just to be clear: Let’s say I’m casting a production of Huckleberry Finn. I refuse to even consider white actors for the role of Nigger Jim. Do you think that makes me a racist?
Well, kinda, yeah. Absolute race-based requirements for employment are racist, by definition. You’re denying someone an opportunity, solely on the basis of the color of their skin.
What else can it be called? A black man and a white man walk into the casting office. The casting agent says, “No whites need apply.”
There can be justifications for it; the Civil Rights laws exempt theatrical casting from equal opportunity rules. It can be “not a bad thing” in some cases. But it is, necessarily, racism.
(Note: unless one subscribes to the “disempowered minority” model; we still haven’t resolved that fully. That’s the reason I added the example of Gonzales and Nguyen, as being roughly equally minority populations and roughly equally disempowered. i.e., is it worse if the same casting director says, “No blacks need apply” for the role of Huck Finn?)
(What if the guy applying for the role of Jim is black…but is of Bangladeshi descent, not African?)
No, it isn’t, and you trivialize real racism by saying so.
Nonsense. There’s nothing about home ownership that gives a current owner any kind of legitimate “creative control” over the appearance, accent, etc., of other people who might own the house in the future. Hence, trying to exert such control with racial covenants is illegitimate and illegal.
Copyright law, on the other hand, DOES acknowledge and enforce a playwright’s legitimate right to exercise creative control over the appearance, accent, etc., of the people who portray the playwright’s characters in future productions. So the two cases are not realistically analogous.
If you copyright a creative work, you control how it may be presented. It is not automatically discrimination to specify that the presentation has to meet certain criteria of faithfulness to the visual/aural presentation of the work as originally conceived. I don’t get why some people are having such a hard time understanding this.
AFAIK, the issue is usually considered in light of whether the actor can credibly present the ethnicity of the character as depicted by the author. Can the actor’s appearance and accent plausibly suggest a black ex-slave in the 19th-century southern US? If so, then there’s no reason he can’t play the character of Jim, and I know of no case of a playwright exercising legal authority to forbid such a casting solely on the grounds of the actor’s nationality (as opposed to racial/ethnic appearance).
I recommend Robert Hapgood’s 1992 article The Rights of Playwrights: Performance Theory and American Law for a thoughtful discussion that draws on a lot of background about what actually happens in the theater, rather than caricatures based on broad-brush definitions of racial exclusion:
Damn skippy they do.
This article is good, but it doesn’t address anti-discrimination laws. A writer who licenses his work almost certainly qualifies as a business under state anti-discrimination laws. As such, they can’t refuse to license their work for reasons based on race. No first amendment exemption to these laws exists. We’ve seen this consistently in creative businesses refusing to provide services to gay weddings. In all those cases, as far as I know, the business has been ruled to be discriminatory.
I think the only way for writers to avoid issues would be to write detailed descriptions of their characters and refuse to deviate from those descriptions in casting.
From Lloyd Suh’s Facebook post:
Yes, Lamia. That bit does come off as quite a bit racist: that it’s universal … except for Whites, they are not included in universal.
But I cut slack because I understand in context of the post what he meant … race is not vital to the story in any way or a theme or subject of the work in any way but he objects to what he sees as a default casting with Whites, as a big picture narrative, and he placed this casting within that extant narrative. That’s what he saw when he saw who was cast because that is the narrative he has running. He applied his existing preconceptions based on race to the specific case and judged the specific case according to those existing preconceptions. In this specific case however white actors were not “the default option” for the roles. They were the only possible option in this particular case.
…malice? Nah.
I said that they paid lip service to the writer.
As said by someone earlier: “Pretty much all colleges and even High Schools know the rules.” For a play to go into production without a valid licence in place is not just a small mistake. (Of course, if you only pay lip service to the contributions of the writer: then of course this is only a “small” mistake. “A contract? How important can that be?”)
The intent doesn’t matter. No licence was in place. I got caught speeding the other day. I didn’t intend to go faster than the speed limit. The limit in the area I was in had changed and I didn’t notice. Telling the policeman that I didn’t intend to go faster than 40km/hr didn’t stop him giving me a ticket.
The system is in place to stop things like this happening. As you point out pretty much all colleges and even High Schools know the rules. The college got caught speeding. They had to deal with the consequences.
Suh did not know that the play was going into production until days before the curtain was due to go up. That is a pretty freaking big failure of communication on the part of the school. Suh has shown plenty of empathy for the students who were affected by this.
Of course that is reasonable. Yet you keep harping on about it as if Suh being busy is somehow relevant to this story.
No offense: but I actually do have an understanding of how the process works.
And?
I’m puzzled as to why you wrote this to me. I’ve already pointed out one of the first things Suh did when he found out the play was in production was to check to see if a valid licence was in place and to see what had been agreed too. And I’ve already stated that if there was a performance licence in place that didn’t specify how the characters should be portrayed then Suh would not have had grounds to stop the play.
So thanks for agreeing with me?
And thanks for agreeing with me again?
And thanks for both agreeing with me again and acknowledging that I’ve been correct all along. But I don’t know how you can reconcile both completely agreeing with me and thinking I do not think you quite have an understanding of how the process works. But at least I’m glad that you finally managed to figure it out.
That’s not what he’s saying at all. He’s saying that a non-white actor can play an “everyman” role – someone that we can all relate to. And that a work can have universal appeal without including whites. “Universal should not mean white” is not the same as “universal should not include whites”. He’s saying that you can have a non-white character with universal appeal without erasing their ethnicity.