If a playwright demanded a school stop production of one of his works because the lead was an African-American and the part was written for a caucasian.
Should we pretend the cries of racism would not floweth in the above scenario?
He never said it did. Seriously you are making shit up.
The playwright had in fact explicitly stated that race is not a subject of the work, that the work is, to quote, “universal.”
So to be clear. YOU are not familiar with the work.
That is his argument and his reasoning. Making sure that Indian parts are for Indians only even at the level of a tiny college production tickets free to students where there were no Indians trying out for the parts. Not because the play has anything to do with race as an issue, but because Indian parts MUST be filled by Indians even if there are none who apply.
I’ve seen To Kill a Mockingbird. This play sir/madam is no To Kill a Mockingbird. 
Not a play about race. Actual reality and context.
But even still.
The same? No two productions are “the same.” If Howard University wanted to put on a production of it and none of the 1.5% of their student population that is White even tried out for the part then I would think that the production could be fine. It would be understood which characters of Atticus and Scout (etc.) which are being played by Blacks are White. No whiteface needed. It would be understood. Howard does Blacks in place of Asian roles in plays sometimes too. Such as in their production of Anything Goes.
Current production at Howard? Fire in the Mirror. A play about “the aftermath of a horrendous clash in 1991 in Crown Heights Brooklyn between a black community and a Lubavitcher Jewish community.” White Jewish characters of course being played by Blacks, that’s Howard’s main talent pool.
Yes, dialect coach. Black students trying to sound like New York Orthodox Jews.
And from the sound of it, it works well enough. I’ve got no problem with it. It’s called acting.
On preview, the Director at Clarion has claimed “I don’t deal with the contracts. The department chair and the student association deal with the contracts.” But to be sure the ball was dropped somehow on the college’s side. Professionals they aint. A big school drama department they aint. Even part of a community of colleges they aint: there are no nearby schools in this case. Really they come off more as “Hey kids! Let’s put on show!”
To some degree there was educational value from this for them about the actual business of theater. About the letter of the law and the self-important jerks.
The irony is that director, so focused on being ready to defend the play from community attacks coming from the Right, for its irreverent and humorous portrayal of Christ, was taken down by extreme rigidity of thought from the other direction.
Having been involved in casting actors for voice parts, I have to agree with NAF1138. Sometimes ethnicity matters and sometimes it doesn’t.
In this case the author of the play made it very clear up front that he thought it mattered, and he’s in a better position to make that judgement call than anyone. The director was cavalier both about respecting the author’s clearly-stated wishes and about securing his consent to the production. This sort of thing should have been worked out in advance, and it’s not the author’s fault that the director was unprofessional and rude.
If you have libertarian leanings, as you claim, why haven’t you come into this thread to defend the intellectual property rights of the play’s author? Surely that should be one of your first concerns, given the libertarian belief in the sanctity of property rights.
It seems to me that a logical first-order observation for a libertarian might be something like: “Well, the author owns the rights to the play, and he has the moral and the legal right to set the conditions under which the play is used. If he only wants his play to be performed in productions where the ethnicity of the actors matches up with the ethnicity of the characters, that’s his right. Anyone who wants to put on the play under different conditions can negotiate with the author, and if the author still refuses, then those people have the right to go and write their own play where South Asian characters are played by white people.”
Even after Kimstu and others demonstrated quite clearly that the play’s author had made his position very clear from the beginning, and that it was the play’s director who fucked up here, you couldn’t even find the time and energy to acknowledge that simple fact.
I suppose, if you completely ignored the rather large context of history and current societal situations.
I think we are missing the important issue here. This play is a clear case of cultural appropriation. How dare a Korean-American use a South Indian setting and mythology in a play.
This thread isn’t a debate about property rights. It’s a debate about whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing to restrict people from taking a job or playing a role, based solely on their race. It’s a bad thing.
Maybe, but you’re the one who brought libertarianism into this.
One of the core tenets—i would argue, based on a historical reading of classical liberal and libertarian ideas, that it is possibly THE core tenet—of libertarian ideology is the notion of the rights of ownership, over yourself and your property, and a belief in absence of coercion. In fact, a key argument of libertarian ideology has often been that, as long as a person is not infringing on someone else’s rights, they should be allowed to do whatever the hell they like with their own person and property, with no outside restrictions or coercion.
Many libertarians, in arguing against restrictive laws and against government regulation, have also argued that there really is no valid notion of what constitutes the common good, and they also argue that other people are perfectly entitled to make decisions that you feel are a “bad thing,” as long as they don’t interfere with your rights in making those decisions.
Basically, someone who calls themselves a libertarian, and who understands what libertarian thought actually means, would say that your argument about this being a “bad thing” is completely irrelevant to the debate. As long as the play, and its performance, remain the property of the playwright, the playwright is perfectly within his rights to do what he’s done.
You are, of course, perfectly free to argue that what he’s doing is a bad thing, but if you’re going to suggest that your argument comes from a libertarian viewpoint, you open yourself up to exposure because your argument really does not fit with libertarian ideals. Basically, to criticize a person who is exercising his property rights, to argue based on your (alleged) libertarian leanings that the person is doing a “bad thing,” and to then claim that this isn’t about property rights, suggests a lack of understanding of some of the fundamental ideas and ideals of libertarianism.
I know this is a hijack, but do you seriously believe that not ONCE has anybody who believes as you do used this kind of argument towards the other side? And you actually think the other side ignores it every single time and has never once addressed it in any way?
I’ll leave it there, because again, hijack. But here’s a thought or two: the musical Hamilton: I think there’s a lot added to it because of its deliberate casting. Othello: what is or isn’t added in consideration of casting the title role? (Though I do note that Patrick Stewart was in a “photonegative” production where he played the title role and all the other actors were African-American.)
Except that you don’t have to be a proponent of ethnic purity in Art to actually be on the playwright’s side on this one.
It’s quite possible that the underlying reason that he really wanted specifically Indian actors for the Indian parts was to disguise the fact that they’re fundamentally just Americans with Indian names. Snippets of the dialogue found online from a former production seem to support this theory. " ‘Yo, dude’ "? Yeah, that’s pretty Yank, to my non-American ears.
And sure, Lloyd Suh’s no more Indian than I’m Latvian. Doesn’t matter. It’s still his play, his choice.
It seems really wrong that the director’s jumping on newspapers and blogs to publicly criticise the playwright’s right to have his stipulation, when in fact she had plenty of time to talk about it with him as an adult, one to one, right back at the start of the process when both he AND his agent asked her about the casting. Obviously she knew then that she wouldn’t have Indian actors in the Indian parts - “oh, we haven’t cast it yet” and “oh I forgot you asked” are such blow-off responses.
In that context, raking him over the coals in the Chronicle of Higher Education just comes off as trying to recruit the Internet to bully him into agreeing with her. So sure, lets have a conversation about what degree of cultural mixing or cross-ethnic casting and writing in theatre is appropriate - but lets not have it over THIS specific case.
I was being facetious with my cultural appropriation comment. This situation, as well as the cultural appropriation phenomenon, has a simple solution. Treat people the same regardless of the color of their skin.
No, from the horse’s mouth:
https://www.facebook.com/lloydsuh/posts/10153102259171780?fref=nf&pnref=story
All I can say is that the guy playing Jesus had better have been a Jew.
Finally, an artist who’s not afraid to be thought of as racist.
Yeah, I read it. What he means is that he, as the playwright, wrote the Indian characters as Indians, and thinks that it’s important that they be accurate. If he decided to make the character of Jesus a Generic Western Dude, or one in which the character’s race doesn’t matter that’s actually okay too - it’s an artistic decision. Jesus, in this context, may be not so much standing for himself, the actual person, as for ‘the West’, in which Christianity has played a fairly significant part over the last couple of thousand years.
Look, I think the play sounds dire, and you’d have to pay me to get me into the theatre to see it, but I’ll defend to the hilt the writer’s right to specify what he does and does not want to allow in productions of it. And obviously the specific stipulation that he has is going to lead to it being performed less often than it otherwise might be, but that’s his tradeoff, and that’s ok too.
He wrote a long piece explaining his issue with white actors in his play so we have no need to speculate about his justification. And to be very clear, his problem is not that non-Indians played Indians. His problem is that the actors were white. If they were other actors of color then there would have been no issue. Again, a direct quote:
As Aspidistra’s post suggests, your incredibly simplistic observation misses the central point that the playwright is trying to make.
He is not saying that all characters must be played by people who are exactly the same as their historical analogs. He is saying that he has a particular vision and purpose for his play, that part of that vision and purpose is having “artists of color” portray his characters, and that he reserves the right to license his play only to people who are willing to comply with his vision and purpose.
To argue that “the guy playing Jesus had better have been a Jew” completely misses the point. Suh is arguing that, if he wants Jesus played by a white guy, then as the playwright, he gets to make that call. And Suh is arguing that, if he wants Jesus played by a South Asian guy, then as the playwright, he gets to make that call. And if he wants Jesus played by any actor of color, and not a white guy, then as the playwright, he gets to make that call too.
I’m not arguing that his call is a good one or a bad one. I’m not much of a fan of musicals anyway, and (agreeing with Aspidistra again) the play doesn’t sound like something i’d be at all interested in seeing. But your own claim about who should or should not play Jesus, while sort of an amusing effort at a gotcha, simply reflects a misunderstanding of the basic point that he is trying to make.
Edit:
At least your most recent post seems to grasp the issue:
Exactly. Which is why your comment about Jesus being played by a Jew misses the point completely.
Exactly. And that’s not happening in the entertainment world today. If it were, minorities wouldn’t feel so ignored, underrepresented, and insulted (by whitewashing of roles). Thus, projects like the play in the OP and Hamilton.
Glad we agree!
I think you need to read his facebook post again. There is absolutely nothing in there about artistic vision. The actors could have come in any color except white.
You are doing a superb job of missing the point.
His choice, as the artist, or auteur, or whatever term you want to use, is for the parts to be played by people of color. He is saying that this is his choice to make. His point is precisely that, as the person who wrote the play and controls its use, he gets to determine what type of actors play the parts. It has nothing to do with your sense of whether Jesus should be played by a Jew; it has to do with his desires and his control over the production of his work.
You don’t have to like his choices or agree with them. That’s completely your right. But your argument about Jesus needing to be portrayed by a Jew is still completely beside the point.
It’s a 2 way street. The playwright should have had the common sense to know it wasn’t possible for the school to cast actors if there wasn’t a pool to pick from.
My thing about Jesus was facetious and didn’t have a broader point.
I’ve never denied his right as the creator to control his work. However, I have every right to think he is a racist asshole.