Pick your examples shrewdly enough and it can seem as if all of culture, high and low, is awash in colorblind casting. In the new Broadway production of "Julius Caesar," Denzel Washington as Brutus plays opposite Jessica Hecht, a white actress, as his wife. As "Friends" drew to a close, David Schwimmer's character dated a woman played by Aisha Tyler, a situation so unremarkable that none of the friends bothered mentioning that she was black.
And in "Sideways," the Asian character played by Sandra Oh, who has a fling with a white man played by Thomas Haden Church, is the mother of a black child, a mélange of races that was accepted without comment, too.
But only a fool would think we've reached some racial utopia, and at the moment interracial romance is a popular and thorny subject. "Guess Who," the loose comic remake of the 1967 chestnut "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," takes a blithe love-conquers-all approach, reversing the races so that Bernie Mac, in the Spencer Tracy role, is the father who's shocked when his daughter brings home a white guy, played by Ashton Kutcher. Neil LaBute's new, typically corrosive play, "This Is How It Goes," deals with an interracial love triangle and exposes the venomous attitudes behind the facade of polite acceptance. [...]
| Caryn James' registration-required New York Times article "When It Comes to Casting, Love Conquers Color" reminds me that, those false notes and growl-worthy Hollywood sillinesses aside, my wife and I laughed during much of "Guess Who?" the other night.
[...] Ernest Thompson, author of "On Golden Pond," bears witness to the change. He remembers moving to Westminster, Md., in 1962 at age 12 and being shocked to realize there was a "coloreds only" balcony in the Carroll Theater.
Now an all-black production of his hit play is in previews and expected to be one of the hottest tickets on Broadway. "Maybe the culture is finally ready to grow up a little bit," he said.
According to Thompson, who is white, his play was a hit in Japan last year with an Asian cast. Why wouldn't it work with a black cast?
Thompson acknowledged that an all-black cast brings different resonance to the show. The patriarch, Norman Thayer Jr. (played on Broadway by Jones), is a bigot who says he likes New England "because there are no Jews in the state of Maine, no Negroes and no Puerto Ricans."
"When James Earl signed on to play that role, I assumed we'd be cutting those lines," Thompson said. "But he wanted to leave them in. He said, 'Do you think there's no prejudice in the black community?'"
Thompson sees this more open casting as another in a series of incremental shifts, finally reaching critical mass: "It's just evolution. I don't think it's a trend or a fad. It's time ... It's like knocking down the color barrier in sports, which happened when I was a kid." [...]
| That-there's the part of David Zurawik and Mary Carole McCauley's registration-required Baltimore Sun (via Los Angeles Times) article "The mainstream goes multicolored" that caught my eye.
posted in articles on April 1, 2005 6:23 AM | t (0)
« Previous phile: End-of-month blowout omnibus linkage.
» Next phile: In the way they know how the water moves beneath their common ground.
Return to top of page