Bartlett Sher, August Wilson, and Race in American Theatre

This writer was not supportive of the protest, which ultimately gathered enough student performers to constitute a sufficient chorus of actual blacks. While it's easy to make light of actors, the truth is that acting is an art, a difficult and--if done well--often painful one that requires the actor to try to experience what the character experiences; though the ultimate resolution was above reproach, it struck this writer as counter-productive to oppose a non-black trying to understand that experience, albeit in the tepid form of a musical number (written by a white country singer, no less). Or, conversely, if no black chorus could be found, would it have been better to produce no show about race at all?

But things aren't that simple. Consider the opposite case, that of race-blind casting, where characters nominally white may be cast to a black or Asian or Hispanic actor. A few years later, we saw the playwright and poet Amiri Baraka speak at the University of Oregon. Asked about race-blind casting, he retorted, "How about we talk about some race-conscious casting?" His point was that simply pretending race doesn't matter is a way of refusing to talk about racial issues, too.

When it comes to the issue of presenting race on stage, there's no simple answer. In fact, this touches on one of central questions in American culture: is identity inherent, something you're, in effect, born with, or it is constructed based on experience, something learned? Wilson embraced the former idea; his artistic project--a ten-part cycle of plays depicting the African-American experience for each decade of the twentieth century--was an attempt to reclaim black history, to tell their story. But that "us" and "them" mentality obscures the more complex reality of miscegenation and experience; whites aren't all white, blacks aren't all black (witness the Hemingses); some blacks even pass for white (see Anatole Broyard), and what then? By the same token, it's ridiculously naive to simply pretend we've achieved a post-racial society; this writer walks down the street and others see a white, another Seattlest contributor walks down the street, and people see a black.

So what's the worst that can be said for August Wilson's rule being jettisoned? Honestly, it's that there are less opportunities for black artists. Wilson's work, however good, is not the end-all, be-all of the work that needs to be done about the complex story of race in America, and the heavy-lifting that remains requires a new generation of artists to step up and embrace the struggle in a market with that many fewer real employment opportunities. But Wilson's work has entered the mainstream and is now safely part of a repertoire for largely white audiences, a repertoire that loves historical plays about race because they don't make audiences ask hard questions about the present while letting them feel progressive about race. In the end, it seems like Wilson himself may well have become a new way for us not to talk about race.