Word: director
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...couple of these letter express chagrin at Pachter's accusations of director Beth Heller's "racist casting." This kind of response to this kind of statement is understandable, even laudable. But Pachter never makes this accusation. He instead writes that the two Black, non-chorus players were given "degrading roles for Black actors to play." Actress Lenore Jones was given the role of Mama, whom Pachter calls "sick and lecherous," and actor Tym Tombar was given the role of Amos, whom Pachter calls "simple, subservient, and constantly humiliated by his white, adulterous wife...
Cross-casting is a recent and noble ideal. When a director or producer cross-casts, he or she casts a role disregarding the script's proscription of race or gender. On one level, it is an appealingly democratic notion; it suggests that anyone can play any role, and that despite our socialization, characteristics such as sex and race are supremely superficial...
...relative ideal; it is a corrective measure. To pretend that the bias that infused drama did not infuse society is at best idiotic and at worst malicious. We cross-cast now to redress certain cultural greivances, but we should never forget how grave those greivances are. If a director casts an Asian-American as a Prince Hamlet, that still does not soothe the stinging reality that the West never did, indeed, never could, envision an Asian protagonist. Because so many roles are scripted for the social majority as acknowledged by our culture, roles scripted for Asian actors are anomolies...
...alone among reviewers in his concerns about the responsibilities and repercussions of cross-casting. Liza M. Velasquez asserts in her review of The Royal Hunt of the Sun ("Royal Hunt Misses the Mark," Oct. 26) that the casting decisions made in the Mainstage production were "disappointing." She writes that director Jeremy Blumenthal cross-cast a number of women in the roles of "sympathetic yet incomprehensible male Incas," and goes on to say that "[i]t seems insensitive to make a conscious effort to cross-cast and yet cast women in only savage and subordinate roles...
...thought is we like to fund things that would not really happen otherwise," says James Pierson, executive director of the Olin Foundation, which supports a number of projects at Harvard. Some foundations, he says, will make money available in a particular field, hoping to move scholarship into areas that reflect the organization's goals...