reading comprehension and good-old scene analysis
November 10, 2015 9:55 AM   Subscribe

Playwright Katori Hall responds to a production of her play, The Mountaintop where the role of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been double-cast the role of King with a black actor and a white one.
posted by roomthreeseventeen (18 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
what the ever-loving shit
posted by Kitteh at 10:04 AM on November 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh boy, that response from the playwright. Please conduct your weird racial experiments in the comfort of your own home, or indeed nowhere!
posted by selfnoise at 10:08 AM on November 10, 2015


Huh. I believe that I have met Michael Oatman, the director, through an annual theater conference in Omaha -- fairly sure I responded to one of his own plays, "The King of Cage Street," which I recall liking quite a lot. It's probably worth noting that if this is the same Oatman, he is black, which is not referenced in the story.

That being said, there is an unfortunate tendency in modern theater for directors to position themselves as visionaries whose sensibilities or radical reinterpretations of text take priority. This is often fine when dealing with very old plays, although, Lord save me from another version of Hamlet set during, I don't know, the 1970s. But it's often very disrespectful to living writers, and I can't tell you how often I have seen a writer's vision disregarded and thew writer shut out because the director thought they had a better idea. There are supposed to be some safeguards against this in modern theater, but they are rarely enforced.

This seems like an example, and it was a poor decision on Oatman's part. If you are to make any changes to a living playwrights script, you must consult them first and gain their permission -- that's part of the contract.

And I am generally in favor of gender- and race-blind casting, but only when it puts women and minorities in roles that are often denied them. Too often, nowadays, it seems like the opposite happens -- white men are cast as just about anything, even in roles that were explicitly written not to be white men, as though there can't be a single space of theater that is not filled by whiteness and manness.
posted by maxsparber at 10:11 AM on November 10, 2015 [9 favorites]


I don't understand what double-casting means.
posted by bq at 10:23 AM on November 10, 2015


I don't understand what double-casting means.

There were six performances. Each actor played the role of Martin Luther King, Jr. for three of them.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:26 AM on November 10, 2015


directors to position themselves as visionaries whose sensibilities or radical reinterpretations of text take priority.

Wow, this guy wanted to mess with Dr. Martin Luther fucking King? There's a place for radical reinterpretations, but this ain't it. Anyone crossing that line just comes off as a jackass, not a visionary.
posted by Melismata at 10:29 AM on November 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


“Dr. King is not just a prominent African American, he’s a prominent American. Why can’t an American play another prominent American?”

Dog whistle if I ever heard one.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:32 AM on November 10, 2015


If it is indeed this Michael Oatman I doubt it was a dog whistle, but I'm not sure if I can explain what it actually is.

"Profiles of Michael Oatmal [sic] and his work—which includes Eclipse: The War Between Pac and Big, My Africa, A Solitary Voice and Drowning the Flame—have been featured in both The New York Times and American Theatre."

Oatman hasn't made some sort of statement himself about this?
posted by GuyZero at 10:41 AM on November 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


When someone told me, "It's like Othello," I didn't realize they meant a board game in which black flips to white with a single move.
posted by belarius at 10:41 AM on November 10, 2015 [5 favorites]


GuyZero, click the other link in the OP for the university's take.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:44 AM on November 10, 2015


Oatman hasn't made some sort of statement himself about this?

From the article:

Almost a month after the production’s closing, I was finally able to speak with Oatman, who expressed that he felt there was no “prohibition against nontraditional casting.” When I asked him “Why?” he once again responded, “I just didn’t think there was. I wanted to see if a white actor, or a light-skinned actor, had the same cultural buy-in and could portray Dr. King.” (Huh!?!?) “Dr. King is not just a prominent African American, he’s a prominent American. Why can’t an American play another prominent American?”
posted by selfnoise at 10:45 AM on November 10, 2015


Sorry, I meant a longer statement. I did indeed read those sentences, but they don't give me personally a lot of insight into the decision.
posted by GuyZero at 10:50 AM on November 10, 2015


It might have been a misguided choice, with the wrong subject matter, but there is an interesting idea in there.

What if there was a play where the first two acts Dr. King is played by a white actor. It could possibly get people with unacknowledged racial bias to sympathize with the Dr. King character. The third act would switch all appropriate actors to black, relying on the leads to mesh well enough that it comes off as nothing but a skin change.

Could be a way to "walk a mile in my shoes" the subject matter.
posted by The Power Nap at 11:02 AM on November 10, 2015


I don't fault him for wanting to experiment, but I don't think it came off well, and I definitely don't fault Hall for wanting her play to NOT be the subject of those experiments. Even if it had worked, suddenly the production becomes about the faces, and not the play as written. Which is great for Shakespeare where we all know it, but not the same for a woman in 2015 who needs her plays to get known for their own merits. Which leaves me thinking, if there were more opportunities for black playwrights and black directors in modern American theater, maybe we wouldn't have to effectively make them compete against each other to see which of them can make more of a mark on the production.

I think as a film where you could watch the two versions back-to-back or even compare scene by scene, this might have been a powerful idea, but I'm not sure if that would have matched his vision or not. With comparison that direct, I can't help but think that the conclusion would have to be that MLK was absolutely a product of black American culture and he wasn't just some guy who said some pretty-sounding works, which white Americans often would like him to be.
posted by Sequence at 11:04 AM on November 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


There were six performances. Each actor played the role of Martin Luther King, Jr. for three of them.

I'm sure this approach is less common, but the school my older daughter attends sometimes solves the problem (so to speak) of there being a lot of turnout for auditions by casting two or three people for most roles, and having them either alternate during the same performance or having them all on stage at once in a sort of Greek chorus effect.
posted by Gelatin at 11:05 AM on November 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


I can imagine good artistic reasons for doing this, but if those are in play, the director should articulate and defend them, especially to the playwright.
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:07 AM on November 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm highly skeptical, and I do think the director ought to have a more substantial statement about what he hoped to achieve. "Let's find another white dude" is sadly a default mode for casting, and it's troubling to see it applied to MLK. Maybe it was just done as an attention-seeking move, but if the point was to explore or learn something, Oatman could now tell us what he was trying to explore and speak to what, if anything, he learned.

With that said, I am a big believer in a separation between the playwright and performance, and I'm generally leery (this might well be a worthy exception though) of a playwright coming off the page to tell us we've done her work wrong. The text is sacrosanct, and trying to mess with it will rightly get you slapped by whoever licensed the play, but directors have to have some freedom to produce the play in the way they see fit. This is especially important in a University theater context, where exploration and learning is supposed to be part of the mission. And I don't think we should have to wait for playwrights to die before we gain that freedom.
posted by zachlipton at 3:23 PM on November 10, 2015


This wasn't technically a university theatre context, though. This was a production by the Department of Pan African Studies. This was not part of any students' dramaturgical education, and the KSU Theatre Department was not involved.

As a matter of fact, the mission of the Pan African Studies Department is to "[offer] a comprehensively radical African centered approach to learning", and the mission of the African Community Theatre is to "[increase] exposure to and knowledge of the theatre heritage of African-Americans for students and local community residents of all ages. ... Students enhance communication skills and gain awareness and appreciation of the African-American heritage as depicted through theatre."

NB: My husband was just hired as faculty in the KSU School of Theatre and Dance.
posted by chainsofreedom at 6:20 AM on November 11, 2015


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