“who tolerates, which is intolerable; who is kind, which is cruel;”
May 31, 2017 6:27 AM   Subscribe

A Black Actor in ‘Virginia Woolf’? Not Happening, Albee Estate Says [The New York Times] “A decision by the estate of Edward Albee not to allow a production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to cast a black actor as a blond character is reigniting decades-long debates in the theater world over race, casting and authorial control. A theater producer in Portland, Ore., said last week that Albee’s agent, representing his estate, refused to grant him the rights to present the play with a black actor, Damien Geter, playing the supporting role of Nick, a young biologist at a small New England college. The Albee office, through a spokesman, said the producer had mischaracterized the status of his application for rights to the production, but confirmed that it objected to a black actor in that role.”

• Diversity on stage: who's afraid of color-blind casting? [The Guardian]
“Why haven’t more producers embraced non-traditional casting when it comes to lead roles? Well, restrictive estates might be part of the story, but a reluctance to challenge audience perspectives and the fact that most producers and directors are white men are likely more important factors. Besides, sometimes race and gender are at the heart of the material and will resist meddling. It would be difficult, though by no means impossible, to fiddle with the racial makeup of Six Degrees of Separation, say, or even A Bronx Tale. Same goes for gender in most of this season’s new plays. And there are times when traditional casting should probably be adhered to. Grease can survive the appearance of a Pink Dude among the ladies, but it’s more problematic to oppose Katori Hall’s stipulation, following a controversy, that The Mountaintop’s Martin Luther King Jr should always be played by an actor of color.”
• Why Is the Edward Albee Estate Afraid of a Black Virginia Woolf? [Slate]
“Albee came to view his own work as a piece of social realism firmly rooted in 1962. Perhaps because when it first opened, Woolf was the subject of some glib and homophobic assertions that a gay playwright had written an encoded drama about a homosexual sham marriage, Albee’s insistence that the play was exactly and only what it purported to be eventually stiffened into a kind of dogmatism—and into prickliness about casting. An African-American Nick was impossible, because an interracial marriage, he contended, would surely have sparked commentary from George or Martha, and also because the play contains a couple of baiting references to Nick’s golden-boy Aryan qualities. (Theoretically, depending on the direction and performances, those lines, aimed at a black actor, might play as just another savage and destabilizing attempt on George’s part to “get the guests.” Or a director might choose not to call attention to them at all. Either way, they’re hardly enough to threaten the comprehensibility of the play, any more than the 1966 movie was made confusing because George Segal, an actor of Jewish heritage, played Nick, a Welsh actor played George, and a 33-year-old actress played 52-year-old Martha.)”
• An Attempt At Color-Conscious Casting Has Opened Up A Massive Theater Debate [Buzzfeed]
“The controversy over Streeter’s planned production and the Albee estate’s response has also drawn attention to the difference between colorblind versus color-conscious casting. Both are intended to increase representation in theater, but while the former reflects a belief that any actor can play any part, the latter viewpoint is that casting actors of color in traditionally white roles does change the meaning of the work. Hamilton, for example, is held up as color conscious: Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the musical to be performed by nonwhite actors as the Founding Fathers with specific artistic intent. Similarly, Streeter was only considering actors of color for Nick in his Virginia Woolf, which he described as “color conscious.” In a second Facebook post, he explained his thought process behind casting Nick as black. "The character is an up and comer," he wrote. "He is ambitious and tolerates a lot of abuse in order to get ahead. I see this as emblematic of African Americans in 1962, the time the play was written."”
posted by Fizz (112 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
Theatres absolutely everywhere, I call on you to decline to stage Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ever again and instead choose from among the legion of excellent plays that are owned by people who aren't appallingly racist.
posted by orange swan at 6:39 AM on May 31, 2017 [87 favorites]


The Estate are making a really solid case for copyright to end at death (or much much earlier)
posted by adventureloop at 6:42 AM on May 31, 2017 [51 favorites]


I agree with Albee on this, I gotta say.

I can understand a producer or director thinking they can "add depth" to it, but I also think it takes something out of it which Albee deliberately put there and it's not their right to remove it.

I remember a few years ago someone was trying to do an all-female Glengarry Glenn Ross and Mamet was having none of it and instantly shut it down. That's his right as the plays creator but I can say I definitely would have went to it.
posted by dobbs at 6:43 AM on May 31, 2017 [7 favorites]


I had no idea that the copyright holders of plays could exert this kind of control -- I had (perhaps naively) assumed that as long as you paid the fee to use the script, any artistic decisions at that point were up to you. Some of those choices might be terrible or boring, but that would seem to be more between the director and the audience. It makes me wonder what other experiments have been shut down preemptively like this.

It definitely strikes me as a shabby decision; I wonder whether or not it will attract enough attention to hurt demand for the play in the future.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:46 AM on May 31, 2017 [10 favorites]


I agree with Albee on this, I gotta say.

I doubt it, given he's been dead for a year.

How long after death does the creator retain absolute control of his creations, in your schema?
posted by PMdixon at 6:47 AM on May 31, 2017 [7 favorites]


That's his right as the plays creator

Why should a playwright have the right to enforce their interpretation?
posted by Etrigan at 6:48 AM on May 31, 2017 [23 favorites]


an all-female Glengarry Glenn Ross

Glendagaryn Glenda Rose?
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:51 AM on May 31, 2017 [11 favorites]


[...] and it's not their right to remove it.

Artists don't have a right to veto power over the interpretation or presentation of their work, nor should they. The idea that they might is a serious perversion of our entirely artificial (and already grotesque) intellectual property laws.
posted by mhoye at 6:51 AM on May 31, 2017 [8 favorites]


OPB (the local NPR affiliate) had a very good discussion on this with the director involved.

The estate declined to comment or simply provided a statement if I remember correctly. It's a little more nuanced than just racism, and specifically the objection was to fundamentally changing the nature of the play. The director agreed with that assessment, and in fact was part of his goal for the audience to consume perceive the play in a new light.
posted by herda05 at 6:53 AM on May 31, 2017


It's sort of interesting vis-a-vis how US copyright law interacts with musical compositions. Once a composition is recorded and released, anybody can record a cover if they pay the mechanical license for sales. You can't stop somebody from recording or performing your song.

Significant changes to the lyrics or melody, though, could be considered a derivative work and require a license from the copyright holder.

Obviously none of this is the case for stage productions, but you can see the parallel.

Still seems like a pretty shitty decision, though.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:54 AM on May 31, 2017 [4 favorites]


Artists don't have a right to veto power over the interpretation or presentation of their work, nor should they. The idea that they might is a serious perversion of our entirely artificial (and already grotesque) intellectual property laws.

They do have that power when it comes to playwrights and production of their plays. And there is a certain logic to it. A play doesn't exist to be read, and a production of it is not an adaptation. The production of the play is the work itself, and just like you can't print a new copy of The DaVinci Code with all the idiocy removed, you can't produce a play that violates the stage direction of the playwright unless given permission. (On the other hand it's totally bizarre since the director, players and stage crew have to do a great deal of interpretive work, but it also makes a certain sense).

I'm not defending this decision by the estate, in particular, nor even copyright law (which I think is a very bad thing in its current form, down with capitalism, hail hydra), but in order for there to be meaningful copyright protection over a play, this kind of control by the estate owning that copyright makes sense.
posted by dis_integration at 6:58 AM on May 31, 2017 [12 favorites]


Artists don't have a right to veto power over the interpretation or presentation of their work

Well, clearly they do. You may not like it, but they do; otherwise the production wouldn't have needed to ask approval.

Presumably, the theatre would have promoted and profited from advertising the play as "Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Well, Albee wrote Nick as white and blonde. For people to suggest it's racist because he wrote it this way is ludicrous. It's part of the text and subtext of the play for goodness sakes!

So y'all are cool with the play mentioned that cast a white guy as MLK? The playwright has now specifically forbade it and, I assume, never thought to do so because it's not something they ever imagined they'd have to do. An audience member seeing that production may assume that that's the way that it was written and give the playwright blame for the decision.
posted by dobbs at 6:59 AM on May 31, 2017 [9 favorites]


art is the antithesis of the sacred. if someone says no then do it anyway. experiment with race, sexual identity, social constructs. better yet, do something original if the classics refuse...
posted by judson at 7:01 AM on May 31, 2017 [5 favorites]


From the Slate article:
“And death is, I’d argue, the point at which this aspect of copyright law should cede to a greater social and artistic good. A playwright’s copyright should certainly prevent directors from making unauthorized cuts or changes to the text or stage directions. And playwrights who insist on casting approval—not all do—should have it for as long as they’re alive to exercise it. But after they’re gone, should their idiosyncratic casting preferences really be treated as part of copyright-protected text? In the character list that precedes Woolf, Nick is described as “28 … Blond, well put-together, good-looking.” In dialogue, it’s suggested that he weighs between 185 and 190 pounds. Are Nick’s weight and hair color always honored in casting, and if they are not, what argument can an estate make that certain physical attributes the playwright specified are negotiable, but race is not?”
posted by Fizz at 7:10 AM on May 31, 2017 [19 favorites]


Theatres absolutely everywhere, I call on you to decline to stage Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ever again and instead choose from among the legion of excellent plays that are owned by people who aren't appallingly racist.

I don't really know exactly how I feel about this whole thing and tend to lean on the side of the estate being way too cranky and controlling, but I think the reasons involved are a bit more nuanced than Albee/Albee's estate being just a bunch of racists, for example, from the NYT article:

It is important to note that Mr. Albee wrote Nick as a Caucasian character, whose blonde hair and blue eyes are remarked on frequently in the play, even alluding to Nick’s likeness as that of an Aryan of Nazi racial ideology,” Sam Rudy, a spokesman for the Albee estate, said in a letter to Michael Streeter, the producer. “Furthermore, Mr. Albee himself said on numerous occasions when approached with requests for nontraditional casting in productions of ‘Virginia Woolf’ that a mixed-race marriage between a Caucasian and an African-American would not have gone unacknowledged in conversations in that time and place and under the circumstances in which the play is expressly set by textual references in the 1960s.

I think it alludes more to how people view theater, what aspects of the world the play is in people acknowledge or ignore, what roles social issues play in the play itself, how much the context of the play matters to the play itself, etc. I think it's sort of a complicated thing because there's no simple answers or views on these things. I'm not saying the Albee estate is right. I thought it was interesting that the Rodgers and Hammerstein guy basically said, "yeah...that estate is new. They'll loosen up. You'll see."
posted by Lutoslawski at 7:15 AM on May 31, 2017 [12 favorites]


I was wondering if/when this was going to show up on mefi. It was all over my facebook last week.

I know Damien. He's my uncle's ex's bff and sang at their wedding.

I can attest that he's well put together and good looking.
posted by phunniemee at 7:16 AM on May 31, 2017 [3 favorites]


No drama writer was more controlling, specific, that Samuel Beckett in how his plays could be staged. He would not allow any changes from what he had written. I think of the many changes made to Shakespere's plays and wait for the time when Othello will be staged with an entire Black cast and a white Othello.
posted by Postroad at 7:16 AM on May 31, 2017 [6 favorites]


There is a lot going on here.

Regarding authorial control, I have to ask myself what I would think if it was a change I strongly disagreed with. What if someone wanted to stage a play in which they whitewashed the cast, and this changed the message in a way that is disturbing? Should the playwright be able to refuse a license?

What if someone wanted to license a character illustration I drew and use it in the materials for an exploitative RPG, maybe after changing her outfit to be more skimpy? Should I be able to refuse the license?

I mean, this decision was made within a context where creators who have licenses over their work can choose how to license them (music covers notwithstanding). So saying that the creator shouldn't be able to say no in order to prevent their message being changed has some really big consequences beyond what I think about this particular decision.

Some countries grant creators stronger moral rights to protect integrity of their work than the US does. I don't think it's universally accepted that these moral rights are bad... is the difference that these situations are ones where the author's integrity might be harmed (a distinction in some laws)? Except, I don't think that is what bothers me about them...

The fact that it's an estate, and not the playwright, is a separate issue and one that is much easier for me to grapple with. So is the fact that I disagree with this decision.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:21 AM on May 31, 2017 [14 favorites]


I think of the many changes made to Shakespere's plays and wait for the time when Othello will be staged with an entire Black cast and a white Othello.

Patrick Stewert did a race-switched Othello 20 years ago.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 7:22 AM on May 31, 2017 [43 favorites]


I doubt it, given he's been dead for a year.

Right. But he was alive for the previous 88 so I was commenting on what he'd said in that portion of time.

How long after death does the creator retain absolute control of his creations, in your schema?

It's not my schema. It's the way theatre works. If the director doesn't like it, he should find a new line of work. Or write his own damn play.
posted by dobbs at 7:22 AM on May 31, 2017 [4 favorites]


I am now thinking of all the community theater I did 25 years ago, and all the bad (very bad) casting and the butchering of the lines by people who couldn't get them memorized, and the half-assed sets because that's all anybody could afford. I'm surprised goons from Samuel French didn't appear and beat the crap out of everybody.
posted by JanetLand at 7:22 AM on May 31, 2017 [26 favorites]


The production of the play is the work itself, and just like you can't print a new copy of The DaVinci Code with all the idiocy removed, you can't produce a play that violates the stage direction of the playwright unless given permission.

Just this. What does the playwright control of their art if not the words and stage directions of the production? That is their métier and the basis of their craft and livelihood. Allowing any and all interpretations regardless of the desire of the playwright removes their work from their intended purpose and, in essence, puts words in their mouth they may not agree with and did not choose.

That neither makes this particular decision "right" or "wrong" as that is a matter of interpretation that belongs, under current law, to the estate. I personally do favor a much shorter limit on copyright, where this sort of production would at this time be allowed, but that isn't what we have at the moment.

That this has become an issue suggests a publicity ploy given the director would know full well these conditions exist and would not have access to a great many plays were they to treat the wishes of their other playwrights in this manner. One can't simply substitute one's own belief for that of another under the assumption of agreement due to strength of conviction or belief in one's own moral righteousness. I suspect most people here would take it amiss if their words were edited without consent to express something different than they intended, so too is it for playwrights with the added weight of income, audience, and posterity of their creation involved.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:23 AM on May 31, 2017 [8 favorites]


I think the reasons involved are a bit more nuanced than Albee/Albee's estate being just a bunch of racists

Hmm...

he Albee office, through a spokesman, said the producer had mischaracterized the status of his application for rights to the production, but confirmed that it objected to a black actor in that role

I'm gonna go with "no".
posted by Artw at 7:25 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


I guess every staging of a Shakespeare play in any time period other than 17th century England must be retroactively destroyed.

Barthes wrote of the death of the author how long ago now, and these folks are attempting editorial control from beyond the grave. Take the money, smile and nod, thank the Disney Corporation for extending copyright in perpetuity.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 7:27 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


The rights-holders to plays have the right to do this, and there are quite reasonable arguments to be made as to why this right may actually overall be a good thing.

That being said, this was a crappy decision and I skipped seeing a production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" that I otherwise would have gone to here in Edinburgh because I didn't want any of my money going to the people who made that decision.
posted by kyrademon at 7:28 AM on May 31, 2017 [3 favorites]


Ha ha. Has anyone at the Albee estate ever been to a theater? They are packed with white senior citizens. Is that what they want? Theater that serves only geriatric caucasia for all time? Jesus, it's an honor that someone wants to keep this play alive with something fresh.

The thing about the movie casting is extra indicting. Albee didn't mind them casting a woman twenty years younger than Martha, but apparently didn't want to explore how changing race might expand George's character?

And it's one thing for the playwright to carry his crusty beliefs to his grave, I mean I can imagine how he justified his narrow vision since it was his own work, but those executing his estate, give me a break.

The Mamet story is also dumb. Don't these artists see that people want to enliven their work? The most memorable King Lear I ever saw was a gorgeous and brilliant all women production. It made me understand the play more deeply as I had to make cognitive adjustments to the experience. And the actors were so skilled I quickly was able to accept them as men.
posted by latkes at 7:28 AM on May 31, 2017 [28 favorites]


I guess I'd ask why it is directors and audiences then are so damned insistent on restaging these old out of date works where the playwrights are so obviously out of touch when there are scads of young playwrights of all races trying to get their works staged. If racial awareness is really the bigger concern over publicity, how about starting to employ some of those people to give voice to their interests instead of providing another serving of leftovers?
posted by gusottertrout at 7:32 AM on May 31, 2017 [21 favorites]


I would imagine that older plays are so popular because potential audience members have heard of them and are more likely to buy a ticket based on their knowledge of the work.
posted by goatdog at 7:36 AM on May 31, 2017 [5 favorites]


It made me understand the play more deeply as I had to make cognitive adjustments to the experience. And the actors were so skilled I quickly was able to accept them as men.

I think this hits on one of cruxes of this issue every time it comes up. When you cast someone of a different race/gender than the character is written as, are you doing so because you are blind casting, in which case you want the audience to accept the actor as the race/gender of the character in the play, or are you doing so to change the interpretation or the work, in which case you want the juxtaposition/subversion to be a key element of the performance? I'm not saying it has to be one or the other, but these are very different ways to interpret these situations when they come up and while you can certainly exist in a liminal space between these two attitudes, I think most people don't.
posted by Lutoslawski at 7:44 AM on May 31, 2017 [12 favorites]


So y'all are cool with the play mentioned that cast a white guy as MLK?

Nope. And I wasn't cool with ScarJo Kusanagi but loved Idris!Heimdall. Next question?
posted by kmz at 7:47 AM on May 31, 2017 [25 favorites]


Albee didn't mind them casting a woman twenty years younger than Martha

Have you seen the movie? Taylor absolutely looks the age of Martha, 52.

The Mamet story is also dumb.

It's not dumb. He wrote a play specifically about what men will do to each other in order to succceed and survive. If he'd wanted to write a play about what women will do, he would have.

Mamet isn't saying there isn't a story worth telling with the same themes featuring women. He's saying that that's not the story he wrote.

And, if it wasn't clear when I brought it up, my saying "I would have went to see it" because of the casting -- I was suggesting that was a negative and exactly the reason Mamet shut it down. It's not a friggin' parlour trick!

Don't these artists see that people want to enliven their work?

I'm a big fan of American Buffalo, an earlier script by Mamet, which I've seen performed 3 times, always with a white cast. Then, they made it into a movie and they changed one of the characters to black: the drug addict. Yes, this added something to the work, but it wasn't something Mamet had written and it overshadowed the whole damn thing, and, in my opinion, ruined the story and made Mamet appear to those unfamiliar with the work somewhat racist.

Audience members and critics who think that changing races and genders can "only add depth" or "enliven" a work are suggesting the writer wrote characters as the races and genders they chose as flukes or whim. That's not the way most writers I know work.

Don't these artists see that people want to enliven their work?

I once saw James Ellroy speak and someone asked him if he'd ever considered working with Tarantino or some other young hot-shot filmmaker to write a screenplay. Ellroy looked as aghast as I imagine Mamet would upon reading your question when he said, "Do you I look like I need fuckin' help?"
posted by dobbs at 7:49 AM on May 31, 2017 [16 favorites]


I would imagine that older plays are so popular because potential audience members have heard of them and are more likely to buy a ticket based on their knowledge of the work

Same reason we have a bunch of Batman movies.
posted by Artw at 7:50 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


I once saw James Ellroy speak and someone asked him if he'd ever considered working with Tarantino or some other young hot-shot filmmaker to write a screenplay. Ellroy looked as aghast as I imagine Mamet would upon reading your question when he said, "Do you I look like I need fuckin' help?"

Ellroy is an egomaniac prick, who, to my knowledge, has never written a screenplay. He does, in fact, look to me like he needs fuckin' help.
posted by thelonius at 7:59 AM on May 31, 2017 [7 favorites]


> Same reason we have a bunch of Batman movies.

I dunno if that's the best comparison to make, given the process of permission any random person who wants to make a Batman movie will have to go through.
posted by ardgedee at 8:03 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


It is always possible to find a reasonable seeming justification to be racist.
posted by srboisvert at 8:09 AM on May 31, 2017 [21 favorites]


But we still don't have a Black Batman
posted by thelonius at 8:10 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


He has written a script, but that's not the point.

Mamet and Albee aren't looking for you to "help" them by changing the races and genders of the characters they've slaved over. People aren't performing their works 50 years later because of their lack of precision. They're no more waiting on help than Cormac McCarthy's losing sleep because he's wondering where you've gotten to with that damned tray of commas.
posted by dobbs at 8:10 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is not about color-blind casting. This is about making space for non-white actors in theater. That is why "white Othello" and "white MLK" and "white The Color Purple" are not a refutation. Color-blind casting, as nice-sounding of a term as it is, it a misnomer.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:14 AM on May 31, 2017 [36 favorites]


But we still don't have a Black Batman

His name is Black Panther, but it's a whole damn year (Feb 2018) before his movie comes out.
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:19 AM on May 31, 2017 [10 favorites]


For what it's worth, Albee himself doesn't seem to have been consistent on refusing to allow non-white actors to play these roles. This is further down in the Times article:
But eight years earlier, in 2002, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival staged “Virginia Woolf” with a black actress, Andrea Frye, playing Martha. Its director, Tim Bond, now a professor at the University of Washington, said the theater had sent the cast members’ photos and descriptive biographies to Albee, and they were approved. Mr. Bond also recalled a 2000 production of the play at Howard University with a black cast; Albee reportedly assisted with the production.
posted by treepour at 8:23 AM on May 31, 2017 [25 favorites]


His name is Black Panther

No, that's not Batman. That's Black Panther. I mean, a Black Bruce Wayne, whose Black parents were murdered, and who then became Batman. Wouldn't you like to see a Batman film with Samuel Jackson, say, instead of George Clooney? Clooney was terrible in The Dark Knight.
posted by thelonius at 8:25 AM on May 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


So this play has never been performed outside of the US and Europe?
posted by gwint at 8:32 AM on May 31, 2017 [7 favorites]


So, this has been going around in social media for awhile, and unilaterally, all of my friends who are directors/playwrights/Broadway professionals are on the side of the Albee estate. Which makes my kneejerk reaction against this a little strange for me to figure out.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:33 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


I have no opinion about whether casting a black actor as Nick is artistically good or bad. The arguments on either side are as predictable as they are irreconcilable. I have a problem when people tell other people what art they can make.

If the Albee estate wanted to forbid the producers from *calling* the play "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", or representing it as Albee's creation, that seems like their business. But I see no compelling reason they should be allowed to enforce their aesthetic preferences on any derivative work.

If people want to have discussions about when it is OK to cast who as what, that's their prerogative. But those discussions are rotten when they're tied to the exercise of legal rights and state power.
posted by andrewpcone at 8:34 AM on May 31, 2017 [3 favorites]


Well they've got a point. You've got to stay consistent in role casting or you might have white Asians in Miss Saigon, a white King Mongkut of Siam, or worse, a white Christmas Eve. It'll be anarchy! We'll have a Filipino playing both Éponine and Fantine! COMPLETE ANARCHY PEOPLE!
posted by Talez at 8:35 AM on May 31, 2017 [6 favorites]


Since he's already been raised, I think some may be surprised at what Lin-Manuel Miranda has to say about the topic.

"Authorial intent wins. Period," Lin-Manuel Miranda says in response to recent controversies involving race and casting. "As a Dramatists Guild Council member, I will tell you this. As an artist and as a human I will tell you this. Authorial intent wins."

I personally don't agree with this sentiment, but admittedly I'm not an author.
posted by cyphill at 8:37 AM on May 31, 2017 [14 favorites]


Since he's already been raised, I think some may be surprised at what Lin-Manuel Miranda has to say about the topic.

I'm not at all surprised by this, as per comment noted above. Every author of theatre that I've seen has been on Albee's side.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:39 AM on May 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


I personally don't agree with this sentiment, but admittedly I'm not an author.

Neither is the dead guy, he's a corpse.
posted by Artw at 8:40 AM on May 31, 2017 [8 favorites]


It is not, I think, entirely coincidental that we are awash in remakes, reboots, restagings, and general reworkings of media that was popular among and created by predominantly white males from earlier eras. It's great to expand casting to more PoC, but more important still to give creative voices from all walks of life a chance to actually provide their own perspectives and voices to the various media and arts productions. Simply relying on a dash of color to old white concepts is to accept those concepts as defining in ways that should be strongly questioned regardless of how "comfortable" the audience may feel going that route because appealing to familiarity in that method is to be complicit with vehicles and their driving forces that brought us to this point.

Far better to seek out and demand more access to creating new productions than just trying to put a new face on old ones by my accounting. The arts are feeding off themselves in their current form, and we'll have little left to celebrate of them unless we start better embracing the new.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:40 AM on May 31, 2017 [6 favorites]


FTR, the theater people I know are anti-Albee. Admittedly, they're not Broadway people, but they do, like, produce plays.
posted by Frowner at 8:41 AM on May 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


I personally don't agree with this sentiment, but admittedly I'm not an author.

That's okay, neither do plenty of authors who aren't playwrights.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 8:41 AM on May 31, 2017


Doesn't this possibly indicate that there's a thirst for a play like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", but about a different constellation of people who would have different turns of phrase, cultural sore points, family relationships, and interests since they would be more interesting, relatable, modern (or underserved-of-a-slightly-older-era) types of characters?

The play is good, but surely it's possible that we have more current playwrights who can create some new words to serve more modern kinds of characters? And if that's uncertain, then the risk is interesting too?

We have got to find a way to fund and otherwise support the creation of _new_ works and bring audiences to them. This is a real problem. The play's producers want to say something compelling and relevant and think they need to use a well-known play to get people to buy tickets. If they weren't so sure that an unknown play wouldn't be successful, theatre would get a whole lot more interesting.
posted by amtho at 8:54 AM on May 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


We might want authorial intent to win, but which Edward Albee should win in this case? The one who previously approved a production with a black cast or the one who denied one?* Anyway, at some point, authorial intent clearly does not win. As mentioned above, I doubt anyone here, or Lin Manuel Miranda (who is a great guy but not the grand arbiter of race in theater), would say that Shakespeare should only be performed by white English men. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was written in 1962 by someone who is now dead. At what point is the play allowed to have it's own life, to be enriched by new interpretation?

*I'm still thinking about this philosophy podcast about how weird it is that after death, people can control the actions of people in the future, and also weird, their very specific wishes on the day they authored a will take precedence over their wishes every other day of their lives.
posted by latkes at 8:57 AM on May 31, 2017 [21 favorites]


I suspect it's worth noting that the legal relationship between a playwright and the script is different than the legal relationship between a movie or tv scriptwriter and the script. The playwright owns the script and continues to own it, and grants permission for people to use it so long as the copyright lasts.

But there are so many other parties involved in movies and television that once a production studio buys a script, the original writer has very little say in what happens, unless they happen to be a big name on their own and can assert more ownership rights (Whedon or Rowling or someone like that). And they have almost no rights downstream, witness the occasional rumors of a Buffy reboot without Whedon's involvement.

So, yeah: for LMM and lots of playwrights, being a playwright means owning the script and having a say in how the show is performed going forward. It's not the same as a songwriter or a novelist: they can't really control how the audience is going to perceive or engage with the text, that's all up to their original creative effort. For them, once the thing is launched, their control ends. But for a playwright, the audience engagement is an ongoing thing, and I think that's why you get this disconnection between the playwrights and other creative types.

TLDR: Lots of fans and creators want to remix stuff and the original creators don't really have a legal leg to stand on to forbid or control it: but playwrights do.
posted by suelac at 8:58 AM on May 31, 2017 [6 favorites]


Also, I agree new theater is cool and we should support it. But lots of great theater companies do a mix of new and classic work. We're still bringing new life to Greek tragedy etc, so I think mining old work is rich and important too.
posted by latkes at 8:59 AM on May 31, 2017 [5 favorites]


And I'm not saying that this is right or not, but that if that's how the system is structured, it's not unreasonable for the estate to assert its rights and for other playwrights to respect that. The reasons why it is asserting its rights, well.
posted by suelac at 9:00 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


Shit like this is why I'm glad I mostly deal with playwrights who've been dead for four hundred years.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 9:10 AM on May 31, 2017 [5 favorites]


Lloyd Richards: What makes you think either Miller or Sherwood would stand for the nonsense I take from you? You'd better stick to Beaumont and Fletcher! They've been dead for three hundred years!

Margo Channing: ALL playwrights should be dead for three hundred years!
posted by JanetLand at 9:12 AM on May 31, 2017 [13 favorites]


We might want authorial intent to win, but which Edward Albee should win in this case? The one who previously approved a production with a black cast or the one who denied one?

I think it's really crucial here that what's being proposed is not a production with a black cast. I don't know that the Albee estate would reject such a production, and I certainly wouldn't take their side if they did. I find myself taking their side in this narrow case, because casting a black actor as Nick, much more than any of the other three characters (although George would be a problem as well) does some really weird shit to the play, and puts a lot of baggage on it that isn't really there in the script.

In particular, Martha's use of Nick's sexuality as piece to be played in her game with George and then discarded gets a bunch of really intense resonances with a black Nick. So much so that if the play specifically called for Nick to be black, I get the feeling that we might all today view the play as a really problematic throwback to earlier racial attitudes, and one that we'd be uncomfortable performing or going to see. So is it fair to make it into that play?

Put another way, given that some audience members might not know that the play was not written with a black Nick in mind, isn't it reasonable for the Albee estate, in its role as a guardian of Edward Albee's legacy, to withhold approval for a production that's going to make it look like he was a racist?

That said, this:
Which makes my kneejerk reaction against this a little strange for me to figure out.
makes perfect sense to me. As a general heuristic, "white people saying a black person can't do something are in the wrong" will serve you really, really well. I'm just not sure it works in this case.
posted by Ragged Richard at 9:29 AM on May 31, 2017 [33 favorites]


I'm trying to figure out how I feel about this, but I want to note that black people can be blond -- either naturally or artificially. We can also have light colored eyes. ☆彡
posted by lord_wolf at 9:44 AM on May 31, 2017 [31 favorites]


I would imagine that older plays are so popular because potential audience members have heard of them and are more likely to buy a ticket based on their knowledge of the work.


Or maybe ... just maybe ... because they're really good?
posted by DrAstroZoom at 10:09 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


Ragged Richard perfectly sums up my feelings here. A black Nick blows up the chemistry of the show. That's not racist.
posted by DrAstroZoom at 10:16 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


Authors - and copyright holders - have the right to make these kinds of decisions, yes. But it's a small-minded decision lacking in imagination. Their artistic legacy is poorer as a result.
posted by Emily's Fist at 10:17 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


Or maybe ... just maybe ... because they're really good?

Sure, some of them are quite good. But it does seem like theatre has sort of settled on a stable of "great" playwrights (Albee, Pinter, Tennessee Williams, Miller) whose plays are constantly produced over and over when maybe they should make way for a new generation of writers whose work you can't know is really good or bad because it's not being produced. If all you could see in 1965 was Ionesco and Shaw, Albee would have languished in obscurity.
posted by dis_integration at 10:17 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


in order for there to be meaningful copyright protection over a play, this kind of control by the estate owning that copyright makes sense.

Well, no.

Copyright is not about maintaining creative control over interpretations of your work.

Copyright is not about maintaining creative control over interpretations of your work.

People really, really struggle to get their minds around this, so I'm going to say it one more time in all caps:

COPYRIGHT IS NOT ABOUT MAINTAINING CREATIVE CONTROL OVER INTERPRETATIONS OF YOUR WORK.

Copyright is about getting paid.

If the estate of Albee gets paid a licensing fee for use of the work, the constitutional purpose of copyright has been satisfied, and more than "meaningful sense" has been made.

It turns out you can leverage IP rights to do all sorts of things, but that doesn't mean that's what they're for.

Maybe a black lead character wouldn't work in the play. Maybe it would. I don't know. Art is for finding things like that out. No one ever refuses to license on the grounds that the production would be too goddamned boring and trite and/or cast with whoever incompetent the director's banging at the moment.
posted by praemunire at 10:22 AM on May 31, 2017 [20 favorites]


A black Nick sounds problematic as fuck if the rest of the characters remain white. That said, this is my first experience hearing about these kinds of decisions from playwrights and estates, and lord knows the theater has a history of ignoring POC for "white" roles. It's been really interesting to see the different responses to this decision, and I've learned a lot.
posted by redsparkler at 10:24 AM on May 31, 2017 [12 favorites]


In practice, plays are always as much about the times in which they are produced as about the time they were written or set. We experience old movies in the present, but the performance is fixed in the past; plays are endlessly recreated in the now, so they always reflect that. I don't think authors (or their estates) necessarily see it this way, which is why the public domain is so valuable.

There is not enough diversity in theatrical roles and colorblind/non-traditional casting, along with other reimaginings, can both help that an help us reinterpret works from the past (not that all such productions will themselves be worthwhile, but so what?). But if we let the estate of August Wilson control who is cast in The Century Cycle, then we must allow the Albee estate the same privilege, even if we strenuously disagree. The sane response is to reduce the term of copyright and let social pressure at the time of the production save us from blackface or its equivalents where appropriate.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 10:26 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


Put another way, given that some audience members might not know that the play was not written with a black Nick in mind, isn't it reasonable for the Albee estate, in its role as a guardian of Edward Albee's legacy, to withhold approval for a production that's going to make it look like he was a racist?

If they didn't want people to associate Albee's legacy with racism, it wasn't a great decision to ban a production's preferred actor because he's black.
posted by Emily's Fist at 10:28 AM on May 31, 2017 [8 favorites]


And if there's other reasons than the racist one, hey, don't use the racist one.
posted by Artw at 10:29 AM on May 31, 2017


COPYRIGHT IS NOT ABOUT MAINTAINING CREATIVE CONTROL OVER INTERPRETATIONS OF YOUR WORK.
Copyright is about getting paid
.

Yes - and, for a play, getting paid can be tied up in the creative interpretations of the work. If the interpretations stray too far from the authors intent, the product itself gets diluted. Too many bad, off the mark productions can make it difficult to continue making money on that play. So copyright for a time gives the author some control over that.

I think the real issue here is tied to the larger problem with copyright in general -- it lasts for way too long. At some point, the protections of copyright should end. Is it more important for Albee's estate to continue making money in a particular way, or for all of society to be enriched by extending greater license for artistic interpretation? Copyright is (or was) designed to make it worthwhile for people to pursue art and innovation and to thereby encourage creativity. Without the protection, it would be too easy for someone to steal your ideas and profit from them, and that stifles creativity. But at some point, the copyright itself starts to stifle creativity, and the protection it offers is no longer needed. This story is one good example that can help illuminate where that line should be drawn.
posted by cubby at 10:37 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's not dumb. He wrote a play specifically about what men will do to each other in order to succceed and survive. If he'd wanted to write a play about what women will do, he would have.

Gender-swapping a play doesn't make that play "about what women will do." It can certainly add an extra dimension, but Glengarry Glen Ross is still about masculinity even if you have women playing the roles. And since men are the default gender, it can even serve to highlight those themes when they would otherwise be missed.
posted by muddgirl at 10:41 AM on May 31, 2017 [21 favorites]


"Authorial intent wins. Period," Lin-Manuel Miranda says in response to recent controversies involving race and casting. "As a Dramatists Guild Council member, I will tell you this. As an artist and as a human I will tell you this. Authorial intent wins."

And

COPYRIGHT IS NOT ABOUT MAINTAINING CREATIVE CONTROL OVER INTERPRETATIONS OF YOUR WORK.

Copyright is about getting paid.


Copyright protects the reproduction and distribution of a work rendered in a physical medium (i.e. written down, recorded, painted, etc.). Interpretation, authorial intent, dilution of product all speaks more closely to trademark than copyright, but the copyright owner can deny the use of their copyright-protected work for whatever reason they want.

However, it's an interesting question to me coming from a music background. Theater is intended to be presented live; a recording would be a film. Music over the millenia has been intended to be presented live until the advent of recorded media, at which point you could argue it diverged into the recorded work (copyright protected) and the live performance (generally not, although admittedly I'm not an expert in performance royalties). Authorial intent of this piece appears quite clear, and yet this reinterpretation is an excellent reimagining and I think we are all richer for its production.

Authorial inconsistency aside, I think that having an ironclad dictate from a dead author will ultimately weaken the work. Reinterpretation updates a work for different contexts, different times. It allows the work to live and breathe beyond the death of the author, rather than remain fixated in its place and time.
posted by Existential Dread at 10:47 AM on May 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


"Authorial intent wins. Period," Lin-Manuel Miranda

I'm a *little* surprised at this, and don't think I'd agree that authorial intent should reach as long as it does, particularly past death. But it is nice to have a voice in the discussion that has a lot of credibility when it comes to the subject of race and casting mitigating the backlash.

And as an amateur artist who's seen other people play with his work, I think I get it. There's some exciting possibilities that come with that (and for the most part I liked it and found it flattering), but it can also be terrifying or nauseating to see someone miss something you felt was part of the soul of your work.

Hamilton is what it is partly because LMM had some strong (and brilliant) ideas about the relationship between casting and character. Should anyone else engaging with his work later have arbitrary freedom to modify those? If not, some deference to Albee and estate seems defensible too. It's productive, interesting, and even important to play with the race of some roles, but it's also conceivable to me that the race of some roles may be important to something the author meant to have in their work. What the limits of respect for that might be up for debate, but even if it doesn't include indefinite lock-in, I'd hope it does include some distance from the idea that any playwright or estate rep is bad person who should feel bad for making a decision like Albee's estate did here.
posted by wildblueyonder at 10:47 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


Hamilton is what it is partly because LMM had some strong (and brilliant) ideas about the relationship between casting and character. Should anyone else engaging with his work later have arbitrary freedom to modify those?

I guess it comes down to the strength of the work on its own. If the work is strong and these ideas fundamental to its strength, then a production that modifies these would rightly fail due to its modifications, while the strength of the original work is undiminished, no? It's not like anyone would be prohibited from performing the work as originally conceived.
posted by Existential Dread at 10:51 AM on May 31, 2017


the copyright owner can deny the use of their copyright-protected work for whatever reason they want

As I said, you can leverage IP rights to do lots of things (such as to try to prevent people from using third-party ink cartridges in the printers they own). The goal of the US copyright regime was to ensure that writers got paid for the use of their work. If the estate gets paid, then there really has been "meaningful" enforcement of copyright.

Hamilton is what it is partly because LMM had some strong (and brilliant) ideas about the relationship between casting and character. Should anyone else engaging with his work later have arbitrary freedom to modify those?

Yes, if you mean "freedom from legal constraint." It might make for a terrible work, it might be a terrible political gesture (or both!). Probably it would be better to take the investors' money, put it in a pile, and burn it to keep homeless people warm one night. But so? There's a ton of terrible, terrible art out there, as well as art making terrible, terrible political gestures. That's the tradeoff.

In this case, one can't even argue that the creator's Delicate Sensibility or Reputation is being insulted, as the creator no longer has any Sensibility or Reputation left to wound. Instead, we are left with the dead hand of a bunch of trustees further mummifying American theater.
posted by praemunire at 10:59 AM on May 31, 2017


If the interpretations stray too far from the authors intent, the product itself gets diluted. Too many bad, off the mark productions can make it difficult to continue making money on that play.

(a) Copyright is not designed to protect from market judgments on a product. Except in some narrow trademark contexts, you have no property interest in controlling what other people think of your work.

(b) "The product itself gets diluted?" People are sneaking in and making alterations to the original text?
posted by praemunire at 11:02 AM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


I will bet 20 American dollars that the vast majority of people who are applauding Edward Albee's estate for maintaining the author's perceived authorial intent are also the people who argue that there's no such thing as cultural appropriation and that everything should be up for remixing, reinventing, and reincorporating. Unless, of course, a famous white guy did it. Then it's perfect as is and should never be touched.
posted by Errant at 11:14 AM on May 31, 2017 [13 favorites]


No, that's not Batman. That's Black Panther. I mean, a Black Bruce Wayne, whose Black parents were murdered, and who then became Batman. Wouldn't you like to see a Batman film with Samuel Jackson, say, instead of George Clooney? Clooney was terrible in The Dark Knight.

Undeniably so. Oddly enough, around the time Clooney played Batman, I was fond of throwing out Denzel Washington as my dream casting to rescue the Batman franchise from its execrable excesses. Honestly, I still think Washington would work as a late-career Batman in something similar (but not as thoroughly played out) as Miller's Dark Knight Returns. But now that I'm kinda burned out on Batman (Lego excluded) and a lot of what he has come to represent in our culture, I'm honestly more excited by the timely and forward-thinking Afrofuturism embodied by a character like Black Panther. /derail
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:23 AM on May 31, 2017 [7 favorites]


The goal of the US copyright regime was to ensure that writers got paid for the use of their work.

Given that you mentioned the constitutional purpose of copyright earlier, I think it's relevant that, according to the Constitution, the of the US copyright regime was to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, and per the Constitution, the way to do that was to give, for a limited time, exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. to creators of original works.

Repeating three times the assertion that "exclusive Right" is about getting paid, rather than exercising some other form of control doesn't make it a fact. That's just your opinion.

Where do you find in the Constitution an explicit statement that the goal of copyright is to ensure payment, or that exclusive right to a work comprises nothing more than the right to make money off it?
posted by layceepee at 11:47 AM on May 31, 2017 [6 favorites]


Since women were forbidden the stage Shakespeare's plays were all originally written to be performed by male actors dressed as and playing women. Contemporary audiences would've known this, and there are deliberate references to this kind of crossgender-casting all over the damn place in the plays.

Now women can play any roles they want, or at least casting directors want, in Shakespeare productions. Whatever dramatic nuance has been lost by NOT casting, say, Viola with a man playing a woman playing a woman, that nuance does not outweigh the value of expanding opportunities for female actors in Shakespearean theater.
posted by nicebookrack at 12:10 PM on May 31, 2017 [7 favorites]



Given that you mentioned the constitutional purpose of copyright earlier, I think it's relevant that, according to the Constitution, the of the US copyright regime was to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, and per the Constitution, the way to do that was to give, for a limited time, exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. to creators of original works.

Repeating three times the assertion that "exclusive Right" is about getting paid, rather than exercising some other form of control doesn't make it a fact. That's just your opinion.

Where do you find in the Constitution an explicit statement that the goal of copyright is to ensure payment, or that exclusive right to a work comprises nothing more than the right to make money off it?


Well, by the same token, how is the creator of the original work under discussion benefiting from the exclusive Right to their respective Writings? The creator in this instance is dead. The work is well-established in the literature of theater. In function, copyright allowed authors to profit from their works by exchanging permission to reproduce and sell for cash. Permission can be revoked at any time, but the long life of copyright at present is a naked attempt by rights-holders (e.g. Disney) to continue to profit from the copyrights of the original creators of various Mickey Mouse cartoons or whatever.

If the exclusive right is to exercise authorial control over the work, then it makes sense to have copyright exist until the original creator's death, or in perpetuity, but this sort of half-life copyright of life plus 70 years or whatever is really intended for estates to continue to profit after the creator's death.
posted by Existential Dread at 12:29 PM on May 31, 2017


By all accounts, Albee was not a pleasant man. And everybody above talking about the need for increased visibility for POC in theatre are 100% right—both the visibility of diverse performers in "traditional" (i.e., old, white-people) shows, as well as opportunities for new works by diverse writers and directors.

There are crucial, future-shaping conversations to have about diversity in theatre. It's absolutely critical. And if this debate helps to move that conversation forward, great.

But I don't think it's sufficient to say the Albee estate is racist. Others have made good arguments to that point above. I just want to say this: anyone who has studied directing knows, many student directors are told, "it's all about putting your interpretation onto the work." Throw out stage directions, reconceive the work, whatever you want. That's what we're up against, as writers.

As a blanket statement, I don't think POC should be blocked from "white" roles. But, as a fellow playwright and Dramatists' Guild member, I stand by the authorial intent argument. It's too important. Unlike television and film writers, playwrights have historically sacrificed economic security in exchange for retaining ownership and creative control of our work.

This stuff is messy. And it pushes all of our buttons as people, as artists, as audience members.

I'm not being as eloquent as I'd hoped, but I think this is a super-important conversation, and I hope we can all accept that some would have opposing views, and it's not because we're racist or want to exclude black people from theatre.
posted by Zephyrial at 12:50 PM on May 31, 2017 [6 favorites]


It strikes me that in some ways this functions exactly like the lock-in that white Americans have in the economy. For hundreds of years, it was extremely difficult for PoC playwrights to exist, much less have their work become part of the 'canon'. With the result that if this sort of control is applied, modern day black actors will have extremely impoverished careers, not having any chance at productions of the classics (and the familiar favorites are going to be the ones most often produced regionally when they are building their careers.). Yet people can just shrug and say 'well, it just wouldn't be fair to give up some control, my family earned this, too bad'.

Fortunately, not all estates are this dickish and there are at least some classics safely out of copyright hell (if not many beyond Shakespeare), but I can't help but side eye the smiling people explaining how it's just right that black actors will never have a chance at these roles.
posted by tavella at 1:28 PM on May 31, 2017 [11 favorites]


I think there's actually multiple discussions happening here, and they're kind of getting mixed up, which is maybe why this is such a hard question to handle.

1) How long should copyright/authorial control last? What is the purpose of intellectual property? How long should it last? What should it be able to control?

2) What do we do about the fact that many of the works considered "classics" were produced and written for white audiences, and that while new plays are being written every day, the "classics" are a bigger draw for both actors and audiences? That if every estate did this, it would be hard for actors of color to get roles?

3) What is the difference between color blind and color conscious casting in regards to executing authorial intent?

4) What should this estate have done?


Personally, I'm of the opinion that transformative works make the world go 'round, but I'm also sympathetic to the idea that estates should continue to get paid after death. I wish there were a way where you could hold authorial control in your lifetime, but after your death you just get paid.
posted by corb at 1:49 PM on May 31, 2017 [8 favorites]


Copyright is not about maintaining creative control over interpretations of your work.

Copyright is not about maintaining creative control over interpretations of your work.

People really, really struggle to get their minds around this, so I'm going to say it one more time in all caps:

COPYRIGHT IS NOT ABOUT MAINTAINING CREATIVE CONTROL OVER INTERPRETATIONS OF YOUR WORK.

Copyright is about getting paid.

If the estate of Albee gets paid a licensing fee for use of the work, the constitutional purpose of copyright has been satisfied, and more than "meaningful sense" has been made.

It turns out you can leverage IP rights to do all sorts of things, but that doesn't mean that's what they're for.


Yeah...arguing with someone on the Internet (especially about legal stuff without being a lawyer), but this is so wrong I feel it should be challenged lest it somehow becomes incorporated into a SovCit-like movement w/r/t copyrights.

Per the US Constitution (since this in the US): Copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Now, getting paid is one way to promote such progress (and in today's hyper-capitalistic society, probably the easiest way since people need to eat, to have shelter, to buy supplies, etc.) but "getting paid", although mentioned, is not the raison d'être for copyright in the US.

The rights granted by copyright are, per US Code (italics added to highlight those, IMO, relevant here):
-CITE-
17 USC Sec. 106 01/03/2007

-EXPCITE-
TITLE 17 - COPYRIGHTS
CHAPTER 1 - SUBJECT MATTER AND SCOPE OF COPYRIGHT

-HEAD-
Sec. 106. Exclusive rights in copyrighted works

-STATUTE-
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under
this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of
the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or
phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted
work
;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted
work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by
rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and
choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other
audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly
;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and
choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or
sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion
picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted
work publicly; and

(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted
work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
(on preview, what layceepee said, but with sources).

(a) Copyright is not designed to protect from market judgments on a product. Except in some narrow trademark contexts, you have no property interest in controlling what other people think of your work.

And that's not so clear cut once you factor in moral rights. For instance, if the author or estate (permitted by Article 6 paragraph 2 of the Berne Convention) believe a change would be an "alteration, distortion, or mutilation of the work that is 'prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation'", they may have a solid case to prevent such changes.

(And none of this is to state that this situation is moral or just...rarely is the intersection of what is legal, what is moral, and what is just as large as it should be.)
posted by MikeKD at 2:03 PM on May 31, 2017 [9 favorites]


People are making good points about how casting changes the nature of the idea being expressed, but that could equally apply to music. You don’t need someone’s permission to cover their song; you just give them notice that it’s happening and send them some money. It’s a compulsory license. That feels like the right balance — to acknowledge and credit the author’s efforts without giving that author veto power over your own interpretation. It is, to me, an accident of law that we acknowledge this for songs but not for other creative works.

Joan Jett covered a lot of glam-rock songs that had been penned by men. She changed the nature of those songs simply by gender-swapping the lyrics — suddenly the women in these songs had agency and confidence that traditionally had only been bestowed on rock star dudes. That reinterpretation is a major aspect of why Jett was so refreshing at that time and in that place. Do I think any of the composers of those songs would have vetoed their performance by a female lead singer? Probably not. But I’m still glad we didn’t have to find out.

Creative works are not avatars of their creators. An author or composer can control that initial push that sends them out onto the ocean, but they do not have the power to control the currents, and we should not act as if they do. All I care about is that the artist get a fair proportion of the money that changes hands over the consumption and remixing of that art, and even that has an expiration date on it.
posted by savetheclocktower at 2:30 PM on May 31, 2017 [10 favorites]



>Artists don't have a right to veto power over the interpretation or presentation of their work

Well, clearly they do.

Well, dobbs, clearly mhoye was referring to a moral right, and in general, in fact, they also do not have that legal right—if I publish an essay contending that a black actor is perfectly suitable for Nick, Albee in life, and the Albee estate after his death, would have no power to block that, wait for it, interpretation of the work. They may have the legal right to prevent certain kinds of presentations, but that is obviously far from the point mhoye was making.
posted by kenko at 2:35 PM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


I wish there were a way where you could hold authorial control in your lifetime, but after your death you just get paid.

Some countries have compulsory licensing for some (all?) types of patents. I'm not aware of any country that does compulsory licensing for copyrights, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen if the political will were there. (Granted, that's a very big if.)
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:45 PM on May 31, 2017


It is beyond frustrating to see the Albee estate exclude POC actors from roles in WAoVW or to see the Beckett estate block female actors from roles in Waiting For Godot. So I fully understand the temptation to take that frustration and channel it into an argument that the authorial intention of playwrights should have no more weight than that of content creators for other media, but please resist that urge.

As somebody who has worked extensively with playwrights, I swear to god, that's not the answer. We should definitely be placing pressure on the estates of the Big Name Playwrights who are using their power to perpetuate racism or sexism to bring about a reversal of those decisions, but we shouldn't be overturning many years of hard fought for labour laws put in place by unions which overwhelmingly work to protect new and emerging playwrights with little or no power within the industry to protect themselves.

Theatre writing operates within constraints unique to the artform and the rules protecting playwrights are designed to reflect that and to allow them to build careers despite those constraints. Don't dissolve the legal protections currently enjoyed by POC playwrights because the Albee estate is abusing them to target POC actors. Focus on the abuser. The Beckett ruling about "no women" got overturned in court, so it is possible to fight back against rights abuses without unilaterally removing people's rights.
posted by the latin mouse at 2:56 PM on May 31, 2017 [9 favorites]


There is SUCH a race problem in the professional theater nowadays that if WAOVW can't be staged without an all-white cast, it's time to stop producing it anywhere for a good long while.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:33 PM on May 31, 2017 [7 favorites]


Meant to add that the all-female production of Julius Caesar I was in a few years ago was probably the most fun I've ever had on stage.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:36 PM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


Also also, check out castandloose on Tumblr and Twitter (or try to catch one of their lives shows in New York) to read and hear some of the most hilariously racist, sexist, and just plain dumbest casting notices out there.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:49 PM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


One thing to note with the LMM quote, he was being asked about casting POC roles with white people, not the other way around. Would he still be so insistent the other way? Who knows.
posted by kmz at 4:55 PM on May 31, 2017 [3 favorites]


Authorial intent, it's so old school. Goodness, Leavis was dismantling this idea in the twenties.

Personally, I'm not all-in like the New Critics were, but the idea that you can control interpretation is so ... Sisyphean.

Interpretation happens inside the reader, imho, and the author's role in that is as collaborator at best, starting inspiration at worst. Readers do not have a duty to try and ascertain an author's intent, nor to subscribe to it once discovered.

Indeed, the whole idea ignores the role of culture and society in shaping interpretations - and posits a kind of static, captial-M Meaning for a text, unchanging and unweathered like Gibraltar. And we know that's not true, we have a bazillion examples of meaning and interpretation of a text changing over time!

If so, then whatever Albee's intentions were with regard to Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, they remain an ever-receding horizon, attempts to reach them being academic and ultimately fruitless. This isn't some kind of nihilist or absurdist "destruction of meaning" gambit; on the contrary, it gives a text a sea of meaning on which to float on, sail on, navigate through, captained by a range of readers with varying abilities and foci. As it ever was, and as it ever will be.

Attempts to purport otherwise are, to me, vain, even petty. Don't take meaning away from people, or try to impose your own. Let the text be wielded however it may.
posted by smoke at 5:57 PM on May 31, 2017 [4 favorites]


I don't know. My recent activity just showed me The Handmaid's Tale, and it occurred to me with a whoosh of visceral response how I'd feel if someone tried to "adapt" that to say, hey, Gilead isn't so bad after all! So clearly I do think there are some cases where authorial intent really matters, but I just really don't want it abused by assholes.
posted by corb at 7:53 PM on May 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


if I publish an essay contending that a black actor is perfectly suitable for Nick, Albee in life, and the Albee estate after his death, would have no power to block that, wait for it, interpretation of the work

Your essay would be your opinion and no one would confuse it with an "interpretation" of Woolf. No one's mistaking your essay for Albee's play and you wouldn't be profiting from his name. You'd be profiting (if you were) from your essay. These are not even remotely the same thing.

Hell, why make it an essay? Why not write a play about how great you think Woolf would be with a black cast. Then, produce it. You'd be staging your play, not Albee's or even an "interpretation" of Albee.

Lots of art gets created this way. Joyce Cary writes Mister Johnson in 1939. Twenty years later, Chinua Achebe reads it and thinks, "Fuck this, this is not the Nigeria I know!" And writes Things Fall Apart and the world is a better place.

As Mr Mamet says, "Go and do likewise, gents." Or, you know, don't. Condescend on the internet instead.
posted by dobbs at 7:54 PM on May 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


Hell, why make it an essay? Why not write a play about how great you think Woolf would be with a black cast. Then, produce it. You'd be staging your play, not Albee's or even an "interpretation" of Albee.

People always say this. "If you don't like it, make your own thing." But just as lots of art gets created in this manner, as you say, lots of other art is about engaging with your culture as it exists and as it came before you. What you're arguing is that artists of color should be limited or cut off from this vital vein of creativity whenever a white authority deems it appropriate. You keep talking about the duty of the writer of color to make something original, but what of the actor of color? Must they become playwrights and directors and producers all at once, simply in order to engage with some section of their craft while being barred from engaging with the rites and history of their vocation whenever others deem it heterodox? This is the epitome of having to be twice as good to get half as far.

Why is it ok for anyone, even the author, to say, "Others are allowed to have this artistic experience, but you are not, because you are the wrong color"? Why don't black people get to try and find out what being Nick feels like?
posted by Errant at 10:10 PM on May 31, 2017 [9 favorites]


latkes: "At what point is the play allowed to have it's own life, to be enriched by new interpretation?"

In 69 years when the copyright expires.

latkes: "I think mining old work is rich and important too."

No argument from me on this one; current copyright terms are ridiculous. A return to a couple decades would allow mashups/reboots/interpretations of works while they are are still culturally relevant.
posted by Mitheral at 10:50 PM on May 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


I don't know. My recent activity just showed me The Handmaid's Tale, and it occurred to me with a whoosh of visceral response how I'd feel if someone tried to "adapt" that to say, hey, Gilead isn't so bad after all!

You know, it was a major bummer for me with the new Hulu series adaptation, that they made the Commander and his Wife look so young, hot, and glamorous. Many of the Handmaids and other women also look like they're wearing makeup.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:33 AM on June 1, 2017


My recent activity just showed me The Handmaid's Tale, and it occurred to me with a whoosh of visceral response how I'd feel if someone tried to "adapt" that to say, hey, Gilead isn't so bad after all! So clearly I do think there are some cases where authorial intent really matters, but I just really don't want it abused by assholes.
I think it might be legal to do that, actually: no court ever ruled on The Wind Done Gone, but my understanding is that a lot of legal scholars thought that it would have been ruled to be acceptable as a parody (which is to say a work that comments on and critiques) Gone With the Wind. At least with written literature, I think you may actually be more likely to get away with a work that explicitly changes the meaning of the original in order to make a point.

I dunno. I get where the Albee estate is coming from, but I also feel like this reinforces my general sense that most American theater is not especially relevant to my life. I'm not sure that you want to broadcast that what you do is photo-realistically depict the gender relations of upper-middle-class people in 1962, because the audience for that may be small and getting smaller.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:46 AM on June 1, 2017 [6 favorites]


The Handmaid's Tale is an interesting comparison here. The handmaids in the book are all white, because Gilead is explicitly racist and based on an obsession with white babies. However, the showrunner decided to cast several people of color as handmaids. On one hand, there is a problem with that: it erases Gilead's racism to a degree, which is an important part of the book. However, I think the casting change results in a rich reading of the story - Samira Wiley's depiction of Moira adds much to the character.

Anyway, when they asked the showrunner why he made this decision, he said: “What’s the difference between making a television show about racists and making a racist television show? I don’t know that there is any apparent difference when you’re watching.”

I think he's right. It's productive to remember that making a work where racism or whites-only belief is a component (in that you explicitly only hire white actors in major parts) itself has a racist outcome (in that your art makes no room for non-white actors to work or exist). If you're writing a work to criticize racists, couldn't you do more to dismantle racism by just... making space for people of color in your work?

There are sometimes good reasons to make art that is mostly or only about white people. But I don't think it should be the default, as it currently is. I think artists and producers should be really thoughtful and critical of that impulse.
posted by Emily's Fist at 6:55 AM on June 1, 2017 [16 favorites]


I've thought about this a lot, because I am a playwright, and I also knew (and disliked) Albee.

I've come to the conclusion that I don't especially care about the details in this case. I don't care whether a black actor would complicate Nick, or violate Albee's wishes, or whatever.

And I don't care because, at the moment, theater, despite its supposed liberalism, is a world that consistently marginalizes and excludes the voices of people of color. And every single time, there is some perfectly reasonable reason, again and again, why a role must be played by a white person.

I don't believe that protecting the Albee estate when it wants to exclude black actors will do anything for plays that should have people of color in it, but are instead cast with white people, because it hasn't and doesn't. Roles that are meant, or are appropriate for, people of color are cast with white people all the time. I mean to a ludicrous, near-comical extent, except it is hard to find it funny because it is excluding people from work and excluding their voice from theater.

I am of the opinion that this supposed right of a playwright to decide the race of their cast member isn't a right at all. It's a privilege, and it's a privilege almost exclusively enjoyed by white playwrights and white actors. Even when I have written roles that were exclusively intended for people of color, I have been overridden by the producers, and somehow this supposed mechanism for enforcing the will of the playwright was not there for that.

I do not especially care about the little details, the little artistic questions, that allow people to justify not casting people of color. I don't care about a system of privilege that excludes people of color. Such a system is, in fact, racist, even if each little step of it can be internally artistically justified.

I agree copyright is too long, and Albee's estate should not have control of new productions of a dead dude's work. But that's not the core of this problem, because even if all plays went into the public domain five years after they were written, we would still see roles overwhelming cast with white people, especially roles written for people of color.

The core of the problem is that theater is, at least in casting, a racist institution. And, worse, it is a racist institution that has privileged artistic justifications for being racist. And, as a playwright, this disgusts me, and I have no energy to engage in discussions of artistic merit where the real-world outcome is the exclusion of people of color.
posted by maxsparber at 10:15 AM on June 1, 2017 [15 favorites]


I'd ask that you not make assumptions about what I did or did not do with my own productions.
posted by maxsparber at 12:41 PM on June 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


I am not clear on where this presumption is coming from that these mechanisms are equally available and effective based on income, race, and region. They are not.

I am also not sure why you feel comfortable explaining to a professional playwright what he must have failed to do without knowing for a fact what was or was not done. If you are the habit of explaining other people's experiences to them, this is one you would do well to disabuse yourself of.

Let me also point out that this is one of the way racism goes unaddressed: From the presumption that there must be an effective mechanism of addressing it, and so, if it occurred, it must somehow be the fault of the people who brought it up not doing enough.
posted by maxsparber at 12:47 PM on June 1, 2017 [9 favorites]


We know playwrights have some control over their work

"Some control" is vastly different from "absolute control over casting choices in every circumstance." This was a work for hire for a theater in Omaha. There was a role that required an Indian voice over actor and I did not find out until he week before the play opened that they had failed to find one and so instead had given his dialogue to a white actor.

I was not then, nor am I now, a member of the Playwrights Guild; I have been in the past and have found the extent of their ability to do things consists of writing angry letters. I could conceivably have demanded the show be cancelled, but, unlike the dead Albee who enjoys hundreds of productions of his plays per year, I do not not have the luxury of simply shutting down a show at the last minute, and am not sure how I would go about doing so.

I entered the project in good faith and could not have been less ambiguous about my requirements. These were ignored and the theater failed to inform me until it was too late. This is frequently what happens, and the truth is most working playwrights only have the ability to respond the way I did, by choosing not to work with the theater again in the future.

But, again, we are getting tied up in the specifics. The fact is variations of this story play out constantly, and, even more often, a different story plays out, one in which theater theater has no constraints in casting yet casts white people anyway, or is working with a public domain play in which the races of the characters are unambiguously not white, and yet they cast white actors anyway.

It is an endemic problem, and playwrights haven't done a whole hell of a lot to solve the problem. They certainly don't by siding with some vague concept of authorial intention that rarely, if ever, benefits non-whites, but somehow always justifies a circumstance in which a POC doesn't get a role.
posted by maxsparber at 1:52 PM on June 1, 2017 [8 favorites]


This was a work for hire...

Well then you were quite disingenuous with your original post, were you not?

If it was a work for hire, you didn't own it. Someone paid you (or bartered with you or what have you) for you to write a play FOR THEM. It's their property, not yours. Such is the nature of work for hire and it's no surprise they did what they wanted with it. If you don't like those circumstances, don't accept work for hire. "But I gotta eat!" Yeah, So did Albee and August Wilson and every other playwright before they became a known quantity.

You may feel that having to choose between food and no food is no choice at all, but you'd be wrong. Any writer who doesn't understand that is in for a life of misery. It's about the only universal rule for anyone who wants to get paid to make art.
posted by dobbs at 3:20 PM on June 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


You may feel that having to choose between food and no food is no choice at all, but you'd be wrong. Any writer who doesn't understand that is in for a life of misery.

Tacking really hard into maxsparber's "privilege" argument, I see. That's an interesting artistic choice.
posted by Etrigan at 3:27 PM on June 1, 2017 [10 favorites]


It's a weird feature of market capitalism that your moral rights as an artist depend almost entirely on how the work was paid for.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 3:43 PM on June 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


Well then you were quite disingenuous with your original post, were you not?

No. I do own it. Why don't you try asking me instead of telling me, as you obviously don't know how playwrighting works. It was a commission; there are almost no circumstances in which a playwright relinquishes ownership of the play.
posted by maxsparber at 12:29 AM on June 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


You know something, I'm done responding to you, as you're having a discussion with yourself rooted entirely in Dunning-Kruger, and it's an extraordinarily frustrating discussion to have. You might want to recalibrate how you converse.
posted by maxsparber at 12:32 AM on June 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


Couldn't the producers just call it a transformative work, point to the estate's own statement and say, "See? Even they agree it's not the author's work," and then (legally speaking) tell the estate to go fuck themselves?
posted by Sys Rq at 12:54 AM on June 2, 2017


There's been quite a lot of discussion about this here in London. I think the bottom line is that if we automatically exclude from period drama any actor who can't pass as white and cis, then we miss out on some amazing performances. Stories stultify if they're never told in new ways.

Within the past year-and-a-bit we've had a female King of England and a black Prince of Denmark on the London Stage. Perhaps more relevantly to this discussion, in 2013 Talawa Theatre Company staged Arthur Miller's All My Sons with the Kellers as an African-American family, and the Miller estate didn't make a peep.

(Also, I think Chiwetel Eijofor would be a great Batman.)
posted by Pallas Athena at 8:05 AM on June 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


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