Featured Post

Let's End the Specious Argument of Beloved Dead Masters

In particular, let's end the "argument" between Adler and Strasberg.  There is no substance to their false reasoning upon whi...

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

WHY ARE BLACK ENGLISH ACTORS CAST AS ICONIC AFRO-AMERICANS IF TOM STOPPARD IS JEWISH?

"Leopoldstadt deserves a Broadway transfer, but New York audiences will hardly need Gretl to deliver her straight-to-auditorium explanation of what a bris is.  -- For all its Viennese setting, Leopoldstadt is thus a profoundly English play," wrote Kate Maltby in The New York Review of Books in her review, Tom Stoppard's Theatre of Memory.      
                           Link to the review in NYR Daily:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/02/14/tom-stoppards-theatre-of-memory/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR Tyranny

These two Jewish 21st-century English-speaking politicians have a very similar ancestral history,  superficially, they have similar characteristics, but I think that the deep-rooted dissimilar cultures that raised them made them recognizably, insurmountably, steeped in those very specific different cultural experiences.












House passes historic legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime
The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, a federal hate crime, was passed and signed into law in 2020 -- so recently that the word antilynching is considered a misspelled word on the internet.  The expressive  historical connection to this one tip of the iceberg fact is so brutal, bloody, anxiety-ridden with fear, rage, that if it doesn't appear in our cultural expression, if it is suppressed in any way when it is lived every day to the moment you're reading these words, I think that that in itself is a crime.

Americans and the English speak the same language and understand each other's culture, but understanding isn't synonymous with being steeped in it, having it carved, literally and figuratively, into one's DNA.  There are English cultural behaviors that are foreign to Americans and would be confusingly out of place in our Congress or if performed in a "profoundly English" play on Broadway.  The talented performances of Chiwetel Ejiofor, David Oyelowo, Daniel Kaluuya and Cynthia Erivo were, for me, also confusingly foreign and out of place.  Missing or erased from their performances, not  because they haven't experienced racism, but because they only understand American racism intellectually -- that specific rage born of a specific relentless exclusion from safety to a specific everyday expectation of harm -- finds expression on the faces of all African-Americans, from toddlers to the elderly, and we Americans, all of us, are familiar with that expression, that behavior, and when it's absent from a Black face, we recognize that as well.  Nevertheless, on a personal note, even though I recognized what I thought was misguided if not worse, cynical, casting of the English actors mentioned above, about a year ago, during an audition rehearsal, an African-American actor pointed out to me that my criticisms, my clamping the lid on his manner, on his expression of the text and his physical behavior was whitewashing (my word) his concept of the character.  I'm indebted to him.  Consider how often my error makes its way into performances.

The following two scenes from the film of August Wilson's play, Fences, directed by Denzel Washington are examples of how profoundly American that drama is, and how expressively American its characters are.


 The talent exhibited here is not a rarity of the talent, both active and dormant of African-American writers, directors, actors.  I wrote, perhaps obliquely, on 6/16/17 and 3/17/19, Diversity, Talent, Technique, Opportunity and Samuel L. Jackson about this topic.  I'll be more direct now:  It is pure ignorance of acting technique for any director, producer or actor to describe the traditional training of actors in England as classical, and by comparison or inference to describe actor training in the U.S. as anything other than classical; notwithstanding the divergent distortions of Stanislavski sometimes taught here.   Further, whether in England or the U.S., institutions like RADA or Juilliard, universities or studios, charge exorbitant tuition fees that exclude the majority of both our populations.  Is elitist too harsh a word?  Naaa, I don't think so.  A lot of talent has crossed my threshold only to quit in despair because they couldn't afford to continue even with the discount of my already lower than average fees.  Add to that the bottleneck of scarce opportunity to audition, let alone perform.

Once more, as I've already offered, if space will be provided, I'll teach anywhere at Uta's rate as described by Charles Nelson Reilly in my 12/10/13 post, The Life of Reilly.  I welcome discussion and I plan to visit this topic in future posts.

No comments:

Post a Comment