Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Shakespeare In Black and White
LEAD: The issues raised on ?Black.White? have the resonance they do for a lot of reasons. One is our country?s unusual history in the theater. For 75 years, whites played blacks on stage ? from Edwin Booth?s Othello in 1849 to Al Jolson in ?The Jazz Singer.? It was a common practice. No one said anything. Then the world changed and for the past 35 years, African-Americans have taken on traditionally white roles on stage. Now a backlash has started over that. Producer Richard Paul is working on documentary with the Folger Shakespeare Library that will look at Shakespeare in American Life. We have an excerpt from that program now that looks at the issue of whites playing blacks and blacks playing whites in Shakespeare.
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First thing you need to understand for context is this: In the mid-1800s, if you were a seamstress or a longshoreman, Shakespeare?s plots and characters were not strangers to you. Othello and Desdemona were as well known then Homer and Marge or Tony and Carmella are today. But when you went to the theater, more likely than not, the Othello you saw wasn't this.
[CLIP ? Craig Wallace performing ?Othello?]
WALLACE: ?Yet I?ll not shed her blood, / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth as monumental alabaster.?
It was, more likely this
[ACTORS PERFORMING ?Dar?s De Money?]
JAKE: ?The plot is: Othello, a jealous Moor ? runs off wid Darsdemoney. (Pete heard gagging) Seizes her! Strangles here. Ha!
PETE (coughs) I guess I?ll play Othello!?
{FADE AND LEAVE UNDER}
One of the most popular forms of entertainment among working class whites in the mid-1800s were Minstrel shows ? that?s white men in blackface playing stereotypes of African American culture. Francesca Royster is associate professor of English at DePaul University.
ROYSTER: ?Shakespeare?s American life is very closely intertwined with the performance of minstrel shows.?
[ACTORS PERFORMING ?The Ethiopian Burlesque Othello?]
ACTOR 1: If for my wife ? your daughter ? you are looking, You?ll find her in the kitchen, busy cooking.
ACTOR 2: Vat?s dat you say! Mine daughter is your wife? You dam black rascal. I will have your life.
{FADE AND LEAVE UNDER}
Professor Royster says these Shakespeare parodies allowed Americans to explore some of the toughest issues around race.
ROYSTER: ?Struggles around fears of miscegenation ? issues of slavery for example, what to do with white immigrants like Germans and Irish. How are those immigrants integrated into the binary opposition of black and white.
She says this material was drained of its danger when it was put on stage and mocked.
[ACTOR SINGING FROM The Ethiopian Burlesque Othello]
ACTOR: (singing) ?I love my Desdemona, Away, away. And hand in hand we?ll take a stand to spend Brabantio?s money. Away, Away, Away down south in Dixie.?
{FADE AND LEAVE UNDER}
But while there may be things for an historian to appreciate about minstrel shows, the fact This was white people with cork on their faces acting out ugly racial stereotypes. That?s probably one of many reasons why the African-American sense of ownership when it comes to Shakespeare has been supremely conflicted. Caleen Sinnette Jennings is a professor of theater of the American University in Washington, DC. She also wrote a play called ?Playing Juliet/Casting Othello?
JENNINGS: ?To be a black American woman saying Juliet?s lines, ?Thou knowest the mask of night is on my?? and crows and references to the blackness being evil and ugly and bad. Any person of color is going to have to wrestle with what that means and how they feel about that.?
And yet, Professor Jennings says, it?s the beauty and mystery of Shakespeare?s work that even while it can oppress, it has also served as a foot-in-the-door.
JENNINGS: ?Shakespeare has often been used by African Americans as a way of proving worthiness.?
[MUSIC ? EARLY 18TH CENTURY INSTRUMENTAL ?PARLOR? SONG]
The earliest example of this came in 1827. Slavery had just ended in New York and a production of Richard The Third opened at an ice cream parlor in lower Manhattan. Shane White is an Australian historian who?s written about this era.
WHITE: ?Here?s a bunch of blacks, many of whom were ex-slaves, performing Shakespeare onstage. Blacks who are struggling to make ends meet, and what do they do when they become free? Well many of them were trying to learn how to read and write, and some of them, in this case, would go out and perform Shakespeare.?
They were called The African Grove Theater Company and their play was so successful that a rival, white theater owner had the actors arrested ? I guess you could say for ?Performing While Black.? One of the Grove?s performers, Ira Aldridge ended up going to England, where he lured people into the theater thinking they were going to see a minstrel show and then blew them away with his performance of Othello ? that?s the real Othello. Shakespeare?s Othello.
WHITE: ?Aldridge becomes the most famous black performer of the 19th Century.?
He?d also play Shylock and Richard III in white face. It would be 150 years before a black man played a white Shakespeare role in the US That happened when Joseph Papp created Shakespeare in the Park in New York in the 1970s. Papp instituted what-was-called ?colorblind casting? allowing actors like James Earl Jones to play King Lear.
JONES: ?None does offend, none, I say, none; I'll able 'em: / Take that of me, my friend, who have the power / To seal the accuser's lips.?
JENNINGS: ?It was revolutionary to think that a black actor could say these lines and the play have nothing to do with racial tension or racial issues. It was simply the fact that this black actor was a person. What a revolutionary idea.?
Colorblind casting was the thing to do for 10 years. But in the 1990s, there was a backlash.
WILSON: ?I would much rather that they do art that is of their own specific ethnic or racial background [audience booing and jeering].?
In 1997, the playwright August Wilson waged a campaign excoriating colorblind casting. He suggested that blacks playing whites was really no different from a minstrel show where whites played blacks.
WILSON: ?It denies the individual, standing on the stage, representing another race of people, it denies him his own culture.?
Wilson felt that if producers could hire black actors for any role, they would stop funding plays by black playwrights about authentically black characters.
WILSON: ?You?re utilizing black talent, and you?re empowering black talent, if you will, at the expense of black people, at the expense of black theater.?
If Whites want to possess their culture, he suggested, let them. Now that African-Americans have their own cultural capital, they don?t need to borrow Shakespeare. Kim Hall is a professor at Fordham University. She says she hears this argument all the time.
HALL: ?This kind of idea that; A. it doesn?t belong to African Americans and from more ? I don?t know what to say ? political and progressive circles this idea that you should be working on African American authors.?
Who does Shakespeare belong to in America? It seems glib and easy at first to say ?Shakespeare belongs to everyone.? But in a way, the African-American experience with Shakespeare may be the best evidence that it?s true. As Maya Angelou has famously said ? speaking here on the BBC?s ?Everywoman? program.
ANGELOU: ?That must -- gotta be a black girl who wrote that. ?When, in disgrace with fortune, in men's eyes I, all alone bemoan my outcast state. And trouble a deaf heaven with my bootless cries and look upon myself and curse my fate.? See? That's a black girl [laughs]?
For Studio 360, I?m Richard Paul.
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OUTRO: Thanks for Craig Wallace and Morgan Duncan, who performed the minstrel versions of Shakespeare. Richard Paul is working with the Folger Library on a documentary about Shakespeare in America. It will air next year.
