Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 269
Hamilton in his own 2015 hit play, Hamilton, and the
late Robin Williams could perform as a Bengal tiger—
all without compromising the integrity of the theatrical
experience. Such casting considerations now radically
bend gender distinctions, cross racial lines, and span
age ranges and living species.
The New York Shakespeare Festival, founded by Joseph
Papp, has been a leader in nontraditional casting. Its productions
have starred, among others, Angela Bassett as
Lady Macbeth, Morgan Freeman as Petruchio, and Denzel
Washington as Richard III. In Los Angeles, the black
actress Fran Bennett played King Lear and in Oregon,
the Oregon Shakespeare Festival recruits and engages
an acting company in which a full one-third of the members
are non-Caucasian. Black, Asian, and Hispanic
actors are often cast in American productions today as
Elizabethan royalty, French aristocrats, Greek gods,
or Judeo-Christian Bible figures, thus dispensing fully
with stereotypes of received images.
Cross-gender casting is also commonplace in the current
era in most countries, as in the case of Bennett’s King
Lear in Los Angeles and Mark Rylance’s Cleopatra in
London and his Olivia (in Twelfth Night), which earned
him a Best Featured Actor Tony Award on Broadway in
2014. By now, female Hamlets, Prosperos, Richard IIs
and Richard IIIs are everywhere apparent—as are male
Rosalinds and Violas. Cross-gender casting has proven
popular in contemporary theatre, too. Caryl Churchill’s
Cloud Nine features both cross-gender and cross-racial
casting in its explosive first act, a satire of colonial
England with women playing men, black men playing
white men, and a ventriloquist’s dummy playing a child.
And in Bridge and Tunnel on Broadway in 2006, the
black, Baltimore-born actress Sarah Jones played fourteen
different roles—male and female, black and white,
Pakistani, Lithuanian, Mexican, Russian, Jamaican,
Jordanian, Chinese, and African American—all with
uncanny accuracy, charm, and respectful admiration
of the shared problems and challenges of immigration
and assimilation, the “bridges and tunnels,” that affect a
great majority of our current national corpus.
These decisions are not without their own controversy,
however. In 1997, the white theatre critic and director
Robert Brustein debated the black playwright August Wilson
(see “An Open Theatre,”) on the merits of color-blind
casting. Wilson argued for the power of black theatres to
portray a distinct cultural experience using black artists;
Brustein believed that all roles should be open to all. The
passionate discussion had persuasive points on both sides,
and history has shown us brilliant examples of each of
them: both theatre that is indifferent to race, and theatre that
flourishes through the power of witnessing a specific actor
reflect the background of her or his character. The debate,
of course, will never be settled, but it continues to thrive
productively among artists—and students—today.
A SPECTACULAR THEATRE
Aristotle considered spectacle the least of his six components
of theatre, but the past decades have seen theatre
emphasize spectacle more and more. However, the kind
of spectacle in theatre today is different, in some ways,
from the kind Aristotle disliked. Today, spectacle is less
about adding visual elements and more about astounding
the audience. This shift reflects the development of new
technologies that have affected both visual and sound
design. But sometimes spectacle is part of a new philosophy,
as well, a deliberate attempt by artists to produce an
overwhelming effect.
Some of the new theatre technology (see the chapter
titled “Designers and Technicians”) has been inspired by
cinema, with its dazzling computer graphics, animations,
and digitized motion capture, and from the contemporary
circus. The special effects in films like Guardians of the
Galaxy and Transformers have encouraged directors and
designers to discover computerized technologies that in
a matter of nanoseconds can create and remove landscapes,
move lights and change their colors, and produce
seemingly magical illusions. And the concert stage has
created sound systems capable of reaching ear-blasting
volume while still maintaining subtle characteristics.
Today, the amplified voice can reach every seat in the
house simultaneously with the clarity of someone speaking
in the same room.
Such spectacular effects reach their apex in high-budget
Broadway musicals, which feature on-stage fireworks
(Aladdin), high-flying actors (Spider-Man: Turn Off
the Dark), falling chandeliers (Phantom of the Opera),
and ascending helicopters (Miss Saigon). Today’s typical
Broadway theatregoer does not disdain these effects.
Oftentimes, in fact, they are precisely why someone is
attending the show.
There is also a more philosophical reason for the theatre’s
current turn to the spectacular. The French theorist
Antonin Artaud argued fiercely in the 1930s that theatre
should have “no more masterpieces,” and that words in
dramas should be valued more for their physical impact
on the audience than for their meanings. Theatre, Artaud
thought, should have the importance of dreams, and his
proposed theatre was one of overwhelming sounds and
visual images. While Aladdin might not exactly be what
Artaud had in mind when he called for this theatrical