Laurence Olivier

Source: Wikimedia Commons

And does having a Spanish surname make the Kansas-born soprano Raquel González, who looks much like Jaho (both have dark hair and fair skin), an official nonwhite thereby qualified to star in Madame Butterfly?

And considering that virtually every Korean I”€™ve known has hated the Japanese as a race for colonizing them, is having Koreans play a Japanese truly appropriate? Indeed, Miss Midgette worries:

This doesn”€™t even start the debate of whether it’s better to have a Korean soprano in the role than a Caucasian one. Is that equally incorrect; does it imply that all Asians look alike?

It’s definitely woke for a white person to scoff at fellow whites for thinking all East Asians look alike. But is it a little too woke for a white to know enough about human biodiversity to be able to tell a Korean from a Japanese at a glance?

The current orthodoxy is that white people should not be able to distinguish between Asian nationalities when it comes to stage actors.

This stems from the groundbreaking 1990 brouhaha over the first Broadway production of Madame Butterfly‘s offshoot Miss Saigon. To play the lead role of the half-French, half-Vietnamese pimp, producer Cameron Mackintosh wanted his English star Jonathan Pryce. But Chinese-American actor B.D. Wong managed to deny a visa to Pryce on the grounds that he was more racially correct for the role than Pryce. Sure, the Chinese and Vietnamese have felt about each other the way the English and French have felt about each other, but round-eyes aren”€™t supposed to know about that.

The producer threatened to cancel the production (on the grounds that Pryce is a better actor than Wong), and eventually Pryce was allowed into the country.

But ever since, this Eurasian role has been played in the U.S. by a full-blooded Asian.

Theater has largely subscribed to “€œcolor-blind casting”€ for several decades. I first noticed it in a 1986 production of Brecht’s Galileo at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, when Brian Dennehy’s astronomer was confronted by a black Italian cardinal. That was rather distracting, but then alienating the audience is what Brecht was all about…

It’s worth noting that “€œcolor-blind casting”€ in the theater only applies in one direction. Nonwhites can play white roles, but whites can”€™t play, say, Denzel Washington’s role in August Wilson’s Fences.

Very rarely, somebody dares take a public stand against casting nonwhites in white roles. The current example is Edward Albee (1928″€“2016), who perhaps has the courage to do this because he’s dead.

The Albee estate is denying the rights to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to a producer in Portland who wants to put it on in a 35-seat theater and cast a black actor in the role of Nick (played by George Segal in the 1966 Elizabeth Taylor”€“Richard Burton film adaptation). The Albee estate explains:

“€œIt 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.”€

In case you are wondering, ever since the Broadway strike of 1919, playwrights have enjoyed remarkable contractual control over their plays, even after they die. Everybody has heard the Hollywood joke about the starlet who was so dumb that she slept with the screenwriter. (Here’s Jim Carrey as a screenwriter listening to studio executives turn his socially conscious mine-worker drama into a dog movie.) Playwrights, though, are the Man when it comes to all future productions of their plays. There’s a reason Marilyn Monroe married playwright Arthur Miller, not some pathetic screenwriter. (Not that Albee would have wanted Marilyn Monroe, which gives him a few non-cishet white male diversity Pokémon Points in this dispute.)

Personally, though, I am in favor of making life easier for folks trying to put on shows in 35-seat theaters. They don”€™t have the money to jump through every hoop.

(This may help explain the continuing frequency with which Shakespeare plays are mounted. Sure, audiences have a hard time understanding the 400-year-old dialogue, but at least Will isn”€™t a control freak about decisions made by the living.)

The future is likely to trend evermore toward a double standard in which a sort of one-drop rule applies to roles: Whites won”€™t be allowed to play anybody the slightest bit nonwhite, while nonwhites will be encouraged to play historically white roles.

Why? All that matters in politicized culture these days is, as Stalin alleged Lenin said, “€œWho? Whom?”€