Metamorphosis
Commentary by Chitown Kev
A little over a year ago, I wrote in this space about the controversy surrounding a production of one of the classics of world theater; a production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. At that time, I did not take a definitive stance on the decision of Tony Award- winning actress Tonya Pinkins to resign from the production due to creative differences as it concerned her portrayal of the title character.
Amid the complexities of the various issues surrounding that production, specifically, and the cultural output of both creative artists and literary, theater, and art critics, generally, I did say this:
Demographic trends show that America is becoming an increasingly more racially diverse society and that racial diversity will affect everything from politics to whom we love to high and low culture.
As that happens, people of color will increasingly be the producers of literature, art, theater, movies, popular music, and even the “higher forms” of these arts (i.e. classical music and opera, independent and artsy films).
As it stands now, so much of the literary/art criticism field that appears in the daily newspapers, magazines, and, now, on “mainstream” internet blogs seems to be very, very white…
...What is not beside the point, though, is the need for cultural productions and cultural criticism that reflects the needs, wants, and desires of various communities. In fact, they are needed now more than ever.
So now we have the estate of the late American playwright Edward Albee withholding rights from a theater producer in Portland, Oregon because the producer decided to cast an African American male, Damien Geter. as a major character in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
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.
“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.”
Significantly, both Michael Paulson’s piece at the New York Times and the UK Guardian’s coverage of the casting issue notes that even in his lifetime, Mr. Albee could be (to say the least) quite prickly on issues of how his plays were staged.
Michael Paulson/NYT:
Albee, one of the nation’s leading 20th-century playwrights, was known for his tight control over professional productions of his plays, insisting on approval of casts and directors while he was alive; directors were often required to submit head shots of proposed cast members before receiving the rights to mount his plays. He died in September, and this is the first posthumous controversy over his legacy to come to light.
Guardian:
In his lifetime, Albee, who died in 2016, also took legal action to prevent the two lead couples of the play being portrayed as gay men. But in 2003, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a performance of the play was put on with an African American actor in the role of Martha and Oscar-nominated mixed-race actor Sophie Okonedo is currently starring in a production of Albee’s The Goat in London.
Casting director Michael Streeter wrote a Facebook post explaining his decision to cast Geter in the role of Nick:
Here are my thoughts on casting Nick with a black actor: This was a color conscious choice, not a colorblind choice. I believe casting Nick as black adds depth to the play. The character is an up and comer. 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. The play is filled with invective from Martha and particularly George towards Nick. With each insult that happens in the play, the audience will wonder, 'Are George and Martha going to go there re. racial slurs?' There are lines that I think this casting gives resonance to, such as the fact that his (white) wife has 'slim hips' and when he says he's 'nobody's houseboy'...
So here, again, we have the issues of “originalism” and “authorial intent” versus the needs of a 21st century American society (and where have we heard that before?).
There are no easy answers to this dilemma.
A couple of weeks ago, I was reading something or another about James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room; most specifically, about the fact that Giovanni was white (well, Baldwin was very specific about the fact that Giovanni was Italian). I think that the essay (or discussion, I can’t remember which) asked: What if Giovanni were Algerian (or even Moroccan) instead of “white?”
Baldwin, himself, had some very pointed and detailed observations about the racism in France that was directed at racial minorities other than himself (after all, Baldwin was an American).
Were a script for the theater or a movie to be written based on Giovanni’s Room in which the character Giovanni were of North African descent, that would introduce a level of complexity to the character and the production that Baldwin specifically (and, perhaps, out of necessity) avoided.
I also think that such a production would be well worth seeing.
So, on one hand, I understand and sympathize with the wishes of the late Mr. Albee and the Albee estate in wanting to preserve his work as a work of a specific time, place, and intent.
However, I am also sympathetic with the need to be daring and innovative in the arts and with the need for the arts to be able to reflect on the current time and the current place while hewing as close to the original spirit “authorial intent” as possible.
Just as America continues to grow and mature and become more “browned and seasoned” (to use a Pam Spaulding metaphor that I’ve used before), so must our arts.
After all, new forms growing out of old forms is a natural and necessary process, especially when the old forms can no longer function as, perhaps, intended.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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endell Britt does not know where he will sleep tonight. It might be a park bench, a pavement, a shelter – “You go to a shelter and they take your fucking phone” – or, if he’s lucky, a friend’s house. “Wherever I lay my head,” he says, wearing a Chicago Bulls cap.
The 55-year-old also does not know where his next meal is coming from either – but he does have a lifeline. “Food stamps help me get food in my stomach,” he said this week. “They help a lot of people.”
This is Congress Heights in Washington, a predominantly black neighbourhood just five miles south-east of the White House where last week the Donald Trump administration unveiled a budget proposal that would slash the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), as food stamps are officially known.
Losing food stamps altogether would be devastating to Britt, who spent 17 years in prison for robbery and drugs-related offences and is trying to go back to work as a barber. “If I’ve got no food, nothing to eat, I’m just out here. I might go to the trash can when I need something to eat; I might get sick in my stomach but it’s a chance I have to take. I might steal something because I’m going to be hungry.”
In, February about 42 million Americans received assistance via the Snap program, which cost the government benefits cost $70.9bn in 2016. Most recipients, about 72%, live in households with children, and more than a quarter live in households with seniors or people with disabilities. The federal scheme has been widely applauded by economists and academics as a cost-efficient method of helping the most needy.
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As far as residents are concerned, they thought wrong. NY1 reports that developers want to refer to the area between 110th and 125th Streets to make it more trendy, similar to SoHo.
During a press conference on Wednesday, local leaders rejected the name, saying that it was insulting the culturally rich neighborhood and whitewashes the historically black community. They said the name change would only welcome more high-end developers and wealthy white people, leading to the displacement of long-time residents.
“How dare someone try to rob our culture, and try to act as if we were not here, and create a new name, a new reality as if the clock started when other people showed up?” state Senator-elect Brian Benjamin said.
The name “SoHa” first appeared in a New York Times story in 1999, according to NY1. Since then, it has increasingly appeared on real estate websites like StreetEasy. Realtor Keller Williams recently dedicated a “SoHa” team in the neighborhood.
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Graduation season—that time of year when we get to celebrate academic achievements, watch with anticipation as the graduates move on to life’s next step and hear about all the students being banned from prom and graduation for dress-code violations.
As a jolting end to that list, we’re hearing more stories of students who are being punished near the close of the school year for their clothes or hair. These instances are typically about female students (because let’s face it, dress codes are pretty much only about women’s fashion and beauty), and more often than not about students of color.
Earlier this month, we learned of black teen twins in Massachusetts who were banned from prom and extracurricular clubs for wearing braided hair extensions. A popular protective style for naturals, the braids were said to be against the school’s rules against hair extensions, distracting hairstyles and hair taller than two inches in height.
Knowing what we know about black hair growth—that tightly coiled or kinky hair grows up and out instead of down, and that the use of extensions like box braids allows for healthy hair growth—this rule sounded extremely targeted towards students of color, specifically black students. The school has since suspended all punishments and promised to rework the policies, but the larger concern is cultural education and addressing the biases that bred school policies targeting black students.
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More wealth leaves Africa every year than enters it – by more than $40bn (£31bn) – according to research that challenges “misleading” perceptions of foreign aid.
Analysis by a coalition of UK and African equality and development campaigners including Global Justice Now, published on Wednesday, claims the rest of the world is profiting more than most African citizens from the continent’s wealth.
It said African countries received $162bn in 2015, mainly in loans, aid and personal remittances. But in the same year, $203bn was taken from the continent, either directly through multinationals repatriating profits and illegally moving money into tax havens, or by costs imposed by the rest of the world through climate change adaptation and mitigation.
This led to an annual financial deficit of $41.3bn from the 47 African countries where many people remain trapped in poverty, according to the report, Honest Accounts 2017.
The campaigners said illicit financial flows, defined as the illegal movement of cash between countries, account for $68bn a year, three times as much as the $19bn Africa receives in aid.
Tim Jones, an economist from the Jubilee Debt Campaign, said: “The key message we want to get across is that more money flows out of Africa than goes in, and if we are to address poverty and income inequality we have to help to get it back.”
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Somaliland’s foreign minister has said that the international community’s refusal to recognise the republic 26 years after it declared independence means aid is taking far longer to reach people on the brink of famine.
Though Somaliland, on the Gulf of Aden, has 4.4 million inhabitants and its own currency, army and parliament, in the eyes of the world it is part of war-torn Somalia. More than 1.5 million people have been affected by the drought afflicting the state, and most of its livestock has been wiped out. In recent days, the drought has been compounded by an outbreak of cholera in the east.
“I don’t think people took our warnings of famine seriously until the start of the year. It seems the international community does not seem to respond until there are emaciated and dying children on their TV screens.Saad Ali Shire, Somaliland’s foreign minister, said: “Lack of recognition is proving a major problem. We do not receive bilateral aid. All aid goes to the third parties via the UN. The UN has very professional people, but the bureaucracy that goes with these many channels is huge, and there is a high administrative cost. If we were recognised, we could receive aid bilaterally, and attract international investors – so creating a more resilient economy that is less dependent on livestock.
“The assistance now through the UN is very slow and bureaucratic. There is no lack of will, but it often takes months for aid to reach the country as it has to go through so many levels.”
Somaliland, a former British colony, declared independence from Somalia in 1991 and has been praised for its relative political stability and lack of conflict.
Now, the country’s leaders are reopening a battle for diplomatic recognition, believing that if they can persuade one swing state in the African Union, such as Ghana, to recognise the country, the rest of the international community will follow. The drought, and crisis in neighbouring Somalia, have added to the urgency.
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