Word: pachter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Adam E. Pachter...
...most extreme reading of the review, Pachter could be said to be calling Heller and the Chicago production staff of carelessness. In and of itself, that is a serious allegation, but to say Pachter lets fly charges of racism obfuscates a very real and pressing issue in the Harvard theater community and in the larger world of drama: the responsibilities of cross-casting...
...seemingly logical conclusion of this argument would be that Heller should be able to cast minority players in whatever roles she likes, and that Pachter should consider another medium, say sportswriting. Certainly Heller should be allowed to cast whomever she likes, and she deserves praise for embracing the ideal of cross-casting. But like any political figure, she has responsibilities. In cross-casting, she suggests that race is a superficial characteristic, and that anyone in the audience who disagrees, who thinks that a Black man embodies a stereotype, who thinks that an actor's black skin implies some awful caricature...
...Pachter's acknowledgement of race politics in the theater--where we go to see not only drama, but a dramatic re-enactment of life--does not connote racism. And Pachter is not alone among reviewers in his concerns about the responsibilities and repercussions of cross-casting. Liza M. Velasquez asserts in her review of The Royal Hunt of the Sun ("Royal Hunt Misses the Mark," Oct. 26) that the casting decisions made in the Mainstage production were "disappointing." She writes that director Jeremy Blumenthal cross-cast a number of women in the roles of "sympathetic yet incomprehensible male Incas...
...Neither Pachter nor Velasquez dismisses the ideal of cross-casting. Each is mindful of the responsibilities of that political gesture. Cross-casting is an ideal precisely because our society is not, and audience members are mindful of race and sex, especially when it goes against the proscriptions of a playwright. We have to be careful about the messages we let them take from the theater. We do not advance feminism if we cast women in subservient roles written for men, or egalitarianism if we cast Black actors in subservient roles written for whites. Those roles have already been scripted...