When is Color-Blind Casting Not Color-Blind Casting?

Getting Too Big for My Britches and Criticizing the National Theatre

The days are passing quickly and I’ve been in an administrative mode: organizing websites and schedules on my laptop. I haven’t left the couch in weeks. My living room is beginning to look like the set of a bad 90s “white trash play”. Books, nail polish, cups, candles, pill bottles, a box of organic cocoa mass. (Okay. Not exactly the stereotype in Killer Joe.)

Don’t tell anyone, but what I wouldn’t give for some pain killers. Instead I drink my de-alcoholized wine and hope for a placebo effect—or at least a good metaphor.

Leonard nuzzles my armpit and I remember to stop and be here with him. Call it gratitude, attention, mindfulness. Call it love. Call it a warm puppy.

I miss the lake so much I tear up thinking about it. I’m missing the transition for winter to spring. I’m wondering if the thrushes have returned already. I’m missing the window for a safe scavenger hunt in the underbrush, looking for dead paper wasp hives. Yesterday E. offered to push me around the block in the borrowed wheelchair. It’s not the same. Instead I watch a streamed adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath on National Theatre at Home.

The NT, like the Royal Shakespeare Company, continues to do a lot of color-blind casting. And, though I haven’t read Grapes of Wrath since high school (and to be honest, I’m not sure I read it all then), color-blind casting seemed like a bizarre choice for this production. The book has been criticised for erasing Black people’s experiences during the Dust Bowl era, and even though a few of the characters were performed by actors who represent the global majority, the production maintains this conspicuously narrow point of view.

Maybe one could argue that an all-white production would have perpetuated Steinbeck’s historical bigotry by omission, but the choice to cast the Joad family members with white actors, and the in-laws, and other biologically unrelated characters with BIPOC actors seems worse to me.

It’s difficult to not see the casting of the Joad family as a reach for verisimilitude, and the other castings as attempt to meet some kind of goal for inclusivity. This isn’t color-blind casting in the tradition of Peter Brook, whose twins in the filmed production of Mahabharata represented very different physical heritages, Carrie Cracknell’s casting is something else, regardless of her intention. In effect, it tells the story of a racially-integrated society that didn’t exist.

I understand that we assume that the theater-going audience is more “educated” than the general population. I read that all the time, but have no idea if it’s actually true, or what it means to be “educated” in a functional sense. But it’s a mistake to assume that theater-goers aren’t susceptible to being lulled into complacency when it comes to the difficult truths in our culture.

Peter Brook’s casting wasn’t an attempt to change our perception of historical facts regarding race. On the contrary. His casting was something that intentionally prodded us into awareness.

I am a white woman, whose great-grandfather died from the Spanish flu; whose grandmother grew up in service to a middle class family, and then in a “children’s home”; whose grandfather rode the rails and fiddled in bars during The Great Depression. I have their stories, and their stories are drenched with racism. So, in one sense, I have a right to speak about the problems I see with this production.

And I am very curious what people who belong to the global majority see in it.

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Thank you for taking the time to read or listen.

I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

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