Playwright Lol Suy wanted 3 characters to be played by Indian-origin actors.
By Raif Karerat
A week before opening night, a student-led production of the play “Jesus in India” was cancelled at Clarion College after the playwright, Lloy Suh, expressed that he did not want actors of other races portraying Indian characters.
Three of the five characters in the production are Indian, but on the mostly white state university campus, two of those characters were to be played by white student actors and a third was being portrayed by a mixed-race student, reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“He felt they should be of Asian descent,†said Bob Levy, chairman of the visual and performing arts department at Clarion.
The Korean-American playwright requested that the parts be recast, and subsequently pulled the university’s rights to the production after being told that finding Asian replacements was not a viable option given the students had been rehearsing for months and the play was set to open in the following week.
Also a slight issue: the campus is situated in rural northwestern Pennsylvania, where Asian or Pacific Islander students account for 0.7 of 1 percent of the university’s 5,368 students.
Clarion officials said Suh declined their offers to give him a page in the program to say why Asian actors should have been used and to have a university representative give a “stage speech†on why no such actors were in the cast.
Below is the email Suh sent to Mel Michel — a professor of theatre at Clarion and the director of the show — on Nov. 9, explaining his decision to pull it from the university’s docket:
Dear Ms. Michel,
I received your response to Beth Blickers’ query concerning the casting in your production of my play Jesus in India at Clarion. As you well know by now, I have severe objections to your use of Caucasian actors in roles clearly written for South Asian actors, and consider this an absolutely unacceptable distortion of the play.
I consider your assertion that the ethnicity of the characters are not “specified for purposes of the plot/story/theme” outrageous. The play is called Jesus in India. India is not irrelevant, and I take great issue with the insinuation that you (not the author) are entitled to decide whether the ethnicity of a character is worthy of consideration.
Your citing of “color blind casting” as an excuse for selecting white actors to portray non-white characters is a gross misunderstanding of the practice, and denies the savage inequities that exist in the field at large for non-white performers, both in professional and educational settings.
I have received your further message detailing the poor statistics at Clarion in matters of racial diversity. I contend that by producing this play in this way, you are contributing to an environment of hostility towards people of color, and therefore perpetuating the lack of diversity at Clarion now and in the future.
You may argue that because you are a university and not a professional theater, that you should not be held to the same standards of cultural responsibility as the rest of society. I strongly believe otherwise, and maintain that professional training programs have a duty to prepare students for actual theater practice. That practice includes the rigorous cultural conversation present in the field at large; to excuse your students from that work is to woefully underprepare them for the realities of the profession.
Perhaps you are somehow unaware of the ongoing conversation on these issues that have been occurring in the American theater for decades. In order to provide an introductory context, I will direct you here:
http://howlround.com/search?f%5B0%5D=field_post_tags%3A441
You should know that what you are doing is connected to a very painful history of egregious misrepresentation and invisibility, and is incredibly hurtful. Hurtful to a community for whom opportunity and visibility is critical, and also extremely hurtful to me personally as a flippant denial of Asian heritage as a relevant and valid component of one’s humanity.
It hurts me to my core. I couldn’t stop myself from crying when I saw the photos and realized what was happening. It is embarrassing, humiliating, and demoralizing to be so casually disregarded.
I therefore insist that you immediately (1) recast the play with ethnically appropriate actors, or (2) shut down the production entirely.
It is incumbent upon me, professionally, personally and morally, to distance myself from this production, and condemn the way it has been cast. I hope you are able to adjust your plans accordingly so that I don’t have to make any public declarations against it and pursue other further action in order to make this right.
Yours sincerely,
Lloyd Suh