Race and the Classics: An Argument for Empathy
Carla Della Gatta and Harvey Young
In Pearl Cleage’s Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous (2019), the character Anna creates a radical solo show in which she performs August Wilson’s monologues in the nude. Her sister comments, “You stopped doing Naked Wilson because you didn’t want to live in your rage and then you made your reputation doing Lady Macbeth, Medea, Clytemnestra, Hedda Gabbler. Those are some very angry women.” Anna replies, “That’s different. It’s not my personal rage, so it comes from a different place altogether” (Cleage 13). The gap between lived and imagined experience—a crucial distance—allows Anna, a Black woman in the United States, to access and convey “rage” in her staging of ancient Greek and late nineteenth-century Norwegian characters without causing continual distress to herself.
We propose that this gap requires further exploration, especially when classic texts are reenvisioned through the casting of actors whose lived experiences of race differ from those of the characters they play. Centering on the corporeal and identarian distance between racialized (and ethnicized) adaptations of classics, we contend that these spaces between the lived (the actor), the performed (the character), and the witnessing (the theatregoer) exist as zones of potential empathetic connection. These connections are multidirectional and, as suggested in Cleage’s play, can be restorative.
Telling Our Stories
In 1996, August Wilson famously stood before the attendees at the Theatre Communications Group annual convening and critiqued the professional theatre community—notably major regional and Broadway theatres—for failing to stage stories by Black artists about Black life. He confronted a system in which nonwhite actors of color were restricted mostly to roles not originally envisioned for them:
To mount an all-black production of a Death of a Salesman or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans. It is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large. (“Ground”)
Wilson’s intervention sparked a series of debates and compelled producers to make a more concerted effort to commission nonwhite playwrights of color and to produce new works that allowed actors of varying backgrounds opportunities to portray characters whose experiences more closely resembled their own. In calling for a consideration of the empathetic benefits that emerge when a real-life Anna chooses to play Lady Macbeth, we seek not to challenge the important, necessary, and consequential advocacy of artists such as August Wilson, but rather to spotlight the potential that exists within a still dominant approach to theatrical production. A notable outcome of the debates inspired by (and involving) Wilson was an increased effort toward adapting canonical texts away from “the specifics of white culture” in a manner that acknowledges the intersectional identities of a consciously inclusive acting company.
Oftentimes the conversations about global majority actors performing in the classics and cultural adaptations of the classics center on questions of diversity of representation, a move toward including actors of color or integrating other cultures into a (white) canonical text. While representation matters, of course, we wish to move beyond a conversation about representation to an investigation of how a diversity of mind shifts audiences toward new understandings, both empathetic and not. Lin-Manuel Miranda famously picked up Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton at an airport bookstore and read the tale of the first secretary of the United States Treasury as essentially a story about the passion, vision, and contributions of an immigrant. Miranda’s positionality offered a fresh perspective to those of the previous biographers of Hamilton—resulting in a box office success of the musical Hamilton (2015)—that engaged both deliberate casting choices that subvert historical accuracies as well as a repositioning of a historical figure through an ethnic studies epistemology.
The question of cultural adaptations as means to invoke empathy, to be “relatable,” and to diversify a theatre season arises. For example, the dozens of Latinx-themed productions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors adapt these stories to more contemporary settings of immigration and migration. If such adaptations result in the casting of Latinx actors, Latinx production creatives, and educate their audiences about immigration politics and the diverse cultures of Cuba, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, then are they not vehicles for the predominantly white audiences of many Shakespeare theatres and viewers of classic plays to generate empathy for the experiences of those from other cultures?
Connecting by Coming Together
We are mindful that audiences vary from production to production. And at the same time, we have attended enough professional productions on Broadway and at major regional theatres, as well as Shakespeare-based theatres in Canada, the US, and the UK, to note that there is an undeniable similarity that exists across these audiences, except on the rare occasions of targeted outreach such as “Black out” performances that aim to recruit a majority Black audience to attend on specific dates. Less racially diverse are the majority of experimental and fringe theatres. In The Guardian, Anya Ryan lamented the lack of diversity that still exists at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2022. “The venues are small enough to glance around and confirm, once again, that you’re the only Black or Brown person present,” she writes. Ryan further comments on the sense of isolation that can emerge from literally being the “only,” truly in the minority, among a group of spectators: “At the fringe, theatre and comedy do not feel made for people like me to enjoy” (“Fringe Audiences”).
Even for the global majority spectator who feels like an “only,” there are opportunities for empathetic attachment within stories featuring actors and characters with differing racial or ethnic identities. As Ryan notes, “there’s magic in the mass coming-together.” We agree. Our experience as audience members often not in the assumed (white) racial majority of spectators has both occasioned numerous moments of self-aware otherness and estrangement but also many more moments of entrancement and engagement with the role performed. We have felt connection. We have found ourselves brought into the story world of the play. We have connected and identified with both the actor and their character, even across our differences. Certainly, the ease of connection is enabled through years of socialization by media industries that center and render normative a certain subject positioning. Nevertheless, the apparatus of theatre is designed to encourage a sense of affiliation if not outright identification. The commercial success of Wilson’s cycle plays around the globe is anchored not only in the plays’ cultural particularity but also in the fact that non-Black audiences similarly can connect with both the artists and the characters they portray. And, of course, there is a special charge—an affirming sense of inclusion and presence—when the “only” in the audience connects with an actor who is also an “only” within the larger space of the theatre and together they journey through the expansive character offerings throughout the theatrical canon. The feeling of watching Raúl Juliá playing Macbeth or Andre Braugher as Henry V especially resonate. There is an even greater affective glow when the “only” becomes the “many” through campaigns to encourage a particular audience demographic to attend a specific performance.
Empathy and Reparative Theatre
Although tactics for reparative theatre and generating empathy offer strategies for healing, recent studies have questioned the efficacy and ethics of empathy when a power imbalance exists between the empathizer and empathized. Carolyn Pedwell argues, “When empathy is understood as the experience of ‘co-feeling,’ it is suggested, this not only invites problematic appropriations or projections on the part of ‘privileged’ subjects, it also risks obscuring their complicity in the wider relations of power in which marginalisation, oppression and suffering occur” (16). And as Susan Lanzoni notes, “Empathy may be a poor guide to moral action. New studies have questioned whether reading literary fiction indeed makes us more empathic and if empathy can be put to work as an effective political tool” (7). If traditional notions of empathetic practice reinforce the very structures that they aspire to dismantle, can empathy in the theatre function differently?
Greater attention is needed to explore how empathy operates within adaptations of classic texts. The theatre facilitates a bridging between actor and role, actor and audience member, and potentially audience member and audience member by conjuring a feeling of communitas. Inherent within the gaps are lines of privilege as well as other intersectional differences that variously are emphasized or momentarily overlooked to allow for a sense of connection. Although we contend that a series of empathetic attachments is necessary for the success of any production, we also note that the strength and elasticity of these bonds vary depending on production and casting choices as well as audience composition. For example, we are curious about the potential of culturally inclusive adaptations in which the place and characters (as interpreted by actors) deviate from traditional stagings and how such choices can challenge the expectations and privileges of a theatrical audience. What happens when Romeo & Juliet is set in 1960s Bedford-Stuyvesant or Hamlet in 1940s Havana? The first step toward dialogue requires people being willing to encounter one another and consider another’s point of view.
Theatre can only advance through the creation of new works, including original narratives and novel reimaginings of existing texts. When August Wilson stood before the TCG assembly in 1996, he advocated for the production of original narratives. Nearly three decades later, we believe that such a continued call is essential to the future of theatre in the US. And yet, we acknowledge that canonical plays continue to dominate mainstage seasons. To catalyze widespread dialogue on race, prejudice, and social justice, we cannot rely solely on the programming of original plays. This leads us to think about the potential of how canonical plays can be revived. It prompts us to consider how the conscious inclusion of race and cultural difference in reimagined classic texts can create pathways toward empathetic attachment and engagement. It urges us to consider how an awareness of the crucial distance between actor, character, and audience member can allow us to appreciate the challenge but also the benefits of connection.
We have just begun our exploration into “Race and the Classics.” We invite you to join us.
Works Cited
Cleage, Pearl. Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous. 2019. Dramatists Play Service, 2022.
Lanzoni, Susan. Empathy: A History. Yale UP, 2018.
Pedwell, Carolyn. “De-Colonising Empathy: Thinking Affect Transnationally.” Theories of Affect, special issue of Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture, edited by Sneja Gunew, vol. 1, no. 1, 2016, pp. 12–34.
Ryan, Anya. “Fringe Audiences Are 99% White? As a South Asian Critic, I Found Edinburgh’s Screaming Lack of Diversity Hugely Troubling,” The Guardian, 1 Sept. 2022, www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/sep/01/south-asian-critic-edinburgh-fringe-diversity.
Wilson, August. “The Ground on Which I Stand (1996).” American Theatre, 20 June 2016, www.americantheatre.org/2016/06/20/the-ground-on-which-i-stand.