"Who Can Play the King? A Casting Debate Goes Beyond Color."

by Marc Tracy 

[Three productions this summer of William Shakespeare’s Richard III took different approaches to the title role:  Colm Feore appeared at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada; Danai Gurira at the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park in New York City; and Arthur Hughes at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

[Feore plays Richard at Stratford, Ontario, at the Tom Patterson Theatre from 10 May through 30 October; Gurira’s performance ran at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park from 21 June to 17 July; and the RSC production with Hughes runs in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre from 23 June to 8 October.

[Marc Tracy’s article appeared in the New York Times of 28 July 2022 in the news (front) section.]

Should Shakespeare’s Richard III be reserved for disabled actors? Does the character have to be played by a white man? By a man at all? Three recent productions took different tacks.

When three of the most prestigious Shakespeare companies in the world staged “Richard III” this summer, each took a different approach to casting its scheming title character in ways that illuminate the fraught debate over which actors should play which roles.

At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, Richard was played by the actor Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, which means he has a shorter right arm and a missing thumb. The company said it was the first time it had cast a disabled actor to play the character, who describes himself in the opening scene as “deformed.” The production’s director, Gregory Doran, who was until recently the Royal Shakespeare’s artistic director, told The Times of London earlier this year that having actors pretend to be disabled to play “Richard III” would “probably not be acceptable” these days [David Sanderson and Dominic Maxwell, “RSC chief Gregory Doran: Able-bodied actors cannot be Richard III,” 6 May 2022].

The Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, took a different tack: It cast Colm Feore, who is not disabled, to play a Richard who has a deformed spine but who is not a hunchback. And in New York City, the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park went in yet another direction, casting Danai Gurira, a Black woman who does not have a disability, as the duke who schemes and kills his way to the throne of England.

Their varying approaches came at a moment when an intense rethinking of the cultural norms around identity, representation, diversity, opportunity, imagination and artistic license have led to impassioned debates, and battles, over casting.

It has been decades since major theaters have had white actors play Othello in blackface, and, after years of criticism, performances by white actors playing caricatured Asian roles are growing rarer in theater and film, and are being rethought in opera and ballet.

Now there are questions about who should play gay characters (Tom Hanks recently told The New York Times Magazine [David Marchese, “The Reflections of Tom Hanks,” 19 June 2022] that today he would, rightly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in his Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film “Philadelphia”) or transgender characters (Eddie Redmayne said last year that it had been a “mistake” to play a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl” [Kirsty Lang. “Eddie Redmayne’s Cabaret gamble,” Sunday Times [London] 21 Nov. 2021; quoted in many other publications, both online and print]) or characters of different ethnicities and religions. (Bradley Cooper faced criticism this year for using a prosthetic nose to play the Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic [Maestro, co-written and directed by Cooper for Amblin Entertainment and Netflix; set to be released by Netflix in fall 2023].)

While many celebrate the move away from old, sometimes stereotyped portrayals and the new opportunities belatedly being given to actors from a diverse array of backgrounds, others worry that the current insistence on literalism and authenticity can be too constraining. Acting, after all, is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.

“The essential nature of art is freedom,” said the Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, whose many credits include Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” though Mr. Abraham is not Jewish. [I saw Abraham as Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant at Theatre for a New Audience in rep with Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in March 2007; he reprised the Shylock in 2011.  See my report on Merchant on Rick On Theater on 28 February 2011.  ~Rick] “Once we impose any kind of control over it, it’s no longer free.”

And while the recent insistence on more authentic casting promises greater diversity in some respects, it threatens less in others — coming as many women and actors of color are getting more opportunities to play some of the greatest, meatiest roles in the repertory, regardless of whatever race or gender or background the playwrights may have initially envisioned.

Sometimes such casting is considered “colorblind,” in which case audiences are asked to look beyond an actor’s race or ethnicity, or other features. But in recent years the trend has been toward “color-conscious” casting, in which an actor’s race, ethnicity or identity becomes part of the production, and a feature of the character being portrayed.

Some of the varied approaches were underscored by this summer’s productions of “Richard III,” and the different directions each theater took when choosing an actor to play Richard.

Richard tells the audience in the opening scene that he is:

Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them [Duke of Gloucester; Act I, Scene 1] 

The remark by Mr. Doran, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company production, that it would “probably not be acceptable” these days to have actors pretend to be disabled to play Richard caused a stir in theater circles.

Not only is Mr. Doran a renowned Shakespearean, but his husband, Antony Sher, who died last year, was one of the most memorable Richards of recent decades, using crutches in an acclaimed 1984 production and writing a book about his portrayal [Year of the King (Limelight Editions, 1987)].

Mr. Doran, whose production in Stratford-upon-Avon was critically lauded, later clarified his thinking about its casting, explaining that while any actor might be a successful Richard, he believed the role should be reserved for disabled actors until they “have the opportunities across the board now more widely afforded to other actors.”

The new staging in Stratford, Ontario, featuring Mr. Feore, listed a “disability consultant” in its credits. His depiction was inspired by the discovery of Richard’s bones nearly a decade ago — the skeleton suggested a form of scoliosis — and rested on the idea that his physique “was less of a medical disability than a social and cultural one,” the company’s spokeswoman, Ann Swerdfager, said in an email. [Richard III’s remains were tentatively discovered in Leicester, England, on 7 September 2012 and confirmed on 4 February 2013. The remains were reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March.] The critic Karen Fricker wrote in The Toronto Star: “As much as I admired Feore’s performance, it did lead me to wonder if this will be the last able-bodied actor making a star turn as a disabled character on the Stratford stage, given crucial conversations currently happening around deaf and disability performance.”

And in New York, Ms. Gurira, who has appeared in “Black Panther” and the television series “The Walking Dead,” tried to explore the underlying reasons for Richard’s behavior. “There is a psychological reason for what he becomes,” she said in an interview. “He’s looking at the rules in front of him, and he feels he’s most capable, but the rules disallow him from manifesting his full capability.”

The production’s director, Robert O’Hara, said that they made Richard’s difference key to the interpretation. “Richard’s otherness becomes an entire reason for his behavior,” he said in an interview. “He feels like now he has to play a part people projected onto him.”

The rest of the cast for the production, which ended its run earlier this month, was notably diverse, and included several actors with disabilities in roles that are not usually cast that way. Ali Stroker, a Tony-winning actress who uses a wheelchair, played Lady Anne; Monique Holt, who is Deaf, played Richard’s mother, the two typically communicating onstage via American Sign Language.

“I wanted to open up the conversation from ‘Why isn’t Richard being played by a disabled actor?’ to ‘Why isn’t every role considered able to be played by a disabled actor?’” Mr. O’Hara said.

Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University and a Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater who consulted on its “Richard III,” argued that the growing embrace of color-conscious casting reflected contemporary understandings of how different attributes inflect both actors’ identities and audiences’ perceptions.

“All of our bodies carry meaning on stage, whether or not we want to acknowledge that. And that’s going to affect storytelling,” Ms. Thompson said.

She pointed to an example from another play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends of Hamlet’s, whom other characters often confuse for each other. “If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are played by Black actors and the Hamlet family is all-white,” she said, “the inability to distinguish carries a whole set of different meanings.”

Many productions upend traditional casting to interrogate classics. Women played every role in a trilogy of acclaimed Shakespeare productions directed by Phyllida Lloyd at Donmar Warehouse in London, seen in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse. A “Julius Caesar” directed by Mr. Doran reset the scene from ancient Rome to modern Africa. Even Hollywood has reimagined some blockbusters, as with the gender-swapped 2016 “Ghostbusters.”

[I saw a Donmar Warehouse’s mounting of an all-female Julius Caesar at St. Ann’s in October 2013.  Directed by Lloyd, it was set in a women’s prison, not Africa; my report on the production was posted on 15 October 2013. 

[(In April 2012, the Royal Shakespeare Company brought a production of Julius Caesar, which director Gregory Doran relocated to contemporary Africa with an all-black cast, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  Times writer Marc Tracy may have his JC productions mixed up.)

[I’ve written on ROT on “Non-Traditional Casting”; see my post on 20 December 2009.  ~Rick]

But as there is a push for greater casting freedoms in some areas, there is an argument for more literalism in others, especially from actors with certain backgrounds who lack opportunities.

Some disabled actors are upset when they see Richard III, one of the juiciest disabled characters in the canon, go to someone else. “We all want a level playing field where everybody can play everybody,” said Mat Fraser, an English actor who is disabled and has played Richard, “but my entire career I’ve not been allowed to play hardly anybody.”

In 2016, while accepting an Emmy for his turn as a transgender character in “Transparent,” Jeffrey Tambor said that he hoped to be “the last cisgender male to play a transgender female.” Now, with a “Transparent” stage musical being created in Los Angeles, its creator, Joey Soloway, vowed in an interview: “No trans person should be played by a cis person. Zero tolerance.”

The conversation on casting has been evolving in recent years.

“It used to be that part of the measurement of greatness was your ability to transform yourself,” said Isaac Butler, the author of “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” a new history of Method acting. “Is versatility still the hallmark of good acting? And how do you approach it if there are certain identity lines you cannot cross? And which are those identity lines?”

[Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to this blog, wrote “The Method – a Review,” posted on ROT on 12 March 2022, on Butler’s book.  ~Rick]

Gregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy, has played roles that are not traditionally portrayed as disabled, as he did playing two monarchs in “Richard III” in New York [Edward IV (Richard III’s predecessor) and the Earl of Richmond (later Henry VII, Richard’s successor)], and sometimes plays characters written as having cerebral palsy, as he will this fall in a Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cost of Living.” 

[Cost of Living by Martyna Majok premièred in 2016 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  Produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club, it ran Off-Broadway at New York City Center from 2017 to 2018, winning the 2018 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.  In addition to winning the Pulitzer, the play was also nominated for the 2018 Outer Critics Circle Award.

[Mozgala won the 2018 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play for his performance as John, a brilliant and witty doctoral student, and was nominated for the Drama Desk and the Outer Critics Circle Awards.  He’s expected to move with the production for his Broadway debut when Cost of Living opens at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 3 October.]

“I spent years trying to pretend my disability didn’t exist in life and onstage, which is ridiculous, because it does,” Mr. Mozgala said.

“Every character I ever play is going to have cerebral palsy — there’s nothing I can do about that,” he added. “I have to bring my full humanity to every character I play.”

Some still hold out hope for a day when identity will recede in the conversation.

“A hundred years from now, do I hope white actors could play Othello?” said Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director. “Sure, because it would mean racism wasn’t the explosive issue it is now.”

[The casting decisions made by the three Shakespearean directors—Gregory Doran at the RSC, Antoni Cimolino at the Stratford Festival, and Robert O’Hara for Shakespeare in the Park—touch on non-traditional casting, but the emphasis on literalism and authenticity looks as if it impedes the broader access that non-traditional casting is supposed to afford directors, producers, and actors.

[“Non-traditional casting” is the Actors’ Equity name for its policy of encouraging producers and directors to consider women, minorities, and the handicapped for roles that don’t specifically require them, but also don’t specifically exclude them.  The idea is to give underrepresented actors chances at roles they might not otherwise get.

[But if only a Jewish actor can play Leonard Bernstein—one of the complaints leveled against Bradley Cooper and Maestro—or only a disabled one can be cast as Richard III or Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie, then part of the rationale for non-traditional casting is lost.

[The casting choices the directors made, as Marc Tracy observes, are each “a different approach” with respect to non-traditional casting.  Placing Colm Feore in the role of the last Plantagenet king is traditional casting.  He’s a white male actor with no disability.  (His and Cimolino’s interpretation of Richard’s disability may be less traditional, based, as it is on the examination of the king’s recently-discovered remains, but it’s not unknown, even before 2012.)

[Casting Danai Gurira in the part at the Delacorte is a classic non-trad choice: she’s African American and female, not the conventional choice, though she “acted” Richard’s disability.  Director O’Hara engaged in color-blind and gender-blind casting for the title character in his production; this depends for its success on the talent of the actors and the receptiveness of the spectator to the world of the play established by the production.  This kind of casting can add a wonderful new dimension to a production, as well as provide a terrific performance that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.  

[The choice of Arthur Hughes at RSC, though, is in the realm of the new drive for literalness and authenticity in casting.  Now, I don’t actually know how Doran ended up putting Hughes, an actor with a disability, into the role of Richard—he may have selected Hughes from the pool of candidates because he was the best choice for the production or he may even have developed the production of Richard III around Hughes in a part he felt the actor was destined to play—but if the director went into the casting process with a litmus test, he eliminated actors the same way earlier directors did when they dismissed disabled actors or other non-traditional choices.

[Now, don’t misunderstand me: I understand and applaud the impulse to cast disabled actors, trans actors, Jewish and Muslim actors, and others as disabled, trans, Jewish, or Muslim characters.  At the same time, though, I understand F. Murray Abraham when he points out, “Once we impose any kind of control over [casting], it’s no longer free.” 

[There’s an inherent conflict, perhaps irreconcilable, between non-traditional casting and “color-conscious” casting.  “Acting, after all,” asserts Tracy, “is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.”  I trained as an actor, and I believe that, too.

[Maybe the friction between the two views on casting will eventually be worked out and some equitable path through the thicket will be found.  But maybe not, and those in the casting business who are proponents of an open non-trad system, and those who advocate a color-, gender-, and ability-conscious system will always clash.

[The first practice results in actors like Robert David Hall, a double-amputee who played the medical examiner on TV’s CSI (2000-2015), and the late Clark Middleton, afflicted with crippling juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, who played recurring roles on Law and Order (1997-2000) and The Blacklist (2014-2020).  The second gives us performances like Cole Sibus (Stumptown) and Chris Burke (Life Goes On), actors with Down syndrome who both played characters with the condition on TV; Gregg Mozgala as John, a character with cerebral palsy, in Cost of Living; and Madison Ferris, who suffers from muscular dystrophy and is confined to a wheelchair, as Laura, a disabled character, in Glass Menagerie.

[Marc Tracy is a reporter on the Culture desk of the New York Times.  He covers debates over representation, appropriation, and politics in the arts.]