And when Adams, Sellars and Mark Morris got together again in 2011 for the opera’s premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the lead Chinese characters were once more all white. No one protested. Indeed, the New York Times’ lead classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini, singled out one of those white Nixon in China singers, Robert Brubaker, as capturing Chairman Mao’s “authoritarian defiance and rapacious self-indulgence.” Today, Tommasini is lambasting classical music for its racism (see “Classical Music’s Suicide Pact,” City Journal, Summer 2021); in 2011, he did not mention Brubaker’s race.
That blindness to whitewashing continued into 2020. In its review of the Scottish Opera’s Nixon in China, The Guardian, hardly a conservative mouthpiece, praised both Mark Le Brocq as Chairman Mao and Nicholas Lester as Zhou Enlai.
A norm against “whitewashing” would make Nixon in China almost impossible to stage in the West, an anonymous source told the Telegraph recently. Finding enough Asian singers of requisite quality to fill the large roster of Chinese characters “in a country the other side of the world from China” would be “just too difficult”.
Nixon in China’s creators would presumably have an interest in defending their work and its production history against a potentially fatal new casting restriction. They are keeping out of the fray, however. When I asked John Adams if he thinks that it is problematic to cast a white tenor as Mao Zedong, he declined to comment. Peter Sellers also refused comment.
And so it is left to BEATS to explain the nuances of yellowface and whitewashing. Why is it acceptable for a black singer to sing Nixon but not acceptable for a white singer to sing Mao or Zhou Enlai? I asked. The answer turns on whether a singer’s skin color helps or hurts a political agenda.
“Casting a black singer (or other Artist of Colour – AoC) as a white historical personage can be progressive,” the group responded, “as it works to balance out the historical and current exclusion of AoCs on stage, and the discrimination they have experienced, and continue to experience”. But “casting a white actor in a specifically non-white role, such as a Chinese historical personage, is regressive, as it perpetuates the exclusion of ESEAs (East & South-East Asians) from the stage.”
But no singer is presently “excluded” from roles because of his race. Asians and blacks have sung leading white characters in Mozart, Rossini, Berlioz, Bizet, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, and Offenbach, in the world’s major opera houses. If there are fewer Asian singers on opera stages than in the orchestra pit, that is because Asian involvement with Western classical music began with the string instruments. But training in Western opera techniques is catching up fast.
Staying current with “progressive” casting rules will require full-time study. Would it be acceptable for a black singer to play a Chinese character such as Mao, I asked BEATS. Not really. Here pan-Asian casting would be recommended. So artists of colour may bump whites from white roles but different categories of AoC’s should enjoy monopolies over their respective identity-defined characters.
For an organisation intent on policing identity boundaries in art, BEATS is remarkably lax in defining those boundaries. A Korean or Japanese singer may perform Mao or Zhou Enlai, the advocacy group said in response to a further question —notwithstanding the large differences in culture and history between the Chinese, Koreans, and the Japanese.
In fact, all the groups which BEATS regards as interchangeable for the purpose of casting are wildly heterogeneous. Individuals from the following countries may substitute for each other in roles written for any particular nationality: “Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, China, East Timor, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and their diasporas.”
Never mind that many of these peoples spent millennia subjugating and colonising each other. Today, their most important characteristic is that they are not white, so someone from Brunei may sing a Chinese Communist leader even though Brunei had almost no connection with either Imperial or Communist China. Someone from Brunei could also sing Madama Butterfly, even though Japan invaded and occupied Brunei during World War II. This conflation of distinct identities under one “Asian” umbrella is little different from the “Orientalist” tropes decried by Edward Said and his epigones.
Such ecumenicism is already behind the curve, however. To see the future of the diversity crusade in the arts, one must, as always, look to the United States, where casting directors henceforth will need a spectrometer to decide if a performer is sufficiently “coloured” to fill a role.
At the moment when the Scottish Opera was self-destructing, In the Heights, a screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical, landed in American movie theatres. It, too, had an immaculately progressive creative team, with Miranda writing the screenplay and Jon Chu directing. The movie, about New York’s Dominican community, which is concentrated in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, received generally favourable press.
Miranda’s diversity credentials would seem unassailable, given his portrayal of the Founding Fathers as rap-emitting black and Hispanic citizens in the musical Hamilton. In the Heights used an all-Hispanic cast, thus obeying the rule that whites may not play person of colour roles. But the diversity racket has moved beyond such blunt categories. One critic complained that the actors in In the Heights were not dark-skinned enough, even though the proportion of dark-skinned actors among the lead characters — 16% —matches the racial demographics of Washington Heights.
A new offence was born, which may be dubbed “brownwashing.” Miranda fell on his sword immediately. “In trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short,” he tweeted. “I’m truly sorry. I’m learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it… I promise to do better in my future projects, and I’m dedicated to the learning and evolving we all have to do to make sure we are honouring our diverse and vibrant community.”
Every time arts leaders and institutions cave to racial pressure, they deal creativity another blow. The dumb literalism of today’s censors is a frontal assault on the human imagination, which frees us from the constraints of time, place, and the boundaries of our own subjectivity. One of drama’s most mesmerising set pieces is an onstage actor putting on his make-up and costume, effacing one identity and taking on another right before our eyes. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a classic of erotic literature because transforming oneself into another being is an act of God-like power and seduction, whether of an amorous target or of an audience.
The next step in imaginative emasculation is obvious: Only elderly actors can play King Lear, only hunchbacks can sing Rigoletto or play Richard III, only fat people can play or sing Falstaff, since using stage make-up and body suits to transform non-old, non-handicapped, and non-fat actors into those roles represents ageism, fat-shaming, and ableism. Certainly no straight actor will ever be able to play a gay or “trans” character, as Sean Penn recently observed. But then again, maybe only Falstaff should be able to play Falstaff, since surely between a fat actor and Falstaff himself there are significant differences of identity. Jorge Luis Borges could have figured this puzzler out, but not the rest of us.
Ultimately, theatre itself may have to be segregated, since to claim that a white audience can identify with a black-themed work is a more subtle form of cultural appropriation. A recent play, lauded twice by the New York Times, asked white audience members to leave the theatre before the play’s conclusion so that black attendees could experience undisturbed racial solidarity.
Imaginative empathy—the ability to project oneself into someone else’s shoes–has been a key to expanding liberty and toleration. The arts have played a crucial role in widening human understanding. Now, however, they are leading the way back into a world of tribal barriers and stunted experience.
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