Kingman Brewster, David Diamond, and other people who used to own our books

Not many of the books in our library were virgins when we got them.  Emsworth is not unwilling to shell out for new books, but by the time we realize we want a book, the hardcover edition has usually been out of print for decades.  Our library is full of books that used to belong to other people.

We feel connected to those people.  They liked the same authors we like, and if they wrote their names in their books, they surely cared about books and were proud of their libraries.  That’s all to their credit.

People used to put their names in their books as a matter of course.  And they took care with their libraries:  a sticker inside the front cover of an 1898 illustrated edition of James M. Barrie’s The Little Minister reads “Private Library of Bertha L. Field/No. 108.”  Bertha catalogued and numbered the books in her library!  A faded pencil inscription on the opposite page reads “November 23 – 1900.”  Book owners used to be possessive, too:  inside the front cover of our copy of Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front someone originally wrote, in pencil, “This book belongs to Lance Cox,” but those words were lined through by someone who wrote, underneath, “Says you — It belongs to me — Mary Jane Gordon.”

Of many of the original owners of my books we know only their names from their inscriptions.  A copy of Frank Norris’s The Octopus was inscribed by “Bernadette Dickler/K.S.N., Summer 1915.”  James Thurber and E. B. White”s Is Sex Necessary? was once proudly owned by Catharine F. Strowger.  Sidney Torme, with prescience, once paid $3.50 for a new first edition of John Updike’s The Poorhouse Fair.  Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biograph, E. M. Forster’s biography of his great-aunt, published in 1956, once belonged to “Grace and Alfred Harris/Cambridge/April 1957.”

Our books have been all over North America.  Theresa Agnes Cleary, of Chatham, Ontario, used to own a first Canadian edition of Evelyn Waugh’s Helena.  Everett V. McKay Jr. (1925-1990, as a Google search reveals), of Louisville, Kentucky, acquired John Steinbeck’s The Pearl on “16 March 1949.”  Robert K. Coe, Jr., of Whitewater, Wisconsin, once owned J. M. Barrie’s play Quality Street.  Hannah and Samuel Guggenheim, former owners of a 1939 edition of T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, were fellow Rochesterians, though I didn’t know them.  Another Rochesterian, Alice L. Connors, of 9 Penfield Road, once owned G. K. Chesterton’s 1922 book What I Saw in America.

Some names inspire curiosity. What kind of man might someone with a Dickensian name like Ira F. Jagger, of Albany, New York, once the owner of a first American edition of P. G. Wodehouse’s Money in the Bank, have been? We found him with a Google search: he was a trust officer in an Albany bank whose wife Olive wrote poems.  He died in 1946, five years after he put his name in the Wodehouse book.

Other previous owners of our books have had various degrees of celebrity.  Perhaps you’ve heard of Kingman Brewster?  No, not Kingman Brewster, Jr., the law professor who was president of Yale during the troubled 1960s, but his father, Kingman Brewster, Sr., who bought a copy of Emerson’s Representative Men when he was a sophomore at Amherst College.

Using a quill pen, young Mr. Brewster signed his copy “Kingman Brewster/Amherst Coll./Alpha Delta Omega House/Sept 26th 1904.” We learn from the indispensable Wikipedia that Mr. Brewster graduated from Amherst with academic distinction in 1906 and from Harvard Law School in 1911, and that he is a “direct lineal descendant” of the William Brewster who came over on the Mayflower. Who did Emerson identify as “representative men”? Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakepeare, Napoleon, and Goethe.  We especially recommend the essay on Shakespeare.

Academics tend to collect books.  Cornelius Weygandt (1871-1957), an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, bought J. M. Barrie’s Courage, a thin volume containing the text of a speech given by the novelist and playwright at St. Andrews University on May 3, 1922.  Dr. Weigandt had already made a name for himself with a 1913 book, Irish Plays and Playwrights, which is still in print and available on Amazon; later in his career he published a number of books on the culture of the Pennsylvania Germans.  We look forward to adding a Weygandt book or two to our library.

But book collectors come in all types.  Edwin Thanhouser, former owner of a 1928 printing of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge at San Luis Rey, made a lot of money running a motion picture company in New Rochelle, New York from 1909 to 1917 and later collected art; his Bayville, Long Island home was called “Shorewood.”  He had a picture of the house engraved on a sticker that was pasted inside the front cover of the Wilder book (and presumably all the other books in his library); it reads “Edwin Thanhouser/Shorewood.” Just before the title page is the undated autograph of “Marie Thanhouser,” who was his wife’s sister, written with a fountain pen.

Occasionally an inscription gives a whiff of drama, often when the book was a gift. What else can you think of a (price-clipped) Christmas gift of Thomas Mann’s The Beloved Returns: Lotte in Weimar, inscribed “And May He Come/Very Soon — for You/Rudy dear/Christmas 1943.”  Another wartime gift, apparently from a lady who’d been nursing a man long enough to know that he needed intellectual stimulation, was Albert Jay Nock’s 1943 book, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which was inscribed “With kindest greetings and best wishes/To our Prize Patient/Frank Smith/Desired — to needle his thinking & only a touch/Lilly Pulsifer.”

And consider this romantic gift of a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Basil and Josephine Stories, inscribed, on the inside cover, “To my Vicki — (see overleaf!), and then, on the overleaf: “September 9, 1973/For my Vicki — /with much love and a little nostalgia . . ./Your Clark forever.”  The stories had originally been published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1928 and 1929.  Had Clark and Vicki read them together, 44 years earlier?

Another J. M. Barrie book, a 1916 American edition of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham, was a gift to “Guinn Hale/from the officers of the O.S.T.S.”  Could that have been the Old Smythetown Temperance Society?  The imagination runs wild.

Some previous owners knew, or at least met, the books’ authors.  August Wilson personally inscribed an edition of his play Seven Guitars “for Dr. Rosemarie Beston/with all best wishes./August Wilson/3-13-97.”  Did they meet at a book signing?  Was the playwright was a guest speaker at Rochester’s Nazareth College, where Dr. Beston served as president from 1984 to 1998?  Oddly, she evidently didn’t want this autographed edition for her own library; in July 1997 she gave it to the college library, which eventually didn’t want it either.

And the library of distinguished composer David Diamond, a Rochesterian, who died in 2005, included the works of master playwright Edward Albee, most of which are now in our library.  According to an 1999 biography of Albee by Mel Gussow, Diamond and Albee took “an almost immediate dislike to one another” when they first met in 1952; apparently Albee had made disparaging remarks about Diamond’s music.  But in 1958 a mutual friend insisted that Albee send Diamond a copy of his (then unproduced) play The Zoo Story.  “To Albee’s astonishment, the composer was unhesitating in his enthusiasm.”  Diamond wrote Albee a long letter praising the play, offering to help peddle it to contacts in the theater world, concluding “PS/May I keep the copy you sent me?”

We don’t know what happened to Albee’s manuscript, but when The Zoo Story was published in 1960, Diamond got a copy and stamped his  name it it.  A year later, Diamond clipped and pasted a picture of a photo of Albee out of a magazine opposite the title page of his copy of Albee’s The American Dream.  The friendship between the older composer and the younger playwright was alive alive 15 years later; in Diamond’s copy of The Lady from Dubuque (published in 1980) we found a telephone message, dated “Dec 18 11 56 AM ’75,” to Room 918 from “Ed Albee/221 3319.”  We picture a New York hotel desk clerk pulling the message out of the slot and passing it along to Mr. Diamond.  The composer kept a small “With the Compliments of the Author” card in his copy of Gussow’s biography, probably for a bookmark; he wrote a few words in the book’s margin at page 102 amplifying an anecdote in which the biographer had quoted Diamond.

It’s nice when you see that a book owner didn’t forget about a book once he’d first read it.  A 1940 printing of Willa Cather’s 1922 novel One of Ours also has David Diamond’s raised-seal stamp on the title page.  Many years later, in 1973, when the Post Office issued an 8-cent commemorative stamp featuring “Willa Cather/American Novelist,” Mr. Diamond licked one end of it and pasted it in his book on the opposite page.  It’s still there.

August Wilson’s Two Trains Running at Rochester’s Geva Theatre

August Wilson

Whatever else has been on the season’s playbill at Rochester’s Geva Theatre the last four years, the play we’ve looked forward to the most each has been a play by August Wilson.  Geva has been doing one play from his Pittsburgh cycle each year, and we’ve loved them all — Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904),  The Piano Lesson (set in 1936), Fences (set in 1959; see Emsworth’s delighted review), and now this season’s play, Two Trains Running (set in 1969).  Indeed, we still have fond memories of a joyful Jitney (set in 1977) mounted by Geva in April 1999.

Pittsburgh's Hill District, seen from the Monongahela River around 1935

Two Trains Running tells the stories of the folks who hang around Memphis Lee’s ill-patronized diner in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.  Memphis himself (A. C. Smith) is bracing for a fight with city authorities over the value of his building, which is being condemned for urban renewal.  He wants his price — $25,000 — but doesn’t really expect to get it after a lifetime of seeing black men cheated and robbed of their dignity.  Memphis himself, as a young man, was driven out of Jackson, Mississippi by white men who aimed to demean and humiliate him as much as to rob him.  

A. C. Smith plays Memphis Lee

Memphis has no use for the ways his friends cope with poverty and racial oppression.  His young friend Sterling Johnson (Javon Johnson) is excited about a black power rally at which Malcolm X will be speaking, but Memphis tears down the poster Wolf pins on the wall of the diner.  His young waitress Risa (Patrese D. McClain) quotes the Bible and sends her tithes to Prophet Samuel, a charismatic local preacher; Memphis scoffs at the Prophet’s money-grubbing.  Sterling, who has fallen for Risa, fantasizes about Cadillacs but is more interested in petty crime than hard work; Memphis sadly predicts that Sterling will soon be back in the penitentiary.  

Memphis can barely abide the half-crazed Hambone (David Shakes) and his fixation on being paid the ham he was promised nine years earlier for painting a fence; Memphis berates Risa for her kindness to Hambone.  And Memphis cannot bring himself to do what his best friend Holloway (Alfred Wilson) recommends to everyone: go down Wiley Avenue to see the 322-year-old Aunt Ester, a semi-mystical seer who appears, on-stage or off, in several Wilson plays.  Yet skeptical as he is that there can be justice for a black man, Memphis intends, perhaps for the first time in his life, to take a stand for his own dignity and to insist on his price for his building. 

Patrese D. McClain has a sharp stage presence as Risa, waitress and object of Sterling Johnson's desire

And as August Wilson sadly shows, oppressed black folk sometimes oppressed one another in turn.  Early in the play, Memphis gains our sympathy with his story of how his wife left him for no good reason — but as the play goes on and we see Memphis’s harsh treatment of Risa, we understand better what life might have been like for a woman of his. Prophet Samuel preys on his congregation. Everyone plays the numbers, but as Holloway explains, the numbers racket means that money just moves from one black person to another.  The wealthy undertaker West, who owns much of the neighborhood, is eager to make a low-ball offer for Memphis’s building. 

We liked these vivid characters more than we can say.  True, we didn’t grow up black in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where all these plays are set, and we certainly didn’t suffer racial oppression, but we did grow up among working-class people in western Pennsylvania, and we identify strongly with Pittsburgh, its people, and their ways.  We knew folks who talked like Troy Maxon, in Fences, and Memphis Lee, in Two Trains Running.  Like Sterling Johnson in Two Trains Running, our relatives sought work from J & L Steel.  And we were in our mid-teens in 1969, when the story of this play takes place. 

A. C. Smith in a fall 2009 production by Chicago's Court Theatre of August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

The cast of Two Trains Running is excellent, though not quite to the standards of last year’s Fences (see Emsworth’s review). The actors and director Ron OJ Parson are based in Chicago, according to the program notes, and are veterans of a number of August Wilson plays. A. C. Smith, a large man, is an imposing yet vulnerable Memphis Lee; the lovely Patrese D. McClain stands out as the clear-eyed waitress Risa. 

Two Trains Running is a rich play with many more subplots and layers than we can mention here (and the characters all have a penchant for storytelling), but nothing gets lost in this well-directed production.  The performance we liked best was Alfred H. Wilson’s as Holloway, who from his side booth offers shrewd, sardonic commentary on everyone else’s troubles. Mr. Wilson has a marvelously expressive voice and stage presence — oddly, though, more than once he seemed to be struggling for his lines.

August Wilson’s Fences at Rochester’s GeVa Theatre

Tony Todd (right) and Wiley Moore (left) as Troy Maxson and his best friend Bono.

It’s too late now to do anyone any good, because the show closed a week ago, but GeVa Theatre just put on a fabulous production of August Wilson’s Fences here in Rochester.  Unfortunately we couldn’t make it down to GeVa till the run was almost over. We would have loved to have seen it again.

The late playwright

This is surely one of the very best American plays. We say that not merely because the play (a) is set in Pittsburgh, near our boyhood home in western Pennsylvania and (b) involves baseball. No, Fences is a masterpiece because of Wilson’s gorgeous cascade of language and his sympathy for the frailties of mankind.  What happens to the soul of a good man who is blocked from fulfulling his dreams? What if he finds himself resenting the promise and potential of his own son? How can a man who loves and honors his wife nevertheless end up in bed with another woman?

Troy Maxson claimed that Dodgers star Jackie Robinson wouldn't have been good enough to play with him in the Negro Leagues

Fences is the tragedy of Troy Maxson (Tony Todd), a former star of the Negro Leagues whose career ended before baseball was integrated. Now he works on a garbage truck, bitter about missing out on the fame and money enjoyed by younger men like Jackie Robinson — who, he says, wouldn’t have been good enough to make the teams he and Josh Gibson played on.

Clemente's 1959 baseball card

What Troy refuses to see is that times are changing. He tells his best friend Bono (Wiley Moore, who nails the role) that baseball will always keep the black man down. Why else, he asks, would the Pirates be keeping Roberto Clemente on the bench? In fact, by 1957, ten years after Robinson joined the Dodgers,  Willie Mays and Hank Aaron were among the biggest stars in baseball, and Clemente had been the Pirates’ full-time right fielder since 1955.

And Troy himself has won a victory in the struggle for racial equality. When he files a formal employee grievance against the policy that only white men could drive the garbage trucks (black men had to work on the ground), he and his wife Rose (Nora Cole) worry that he’ll simply be fired. Instead, his grievance is upheld and Troy is promoted to the cab of his garbage truck.

Rose is proud of their son, Cory (Jared McNeill), who has become a high-school football star and has been offered a college scholarship.  But Troy is afraid that sports will be a dead end for Cory as it was for him.  Or so he says — is Troy really jealous that his son might achieve the success in sports that eluded him?  He refuses to sign scholarship papers for his son and insists that Cory keep working at the neighborhood grocery instead of pursuing football.

Tony Todd has an unforgettable, modulated, gravelly voice, and he was a superbly physical Troy Maxson.  He had his audience in the palm of his hand from the opening scene in which Troy drinks whiskey with his buddy Bono (Wiley Moore) and brags about his wife and their vigor as lovers. Like Troy Maxson, Todd is a master storyteller; in one of the most unforgettable scenes in this show, Troy reminisces about his abuse at the hands of his own father. Tony Todd is known for his movie roles (Candyman, The Rock), but he is a first-rate actor, and here in Rochester he left nothing of August Wilson’s script on the page.

In fact, the entire cast of this show was up to Todd’s standard, especially Nora Cole as Troy’s long-suffering wife Rose. This production richly deserves to be seen elsewhere — we thought it every bit as fine as the recent production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone on Broadway, which we also saw and loved (see this post) — but as nearly as we can tell, it closed for good here in Rochester.

Cuddy

It was August Wilson’s general policy that his plays be directed by black directors.  We understand that GeVa Artistic Director Mark Cuddy obtained special permission from Wilson’s widow to direct Fences (which necessarily has an all-black cast) himself.

This exception for Cuddy didn’t get any particular public attention, so far as we know.  But the selection of another white man, Bartlett Sher, to direct the afore-mentioned production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone on Broadway did stir up a fuss. The choice of Sher aroused the ire of some African-Americans — in fact, we ran across one blogger (here he is) who complained hysterically that this was yet another “openly blatant example” of “insidious and pervasive American racism.”

It didn’t seem very “blatant” to us, and personally, we didn’t think GeVa’s production of Fences was tainted by having a white director. Perhaps Mr. Cuddy can’t claim to fully appreciate African-American culture. But people are still people. Who would argue that Mr. Cuddy shouldn’t direct Chekhov because he didn’t grow up Russian?  Anyway, the themes of Fences are universal, not tied to the experience of being black in America. We don’t see why Mr. Cuddy or Mr. Sher should have been disqualified from directing two of the very finest American plays simply because of their race, and we’re glad Mr. Wilson’s estate agreed.

We also think this show succeeded so well mainly because of its superb performers, not because of Mr. Cuddy, whose direction was unobtrusive. Our guess is that Mr. Cuddy had the good sense not to interfere with veteran actors who plainly understood Wilson’s play and what to do with it.

UPDATE: APRIL 2010.  Emsworth greatly enjoyed GeVa’s production of August Wilson’s Two Trains Running.  See this link.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone has come back to Broadway (a review)

The caption for this Jacob Lawrence painting ("The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 3) reads, "In every town Negroes were leaving by the hundreds to go North and enter into Northern industry." It's at the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.).

August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in 1911, deals with the separation of black people in America from their cultural roots. Most of the characters in this play had come to Pittsburgh from homes in the south — part of the “great migration” that was the subject of Jacob Lawrence’s remarkable series of paintings (above and below). August Wilson described it this way in his introduction to the play:

From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrive dazed and stunned, their hearts kicking in their chests with a song worth singing. They arrive carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with dust and fresh hope . . . .

The caption for this Jacob Lawrence painting ("The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 45) reads, "They arrived in Pittsburgh, one of the great industrial centers of the North, in large numbers."

But when we saw this play last weekend at the Belasco Theatre (West 44th Street, Broadway), we realized that at least one of the actresses was even less connected to the cultural milieu of August Wilson than the characters in the play were to their ancestors’ African heritage.

The telling moment came in the play’s final minutes, as Herald Loomis (Chad L. Coleman), meeting his wife Martha after ten years apart, becomes overwhelmed with bitter emotion and pulls a knife. Trying to bring him to his senses, Martha (Danai Gurira) urges him to “look to Jesus. Even if you done fell away from the church you can be saved again.”

Martha begins to quote the familiar words of the twenty-third Psalm. After a minute, the words of Scripture strike a chord with the distraught Herald Loomis:

MARTHA: “Even though I walk through the shadow of death — ”

LOOMIS: That’s just where I be walking!

MARTHA: “I shall fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy staff and thy rod, they comfort me.”

LOOMIS: You can’t tell me nothing about no valleys. I done been all across the valleys . . . .

That’s how Martha’s line was spoken last Friday night: “Thy staff and thy rod, they comfort me.”

When he wrote this passage, August Wilson must have felt that he was making it easy for any actress playing Martha by giving her lines she would already know. Wilson himself surely learned Psalm 23 by heart at an early age; he must often have heard the verses spoken in church. The phrase “Thy rod and thy staff” (like other passages from the King James Bible) would have been part of Wilson’s cultural vocabulary, along with the tradition of gospel preaching also echoed in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

Danai Gurira

But it’s clear that Danai Gurira wasn’t familiar with Psalm 23 before she took on the part of Martha Pentecost — otherwise, she never would have transposed “staff” and “rod”. For her, this was just another line she had to learn. We couldn’t help wondering if this actress even knew the theological implications of the name “Pentecost” that her character had taken. (With some research, Emsworth has ascertained that Ms. Gurira is about 30 years old, a playwright as well as an actress, and a native of Zimbabwe. We infer that she never attended a Christian mission school in that horribly troubled country.)

It is, of course, unfair to this exceptionally well-acted production for Emsworth to dwell at such length on a minor blunder by one actress. (It’s especially unfair because we saw a preview performance.) In fact, the casting by director Bartlett Sher is one of the many strengths of this show. Each of the nine adult characters in the play is portrayed vividly and in high definition.

Chad L. Coleman

The best part of seeing an August Wilson play is not necessarily the storyline, but the pleasure of getting to know the characters and watching them interact. But of the several Wilson plays we’ve seen on stage, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone has, we think, the most compelling plot and subplots. Former deacon Herald Loomis (Chad C. Coleman) arrives at Seth Holly’s boarding house shorn of his faith and looking for a wife from whom he was cruelly torn ten years earlier. Long-time boarder Bynum Walker (Roger Robinson) wants to find a shiny man that he met in a vision. Mattie Campbell (Marsha Stephanie Blake) wants to recover a husband who left her. 

And what of the various performances? We especially enjoyed Ernie Hudson’s performance as Seth Holly. the grumpy owner of the Pittsburgh boarding house where all the play’s action takes place. We think perhaps Holly was the character August Wilson himself liked the most: the only character born in the North, a devoted husband, a trick worker in a machine tool and die shop, the financially astute proprietor of two businesses on the side, a skilled metalworker, an aspiring entrepeneur, a small-scale vegetable gardener, and a man impatient with the superstitions and unsettled ways of his boarders from the south. We also appreciated Latanya Richardson Jackson as Seth’s tolerant, warm-hearted wife Bertha.

But the finest performance in the show is given by Roger Robinson as the Hollys’ boarder Bynum Walker.  He’s a “hoodoo” man who makes potions with roots and pigeon blood, and he has the ability to “bind” people together (with the qualification that “You can’t bind what don’t cling”!). The scene in the play that Emsworth remembers most vividly is not one that was acted on stage, but instead a scene described by Bynum, the dramatic story of his magical encounter with the “shiny man” who showed him how to find his “song,” the “Binding Song.”

It’s a banner year for theater-going when you get to see not one, but two August Wilson plays. See Emsworth’s review of a remarkably good production of Fences in Rochester in June. Here’s the link.

Not enough color at the Shaw Festival?

(October 2008) To his dismay, Emsworth has belatedly learned that the diversity police have been hectoring Jackie Maxwell, Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival, for not bringing more actors of color, more directors of color, and more plays by playwrights of color, to Niagara-on-the-Lake.

The hue and cry is being led by one Andrew Moodie, who is apparently a Canadian playwright of some distinction. (Emsworth makes no pretense of being up on contemporary theater, especially in Canada.) Moodie’s campaign, which he calls “Share the Stage,” was seconded not long ago by J. Kelly Nestruck, the redoubtable theater critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, who claims he was “suddenly struck” earlier this year with how “white” the Shaw’s company was.

The wedge here is the Shaw Festival’s friendly competition with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, an institution which Nestruck patronizingly says is now up to snuff, diversity-wise.  Jackie Maxwell gets credit for “gender diversity” (what an dreadful phrase!) at the Shaw Festival, but they’re blaming her for not trying hard enough on race.

Well, now — how is she to do this at the Shaw Festival? It’s an institution whose every season is anchored around two plays by Bernard Shaw himself, a white guy who wrote plays about white folks. And all its plays (per the Festival’s “mandate”) are supposed to have been written, or at least set, during Shaw’s lifetime (1856-1950).

We pause for historical reflection.  Here in Rochester, we’re steeped in the American suffrage movement, because Susan B. Anthony lived here and her 19th-century home, now a museum, is here.  History tells us that before the Civil War, abolitionists and suffragettes made common cause.

But Anthony’s relationship with Douglass (together again in bronze in a Rochester park) cooled when black leaders wanted to put women’s rights on hold while civil rights for black people were being consolidated. So there’s a tiny touch of irony when Jackie Maxwell is accused with putting racial diversity on the back burner now that she has gotten “gender diversity” at the Shaw.

There are plenty of new plays by and about people of color. But unless they’re set before 1950, they’re not plays that the Shaw does. So how, exactly, is the Shaw Festival supposed to diversify, color-wise?

Well, Moodie and Nestruck want the Shaw Festival to feature more actors of color in plays by Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Noel Coward. After all, when The Glass Menagerie is played in Bombay, doesn’t it have an Indian cast? When they do Blithe Spirit in Lagos, isn’t the cast Nigerian? There are people of all ethnic backgrounds in Ontario (as in New York State). So if Denzel Washington can play Brutus (see the picture above, with Stratford Festival veteran Colm Feore, in the foreground, as Cassius, in a Washington, D.C. production last year), why can’t there be a black Undershaft at the Shaw Festival?

If that were to be, Emsworth would nominate Derrick Lee Weeden. On the basis of his breath-taking performance as Othello at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater last winter (with Paul Niebanck as Iago), Emsworth ranks Weeden with the best actors we’ve seen in Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake, not excluding Christopher Plummer or the late William Hutt. But Weeden is, regrettably, not part of the Shaw’s repertory company, and the Shaw Festival is at a disadvantage in trying to recruit an actor of his ability. (He’s acted with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for many years; see this link.) The Shaw Festival doesn’t do either Shakespeare or contemporary plays, and from 1856 to 1950, there just weren’t that many important plays written by or about people of color.

There’s no reason why actors of color can’t be cast in many Shaw plays, as indeed they sometimes are. As Mr. Nestruck points out, Nikki M. James has one of the lead roles in Caesar and Cleopatra at the Stratford Festival this season. But in many cases, color-blind casting in a Shaw play would tend to confuse audiences and to distort social relationships that are at the heart of the plays.

And many Shaw plays are largely concerned with subtle gradations of class, and with interactions between English people of different ranks of life. Pygmalion is the story of a poor flower girl who encounters a rich, upper-class intellectual. Getting Married (one of the highlights of the Shaw’s 2008 season, highly recommended by Emsworth) has a lot to do with a lower-middle-class greengrocer’s relationship with the family of an English bishop.

The precision with which Shaw sketched class relationships in his plays is at the core of his genius. So how disorienting would it be for audiences if a person of color were cast as either the greengrocer or the bishop in Getting Married? In 1902, could a black greengrocer possibly have been on such familiar terms with an upper-class white family? — we’d be asking ourselves. Or would a white greengrocer really relate in such a way to a black English bishop and his wife? The didactic Bernard Shaw fervently wanted people to think about his plays — but those are not the questions Shaw wanted his audiences to be asking. A director shouldn’t interject race where it would confuse.

Or take Mrs. Warren’s Profession, also at the Shaw Festival this year (see the Emsworth review). The most interesting relationships in the play are between Mrs. Warren, the former courtesan with lower-class origins, and her middle- and upper-class friends (and former clients) in the aristocracy, the arts, and the church. What would happen to the already challenging social dynamics of these relationships if either Mrs. Warren or the men were black actors? Indeed, since the paternity of Mrs. Warren’s daughter is in question, how would it be anything but confusing if all these actors were not of the same race?

Race is already an element in many American plays that the Shaw Festival performs, just as it is in many plays by contemporary black playwrights (like Mr. Moodie, one assumes). Where a character’s ethnicity is part of the play, an ethnically appropriate actor is needed. Would anyone cast a white actor in an August Wilson play? Of course not — black actors are needed to portray African-American culture. Mr. Moodie says one of his plays wasn’t considered by the Shaw Festival because it called for more black actors than the Shaw could muster. I’m betting that Mr. Moodie wouldn’t be happy if white actors were cast to play black characters in his plays.

In The Little Foxes, playing this year at the Shaw Festival, Lillian Hellman’s key lines about the Hubbard family’s exploitation of black people wouldn’t make much sense if the actors portraying the Hubbards were themselves black. On stage, To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t make sense unless Atticus Finch looks like a white man and Tom Robinson looks like a black man. In fact, since interracial marriage was rare in England and North America before 1950, casting a husband and wife as persons of different races in Shaw-era plays would often be jarring and incongruous.

Mr. Moodie and Mr. Nestruck might argue that audiences today simply overlook an actor’s skin color. Maybe so. After all, every theater performance requires an audience to suspend disbelief to one degree or another.

But a director needs to be careful how far she imposes on audiences. As I commented in an earlier post, one of the problems with Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Festival this year was the director’s decision to make both sets of parents of Romeo and Juliet mixed-race couples. It was a seriously distracting element.

Theater is visual, and appearance has always mattered in casting. We audiences strain if an actor doesn’t look the part. We wouldn’t buy the Shaw Festival’s Michael Ball as Jack Tanner, because he’s too old. We wouldn’t buy Deborah Hay as Tanner, either; she’s too female. (But at the Stratford Festival next year, we’re going to buy Brian Bedford as Lady Bracknell!) We don’t buy Eliza Doolittle unless she’s truly pretty enough to dazzle a prince at the Embassy Ball.

Ethnic appearance won’t be important for every Shaw-era play or character, but it matters often enough that a director usually has little discretion as to the racial composition of her cast. Sometimes, of course, the question of race can be neutralized by choosing all-black casts, as was done, apparently with success, for a recent Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starring James Earl Jones, among other distinguished black actors. Could the Shaw Festival mount an all-black production of Private Lives or Waiting for Godot? It could happen, one supposes — they’re plays with small casts.

But in general, the Shaw Festival’s perennial need for a relatively large company of white actors will tend to preclude all-black casts. To Emsworth’s sorrow, for the late August Wilson, a fellow native of western Pennsylvania, is one of his favorite playwrights, that probably means that Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, plays comfortably within the Shaw Festival’s mandate, aren’t likely to be presented there. But you can’t have everything everywhere.

Couldn’t the Shaw Festival hire well-known actors of color for particular productions? That’s not its policy. The Shaw Festival casts from its own repertory company. So even if Morgan Freeman were willing to commit several months to acting in Niagara-on-the-Lake (don’t we wish!), it’s not the Shaw’s practice to bring in “stars” to play lead roles. Should the Shaw Festival redefine itself or change its policies to placate the diversity establishment? This member doesn’t think so.