Acting Happy

A while back, Pamela Paul wrote about something that should be so fundamentally obvious as to require neither explanation nor justification. Actors act.

Adrian Lester, a British actor from Birmingham and the son of two immigrants from Jamaica, was nominated last week for a Tony Award for his performance in “The Lehman Trilogy” as Emanuel Lehman, one of the German-born Jewish founders of the fallen investment behemoth Lehman Brothers. Lester, like the other actors in the three-man play, takes on several parts, including female characters and at one point, a thumb-sucking toddler.

There has been no outcry about a British actor of African descent playing a German Jew . . . And why should there have been? It’s called acting.

When I saw Hamilton on Broadway, our white founding fathers were played by actors who were neither white nor founding fathers. And it was fabulous. They made me believe. And when I saw the remake of West Side Story, this time with the socially “correct” cast and tweaks to the story, it was awful. I figured the movie bombed because there was no need for a remake, but the truth is that the politically correct movie sucked while the original was beloved. Was this a problem?

Of course, we know the problem. As with so many other non-issues twisted into problems with childish rhetorical gimmicks, it was wrong for a person to perform a role when that wasn’t who they were in real life, for actors of a certain complexion.

Such double standards may not trouble you. But if it’s a problem that a “miscast” actor — one who differs in identity from the character — takes a role away from a “properly cast” actor when there are already fewer roles for underrepresented or marginalized groups, then why not condemn Simon Russell Beale for taking a job from a Jewish actor? Why no outcry every time a 40-something actress bends biology to play the mothers of 25-year-old actresses, robbing older actresses who more plausibly fit the part?

And the reactions to Paul’s column reflected both the actors and the woke perspectives. A theater professor explains.

I was frustrated by the lack of nuance in Pamela Paul’s column. The stance that “good actors are able to find a way to portray people who are not like themselves” is an oversimplification that ignores history and power dynamics.

Characters from marginalized groups being portrayed by actors from dominant groups evokes a longstanding practice in which those with power have used the stage and screen to control the narrative of those with less power. Blackface, yellowface and, yes, Jewface, have created demeaning, distorted misrepresentations of those identities while erasing the visibility of their bodies.

The issue isn’t acting to the academic, but “power dynamics,” reminiscent of the prevailing “anti-racist” view that only oppressors can discriminate, only white actors portraying characters from marginalized groups are incorrectly cast.

Questioning who has the right to play whom is not having a double standard, but weighing history, power, representation, opportunity, intention and impact. Such decisions are worth deliberation.

To be fair, there may well be merit to the contention that great black actors were not given the opportunities white actors were given, but that’s not a problem with the roles but with the pedestrian racial discrimination.

I am an English actress, born of Scottish, English and Irish heritage. I come from a long line, four generations, of theater makers, actors, managers and directors. Acting is in my blood. It was hard to avoid.

Let me tell you about some of the characters that I have played.

Pope Joan, in “Top Girls” — the female pontiff who dressed as a boy, before her pregnancy gave her away, leading to her being stoned to death.

I am neither a pope, a Catholic nor a cross-dresser.

Selina Cadell goes on in that vein for a bit, and she’s both humorous and effective in making her point. She’s an actress playing a role, not herself. But there is a more nefarious problem lurking below the silly gibberish of academia.

The problem with such hateful caricatures is twofold: The performers had no personal knowledge about the roles they were portraying, and actual Black, Jewish, gay and Japanese performers were systematically excluded from them.

The first thing to pop out is that it went from a frustrating oversimplification to hateful. The second thing is the conflation of characters with reality. Actors speak words written for them  by others in scripts. They stand where the director tells them to stand. If they don’t do it well the first time, they do it again. And again. Because it’s acting.

That’s the problem with Tom Hanks’s terrific performance as a gay character in “Philadelphia.” It’s not innately problematic. But who was excluded when Mr. Hanks and others like him were centered? When gay actors are told to act straight, while straight actors are endlessly cast in gay roles, that’s a problem. And when for centuries, on many stages, only white actors could play Black roles, and only men could play female roles, that was a problem.

If Tom Hanks took a role that might otherwise have gone to a gay actor (because there certainly haven’t been many gay actors in Hollywood, but I digress), it nether makes his performance any less “terrific” or “innately” problematic. But then stop spewing nonsense like “Systematic marginalization impoverishes the stories we tell each other” and just come out and voice your grievance, that “marginalized” actors aren’t being cast enough, and pretending to align actors’ demographics with the characters they play is a made up excuse. Kinda like acting, except neither interesting nor plausible.

Bravo to those actors who do that well. Bravo to the talented Adrian Lester, who makes you forget the color of his skin, his nationality and his religion — and gives himself over entirely to his performance. There is no reason for any actor to apologize for exercising and reveling in his craft.

Bravo.