“Casting Shadows” Sheds Light On Race In Theater

Published in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin almost immediately was adapted for the minstrel show stage. Twenty-five years had to pass for the racial powers-that-be to allow an actual African-American actor, Sam Lucas, to replace the white actor playing Uncle Tom in that eponymous role.

Roll the clock ahead a century or so. A Broadway curtain rises and you see that the white, Jewish Loman family in a 1996 production of Death of a Salesman is all African-American.

Progress?

Not for August Wilson. He thought the all African-American casting in the Arthur Miller play not only did not add much value; it did a disservice to the African-American experience.

These tidbits of our tattered, twisting, and sometimes embarrassing progress on race in the theater — or as it is often called, ​“non-traditional” casting — emerge in a fascinating exhibition, ​“Casting Shadows: Integration on the American Stage.”

The show is in two large display cases on the north and south ends of of the second floor of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. It is up through April 18, and it’s very much worth catching — especially as after the show closes on May 18, the Beinecke closes down for a year or more of renovations.

The show is comprised mainly of paper ephemera — playbills, old glossy photos, letters, notes from directors to actors, well-thumbed scripts, and newspaper articles — that in themselves are not visually arresting. Collectively, however, the story they tell packs a real wallop.

Sam Lucas’s tale in the first large vitrine leads us from minstrelsy to vaudeville, where Bert Williams was the first African-American performer allowed, in 1910, to join an all-white troupe.

That troupe was none other than the world-famous Ziegfield Follies. After producers quelled a rebellion among many of the unwelcoming white actors, Williams performed, but he was not allowed to appear on stage with female performers.

There’s also a fascinating context provided for the career of Ira Aldridge (pictured), a celebrated 19th-century black actor I’d never heard of, in no small part because in the 1820s, he left our fair land for England. There he excelled on the stage as Othello, Hamlet, Lear, Shylock, and more. Britain, which abolished slavery long before we did, provided talented black actors with many more opportunities.

The exhibition rewards you for sticking your nose on the glass case and reading carefully. What really grabbed me in the middle of the vitrine is a 1944 playbill for On the Town from the Adelphi Theater. If you look carefully, there are a series of Ns inked next to several of the performers’ names.

The well-done explanatory text tells the story: ​“Contributors to the James Weldon Johnson Clippings Collections [from which the lion’s share of the wonderful items in the exhibition come] often sent playbills with the names of black performers underlined or marked with an ​“N” for Negro. Productions as aesthetically diverse as the Broadway musical On the Town and the avant-garde Living Theater’s The Brig would gain recognition for employing African-American actors.”

The second large vitrine has a biographical frame featuring three lives: Paul Robeson; Lloyd Richards, New Haven theater heavyweight and the first African-American allowed to direct a play on Broadway; and Broadway producer Philip Rose, who once belted out tunes as an aspiring singer at a hotel in the Catskills. There he met a young woman on the wait staff, Lorraine Hansberry, who dreamed of writing for the stage.

The result: Rose and Hansberry collaborated with Harry Belafonte in 1949 to bring A Raisin In the Sun to Broadway.

But back to that all-black Death of a Salesman. I confess when I saw Charles Dutton lead an all African-American production at the Yale Rep in 2009, I too did not have any answer for why the play was done so.

Casting any individual actor, regardless of color, is one matter that most people agree on — that is, the job is to find the right person for the role. But what is the value added, apart from being a kind of self-advertising emblem of racial progress, for the entire cast to be black? How might that be different, for example, from an all-female Macbeth? Which I had also seen, and left the theater puzzling over the same questions.

This exhibition provided an answer. In 1973 Joseph Papp staged a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Public Theater with James Earl Jones in the lead. A New York Times article on Feb. 4 of that year asked: ​“should black actors play Chekhov?” Maya Angelou replied, ​“a black actor would expose subtleties in a white character that a white actor might have not seen, or might not have the heart to reveal.”

I’m not sure I agree, but I’m grateful to her — and for this fine historical foray into difficult territory for having gotten me thinking on the matter once again.

“Casting Shadows” closes on April 18. ​“Fun on the Titanic,” another small exhibition on the second floor, dealing with underground East German art, closes April 11. The library building will close in two stages. The reading room closes on May 8 and the public event space closes May 18. The building is scheduled to reopen in the fall of 2016.