The point of theater, according to Hamlet, is to hold a mirror up to nature. But all too often on Chicago’s stages it seems like the mirror is being held up to the members of a yoga class in Lincoln Park. Strides have been made in recent years (just look at Broadway’s hip-hop musical Hamilton, in which the Founding Fathers are played by black and Latino actors), but when it comes to casting, particularly of commercial and canonical work, the default setting is still thin, gender-conforming, able-bodied, and lily white. And it’s high time for a change.
She’s not saying we need to throw out restrictions on casting altogether, especially when they’re spelled out in the script. But “if the text does not require using white actors, for instance, maybe try to look outside of that race,” France says. “Just because it’s been done before that way doesn’t mean we need to continue.”
Finding ways of making a script relevant and universal can be of special importance with old scripts at risk of going stale with familiarity, as in the case of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, a romantic comedy and community-theater chestnut that served as inspiration for the musical Hello, Dolly! When director Henry Wishcamper undertook the job of staging a new revival of the play currently at Goodman Theatre, he didn’t want to feel confined by past, all-white interpretations of its turn-of-the-century setting.
Another recent example of imaginative casting in a classic work was Oracle Theatre’s take on The Hairy Ape, Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 expressionist drama about an Irish-American laborer who’s treated worse than a caged beast by the ruling class and the police. The director of Oracle’s production, Monty Cole, put black men in all the roles, drawing a potent parallel to current concerns about racial inequality and violence directed at young men of color.
What Thornton believes he brings to the role, by contrast, is a deeply personal understanding of the loneliness and need that Shakespeare taps into and that Thornton uses as motivation for Richard’s villainy. “If every door I approach is closed in terms of finding love or acceptance by society,” as Thornton puts it, “then what do you want me to do? I’m not going to sit in my room all day.”
